Commitment to our Community - Membership Committee candidacy: Marco Marinello

[marinello]

Thank you @paolo.dongilli for nominating me. I can only undersign the Commitment to our Community as well, finding in the document the values I want TDF to stand for.

I have been a member of LibreOffice since 2019 which is when I started working with/on LibreOffice Online. In FUSS we were integrating it into a system for remote file access and had found many difficulties in compiling and running the application. So I invested some time in restructuring the build scripts and creating two new pages in the wiki that explained the process in detail.

Full name: Marco Marinello
Email: marinello at libreoffice dot org
Affiliation: volunteer contributor
My 75 words candidacy statement: I am Marco Marinello from Bolzano and speak Italian, German and English. I started my journey in the community in 2019 when I worked on LibreOffice Online. I believe that sharing knowledge helps our community to grow and get better. Therefore I support the Commitment to our Community (link). I will strive to actively involve new people in the project and let them take their first steps in our community.

I also want to nominate Andreas Mantke (@andreasma) as candidate for the membership committee. We had the pleasure to work together on LOOL and I appreciated his passion and determination, next to his technical skills.

[EyalRozenberg]

Hello Marinello,

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 dischare 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…)