Commitment to our Community - MC candidacy Andreas Mantke

Board Discuss
#1

Hi all,

great thanks that you nominate me, Marco Marinello! I feel very pleased to accept my nomination as candidate for the membership committee and I support the Commitment to our Community (https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/39d9irdNxpNBD28)

I am Andreas and I’d like to run for the Membership Committee of The Document Foundation.

I live in Duisburg, Germany and I speak German and English. I’ve been committed to the LibreOffice community (and its predecessor) since 2002. I have already been working in different areas of our community from documentation and marketing to infrastructure over the years. In addition I have served from 2012 to 2018 on the board of The Document Foundation. Currently my main focus areas in our project are documentation, marketing, evangelism and building LibreOffice desktop and online derivative on various Linux OS.

Because of my experience in various parts of our project I like to emphasize that contributions in all areas have an important value for our project. It shouldn’t be a difference if you are a source code developer, do localization, documentation, give user support or talk to about our project and LibreOffice and get more people involved with the project and the software. We need to value all those contributions and get more community members interested also in our foundation.

Full name: Andreas Mantke
Email: Affiliation: unaffiliated | independent volunteer

About the above, I will provide updates on all future changes as soon as possible.

My 75 words candidacy statement:

I’m Andreas Mantke, 65 years old from Duisburg, Germany, no corporate affiliation, worked with the community since 2002 in different areas. Because of my experience in various parts I like to emphasize that contributions in all areas have an important value for our project. Thus I support the Commitment to our Community (https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/39d9irdNxpNBD28) and like to get more diversity in our project and foundation. Furthermore I’m interested in building a free LibreOffice collaborative version.

Regards,
Andreas

1 Like
Commitment to our Community - MC candidacy Jona Azizaj
Italian translation of the Commitment to our Community
List of candidates for the Membership Committee election
#2

Hello Andreas,

Thank you for submitting your candidacy.

I have a few questions for the MC candidates. This is your candidacy thread, so - here I will ask for your perspectives or positions.

Question batch 1: Transparency and information disclosure

Background

At the opening paragraph of your statement, or common elections platform, you write:

we will grow … transparency. We have a clear plan how to do this.

Transparency in the TDF is formally mandated, among other ways, via our statutes, e.g.:

§8(3) The Board of Directors shall assure public knowledge through express publication in a commonly used media outlet with regard to …
(c) the processes, discussions and decisions of the foundation, its committees, the Board of Directors and any Executive Directors, including minutes of meetings.

as is well known, we have a severe transparency problem in the TDF, where almost all of that information remains undisclosed to the public, and even to the trustees - in flagrant breach of the bylaws; and with the board simply dismissing its legal obligations.

And while the bylaws place specific responsibility for disclosing information with the BoD, it is also an overall responsibility of the foundation; and for documents with the MC has access to, disclosure to the membership is also its own responsibility in cases when the BoD is known not to discharge its disclosure duties.

I was expecting to see the plan to address the lack of transparency in the TDF, in the body of your platform/statement. However - I did not find any mention of such a plan (other than a point regarding membership criteria).

Previous MC’s, and the current MC, have sadly also refrained from acting to ensure transparency, particularly in the sense of BoD disclosure as per the bylaws, and from disclosing some information they were responsible-by-fallback to disclose.

Concrete questions

1.1 What do you see as the required and desired scope of transparency within the TDF?
1.2 Do you believe BoDs have failed to meet their disclosure requirements, statutory and otherwise?
1.3 Do you believe that the MC has an implicit disclosure obligation when the BoD does not meet its own obligations? If so, please characterize it.
1.4 Do you have a plan for increasing transparency in the TDF? If so, please lay it out, at least in broad strokes.

(I hope to ask another batch of questions at a later time, I think this is enough for now…)

#3

Hi Eyal,

thank you for your questions!

You asked the same question to every candidate. We - @jonatoni, @stragu, @paolo.dongilli, @marinello and myself worked together on the Commitment to our Community (The Document Foundation Nextcloud). We stand for election to the Membership Committee, so we also worked on a reply together.

We value transparency a lot and we want more of it. Compared to the previous boards, we already see a big improvements. This is great and something we can all build on together!

If we are elected, we will make sure that the decisions of the MC follow clear and published rules. This is especially true for the membership in the board of trustees. For this, we will work on the community bylaws directly at the beginning of the term.

If we are elected, also we will make it public if anyone pushes the membership committee to a certain decision. Nobody should ever be pushed to a decision. Never.

We do not agree that the statutes ask the board to publish each and every document. The statutes carefully balance what has to be published and when. We agree with you that almost certainly in the past terms not everything was published as it should. One example are board minutes, which did not always happen in time. Whether other items were not disclosed we do not know for sure and we don’t want to speculate.

The current board has significantly improved their way to work. Our goal is to support the current board with transparency, for both the board and the membership committee.

The membership committee cannot publish board information the board itself holds back. It can only publish (and with us elected, we will publish) information concerning the membership committee itself. The MC can reach out to the board and remind them of their duties. If we are elected, we will do that, in public.

The Commitment to our Community written by our group has several elements of transparency:

  • Simple English. When something is written in complicated words, it is hard to understand. So the use of Simple English will help transparency.

  • Sharing of knowledge. When information is shared with many people, there is no “exclusivity” anymore. This helps transparency.

  • Community bylaws. In the bylaws we will put transparent membership criteria. This makes clear what qualifies for membership.

  • Community surveys. The result of the anonymous surveys will be made public. This is another step of transparency.

  • MC meetings. We will have a public part of the meeting, and we will publish minutes. Also this is for transparency.

Kind regards,
Andreas

#4

I don’t like cliques in organizational bodies. An MC member’s fealty [edit: s/fealty/fidelity] should be to the trustees first, and to her or his fellow committee members a distant second. We had 5-person clique in the last BoD, and that did not work out well at all, as we all know.

Can you tell me who among you five wrote which parts of this document?

What a strange answer. The question was about transparency in the TDF in general, not about MC decisions - which themselves are only a fraction of the MC-generated material which must be made public.

Nobody suggested the BoD publish “each and every document”. What should be disclosed are “the processes, discussions and decisions of the foundation, its committees, the Board of Directors and any Executive Directors”. Do you - Andreas - disagree that these documents need to be made public, except for those the TDF/BoD is legally barred from disclosing?

  1. Of course the committee can publish such information. Will you - Andreas - oppose the publication of information, which the Board is required to publish or which the trustees should be aware of, and that the MC has, because the board itself is holding that information back? (Note I’m not talking about information which the BoD has, explicitly and publicly, decided to keep confidential for a limited period of time.)
  2. There is no “Board information”. We are talking about TDF information - which may or may not have been generated by the BoD - which the MC has access to.

Most of the items you listed do not regard “the processes, discussions and decisions of the foundation, its committees, the Board of Directors and any Executive Directors” - except those that are already known to the public, or at least the trustees, without you taking any actions, like the community bylaws or knowledge that’s “shared with many people”. MC actions to promote transparency means getting us the information that is not shared by many people.

Also, about MC meetings:

So, do you - Andreas - commit to also minute and publish the private parts of your meetings (excluding only the parts of the minutes which you are legally obliged to keep confidential)?

#5

My confidence in this candidacy is simply zero, especially with Andreas as leader,

As far as I know, individuals are elected, but it seems that this is not the case, so I understand that if elected they will be subject to the same conflict of interest limitations as people connected to companies.

#6

Hi Eyal,

I’m not able to say anything detailed about the situation in the last board, because I wasn’t a member of the bodies. But as a community member I notice that I missed e.g. a lot of the board minutes. I don’t know if and which information we (the community members) also didn’t get. However I agree with others that the situation with the new board notedly improved happily.

The trustees and community members are in the foreground for me and our group. Fortunately you will always find people, which share similar ideas and write them down together.

Regarding transparency in TDF: the MC could do his home work, give itself clear rules, e.g. for the acceptance of new members, and set a good example. It is more difficult to publish those information and documents, which another body don’t want to see in public. In those cases the MC can only point out transparency and criticize publicly. But the MC can’t publish the information itself.

However, sometimes there are good reasons to not publish things. It just shouldn’t be the standard habit. One example would be the rejection of a membership application. If the MC told one that her/his contributions are not enough and would make this public then one or the other wouldn’t clearly feel comfortable and thus maybe not apply for membership. The same apply to - referring to a question in another mail from you - e.g. when companies request cooperation. They can’t be published directly without the consent of the sender at least. In an open source project, many things are made public. But we collaborate with companies or authorities, which have a different way of thinking - there we have proceed more carefully so as not to scare anyone away or to publish confidential information (e.g. the introduction of a new, as yet unknown products, which based on LibreOffice).

The plan of me and other is to have a public part in MC meetings, that will be publish promptly in the minutes. In the private part of the meeting, I suspect, it is about the acceptance of membership. I have explained above, why it is not possible to publish everything here.

Kind regards,
Andreas

#7

Come on, Andreas, you can’t be serious. We were supposed to get, and did not get, access to:

  • Incoming correspondence of the foundation
  • Outgoing correspondence of the foundation
  • Contracts and agreements with third parties
  • Formal correspondence between TDF bodies/officers, including activity reports
  • Formal correspondence between individual trustees and TDF bodies/officers
  • Full minutes and recorded discussions within TDF bodies (not just the BoD and MC - all permanent and ad-hoc bodies), including sessions not open to other trustees (part of “processes”, “discussions”); document associated with the minutes are particularly important (e.g. reports, presentations, proposals). Here we got some, but not all of it.
  • Opinions, position papers etc. within the TDF which somehow don’t fall under the previous definitions.

(and I’m sure I’m missing a few more categories.)

all of these should be held somewhere trustees can access - or at least, routinely exported somewhere trustees can access. This is the general rule: TDF business is managed transparently. The exception is information which:

  • Must be kept confidential by law
  • The board has decided must be kept confidential for a limited amount of time

You may be asking yourself: “But the board hasn’t really made such embargo decisions except on a few of its decisions” - and that is true: It is because what we have now is a default in which everything is secret and hidden. As this changes, there may well be a need to embargo a few more things, and that is understandable. But at least we will then receive the emabrgo decisions themselves, so we know what’s being withheld from us at least.

#8

There is also a German translation of the Commitment to our community available:

Kind regards,
Andreas

#9

I think it is important for the understanding of an open source project like LibreOffice and The Document Foundation that the scope covers developing an office software, but also many other aspects. It’s great that we have great developers which work and improve a top free office software. That’s important, but to make it a leading office software it needs also other areas of contributions.

If an office software would lack e.g. a user documentation it wouldn’t get a critical mass of users and companies interested in using and investing in it. And if nobody speak about it understandable for non-tech decider and evangelize a bigger audience the free office software wouldn’t gain public interest (also for companies and organizations). And LibreOffice could rely on its nat-language community members, which localize it, help users etc. That is also a big strength of our project. And without so many volunteers who tested the software and worked within QA, the software wouldn’t have get as solid as it is today.

Thus to summarize: every contribution in every area of our project, independent if it is development, qa, documentation, localization, design, marketing, user-help etc., is important and makes it a great community.

I find it unhelpful to consider contributions in one area of ​​the project more valuable than in another.

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