Commitment to our Community – Membership Committee candidacy: Stéphane Guillou

[stragu]

Thank you @jonatoni for nominating me.

With other members of our community, I support the Commitment to our Community.

I’m from France, have family in Peru, lived in Spain and now live in Australia. The languages I am most comfortable in are French, Spanish and English.

I have volunteered for LibreOffice since 2012, for the most part in Quality Assurance, and was part of the TDF Team between 2022 and 2024 as Quality Assurance Analyst. I am particularly interested in making LibreOffice reliable, user-friendly, enjoyable and accessible. I am passionate about promoting open source tools and Open Science principles, and sharing knowledge through training and documentation.

Full name: Stéphane Guillou

Email: stephane dot guillou at libreoffice dot org

Affiliation: volunteer contributor (currently employed at The University of Queensland’s Library)

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

Candidacy statement:

I will do my best to make our community inclusive and to foster friendly interactions. I am interested in growing our membership base by making sure all contributions are valued. I want to help make our project an environment in which contributors enjoy positive interactions, are respected and appreciated, and can feel proud of our collective achievements; a community that is conducive to productive collaboration, openness and skill-sharing, and makes others excited to join in.

I also want to nominate Paolo Dongilli (@paolo.dongilli) as a candidate for the Membership Committee.

[EyalRozenberg]

Hello Stephane,

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…)