Costs for Participation at Events

Hello BoD, hello all,

in general I support the participation of TDF and LibreOffice at Open Source events around the world. But because the main TDF income is generated from donations and TDF is a charity I would like to know if the board evaluate the necessity and the benefits of such travels in case of long distance travels / high travel expenses for the participation at an event beforehand.

I’d ask the board also for a statement about the travel-costs for each event since 2022 (to now), where TDF participated and payed for long distance travels; and also provide a list of those who took those long distance travels (for each event).

Regards,
Andreas

Hi Andreas,

It’s recently since I’m in the board however I think it has always been beneficial for the local communities organizing an event to have some officials from TDF participating, whatever the distance it represents. Bridging TDF with local communities has always been an important goal not only for representation but for other activities like certification or educating and explaining TDF and LibreOffice strategies. It is also for the same purpose that the Asian and Latin American communities are coming together. I think the cost is worth it.

For the second part of your question, I think the ledgers should provide you with an overview of the expenses. I can also extract some reports from the TSP and dig what went through SPI, but that’s a good deal of work and I’m not sure it’s that important. Some roles at TDF are in charge of this area of representation. Maybe the discussion should be more on how to expand those roles.

Cheers - Sophie

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What is also a big cost, perhaps avoidable, is to hire auditors, if we already have them for free. And at the same time avoid the double burden of internal work.

I hope this could be solved with detailed real-time, minute-by-minute information on what everyone is doing in TDF and why, along with budgets/expenditures; and justifications and authorizations for each action to be taken/performed.
Better still, as an assembly foundation, with validated authorizations, with real-time voting by members, explaining their vote And detailing the time and resources devoted to it,

Questioners should justifiably detail why they are asking each question, including their true ultimate objectives, what mode they are in the time and resources they have devoted to it, an estimate, albeit detailed, of the cost to TDF of answering it.
,
gg
Miguel Ángel.

I totally share your view (see the first sentence of my post).
But I got from some blog posts etc. the impression that only very few community (or TDF) members do those travels or are able to do them. That’s an issue for our project in my opinion.

That is my opinion too. I think we need be more divers here and enable more project members to represent the project at foreign events and give interesting (inspiring) talks. I hope we could encourage more community members to apply for such tasks and gain new experience. I think this should be a very important task of our marketing project.

Regards,
Andreas

When talking about “cost/performance” of travel support, one thing you need to consider is, attending events, especially like LibreOffice Asia or LATAM conference, it is way more important to connect people from different countries/communities together. Attending conference is not just to “present the project”. What I value more is the connection between different communities, and those connections won’t be strong just by interacting on line. Every community with similar experiences would agree that meeting in person would greatly strengthen the connection. This year’s Asia conference, I believe, is successful for this, connecting communities between Taiwan, Indonesian, Japan, and a few from Europe.

During this year’s LibreOffice Asia Conference, I was very happy seeing that, during Community Dinner, there were many small groups talking and chatting, and almost all of them were mixed countries, like Japanese talking with Indonesian or Taiwanese people; young teens from Taiwan and Indonesian talked together. Or like, my younger son was (originally) shy speaking English, but Italo made him a lot more open and he then chatted happily with other younger Indonesian teens. I was worried that all Indonesian or Japanese community would just group together talking by themselves, but it turned out much better than I expected.

I would strongly say that, it was totally worth supporting their travel cost to Taiwan.

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I think this is exactly what we miss a lot in our project still - bringing people together from various countries, continents, cultures, languages, passions and professions.

Every time the annual report is written, it opens my eyes so much. So many things happen across the globe, and so many things we only learn from the annual report. Timezones, travel distances and language barriers don’t make it easy, but with a community as powerful as ours, and with the advanced tools we have available these days, I think we should do more to enable people to interact with others, be it virtually or in person.

Also bringing the various working areas of the project together is important - otherwise we risk to work in isolated groups without looking a bit further ahead to what other groups are working on. All parts of the project need each other, otherwise things won’t work.

Of course, we cannot fly all the community around the globe for various reasons like cost and environment, but enabling different community members to meet in person is one of the greatest gifts we can make. Part of that is also to encourage people to take up such a task - flying to another part of the world, where different habits exist and a different language is spoken, this requires a lot of courage the first time you do it.

I agree with Franklin, something similar to what he mentions happened last year at the Latin American Conference. There we were able to witness Franklin talking to the Mexican government team, among others, for example.
LATAM and Asian community have many similarities and the interaction that takes place face to face is very different from the one that can take place on the screen.

Maybe you have overlooked the fact that marketing has shared not only masters of presentations about The Document Foundation, LibreOffice and Open Document Format, but also tutorial videos on how to use these masters, with the objective of helping community members to build interesting talks. Unfortunately, only a handful of people has used them.

You can find all materials here: The Document Foundation Nextcloud

In addition, I have offered many times to organize trainings about presentation skills, how to build a presentation, how to overcome the fear of speaking in public, and general storytelling techniques, but no one answered the offers. The proposal is always open.

So, marketing has already fulfilled the task, and is ready to improve what is already available. Maybe, there are other reasons why people are not keen about speaking in public, which is a well-known issue, known as Glossophobia (Glossophobia - Wikipedia).