Commitment to our Community – Membership Committee candidacy: Paolo Dongilli

[paolo.dongilli]

Thanks so much @stragu for your kind nomination. I also fully endorse and subscribe the document Commitment to our Community since it clearly states the community values I believe in.

I am an official and proud member of the LibreOffice community since Jan. 2014. I live in South Tyrol (Italy) and I speak Italian, German (2nd language) and English. Other languages I’d like to learn are French, Spanish and Greek.

I work as technical inspector for the schools of the Province of Bozen-Bolzano and I coordinate since 2016 the FUSS-Project which brought Linux (Debian) and Free Software in all Italian language schools of South Tyrol (74 schools, 4.500 PCs) in 2005. LibreOffice is the most important application (suite) used in our schools and it is also available for all employees in our local public administration (7.000 PCs).
For the LibreOffice community I mainly work as advocate at local and when possible at national level.

Full name: Paolo Dongilli

Email: dongilli at fuss dot bz dot it

Affiliation: Italian School Board, Autonomous Province of Bozen-Bolzano, South Tyrol

My 75 words candidacy statement: I love to engage with local, national, and worldwide communities to advocate Free Software; I will collaborate with other members to strengthen mentorship, devising incentives for new members, and fostering knowledge sharing as main pillar of digital sustainability. I’ll work with schools and public administrations and focus on transparency. This will help us in finding eager people who want to contribute to our projects at another level. I support the Commitment to our Community.

I would like to nominate @marinello as candidate for the membership committee. I have been working with him on Free Software projects in the past and I appreciate his dedication, reliability and loyalty.

Best regards,
Paolo.

[EyalRozenberg]

Hello Paolo,

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…)

[paolo.dongilli]

Hello Eyal,

nice to meet you on Tuesday and thank you for these written questions.

You asked the same question to every candidate. We - @jonatoni, @stragu, @marinello, @andreasma and I - worked together on the Commitment to our Community. 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!

@EyalRozenberg

1.1 What do you see as the required and desired scope of transparency within the TDF?

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.

@EyalRozenberg

1.2 Do you believe BoDs have failed to meet their disclosure requirements, statutory and otherwise?

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.

@EyalRozenberg

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.

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.

@EyalRozenberg

1.4 Do you have a plan for increasing transparency in the TDF? If so, please lay it out, at least in broad strokes.

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 “exclusitivity” 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.

If after our hopefully clarifying answers you also share what we wrote in the Commitment to our Community, it would be great if you could provide a translation of the document in the languages you speak. Thanks so much in advance for your help!

Best regards,
Paolo.