Hi Alex,
Your understanding is what was implied. But that does not make the original assertion true.
The chair role simply does not convey that sort of power, and besides the tie-breaking & some representational duties, he or she is a peer to all other elected members of the board.
Best, Thorsten
Thank you, Thorsten.
Are you alleging:
If any of the above is substantiated, the evidence for it should be made publicly available for the broader public to be fully informed.
While I was on the board, I received private messages inviting me to receive an “onboarding” to the new role, that I never accepted. But in addition, I can say that Michael, Cor and Thorsten were pressuring to some board members to agree with them, even though the evidence showed they shouldn’t, until they gave up.
I remember that minorities in previous boards have been “convinced” to “make up their minds” with the aim to show public consensus. And this was a common practice followed by other directors too in previous years. Unfortunately, I don’t see this arguable behaviour just as a prerogative of the chair.
Or describe in another way. In the last term, when the vote proposal was not what they wanted (but they couldn’t win the vote), they would insist to “have consensus” instead of having votes, and never gave up preventing the vote running. I always wondered that if everything should get “consensus” from all the board members, why did we need the vote to make decisions?
You can say that it’s just the way the minority party in congress is running. However the most extreme and incredible experience of this kind was to “forge the consensus” - a board member claimed all 7 members voted for agreeing on the vote he proposed, by his own interpretation of the TDF rules, while only 3 of the members voted. @drodriguez must have remembered this as well since he was also a victim to “be forced to agree”.
[ironic]With such a powerful and determined member still in BoD, TDF is so lucky, isn’t it?[/ironic]
PS: for the incidence mentioned above all the proofs have been sent to MC last term, so don’t ask me here to “prove it” or to tell you who the incredible member is (you know, the member is very powerful and determined). I’m just sad that, unfortunately nothing could be (and can be) changed. That’s the main reason I decided not to run for this term of BoD.
Hi Alex,
there has been no vote as such or to be more precise there have been votes but then they have been deserted by the majority of the board in ways that show a clear interference in the process by our chairman. For reference see:
The afternoon of the following day Caolan unexpectedly resigned and the chairman proposed to shelve the vote.
At the end of August, when most came back from holidays, Emiliano re-proposed the vote:
Our chairman commented internally that he didn’t support that vote mentioning arguments that were evidently disconnected with facts available to the whole board and the rest of the board deserted the vote.
The work that started with Caolan, Emiliano and myself to deal with matters that should not be influenced by conflicted members of the board (Thorsten, Cor and Gabor) came to a halt while “the conditions that brought to it are persisting”.
Further internal discussions to officially establish such a group were still heavily influenced by the usual 2 conflicted members of the board and went nowhere due to, let’s say, ethical issues. That led the same conflicted members of the board to push out the RoP changes so that they could reset the areas of oversight that could not be reshaped the way they wanted.
As some members of staff are also tasked by the board to deal with tendering and legal matters, the RoP changes vote again negatively affects those tasks by creating new but obvious problems.
I hope you start understanding why transparency in the decision process is important as it’s easy to mislead external observers into thinking that all is procedurally correct but the ramification of some decisions will be understood only by closely following the next step. While each single decisions might not be against laws and regulations, as you might infer, a sequence of decisions could lead to an overall problematic situation leading to decisions making the interests of some more equal than others.
(Evaluating the evolution of a proposal that has been voted in a way in 2019 and then pushed in a very different way in 2020 should give you some hints.)
The following step that should be published ASAP would confirm that the process did not take in consideration obvious issues, including CoIs, which have been presented to the board, expressed in public comments about the vote and simply confirmed by our lawyer. We should have not wasted TDF’s resources to ask for confirmation to lawyers as they were obvious and public but Thorsten and Cor did not wanted to recognise them and apart from Emiliano the rest of the board remained silent as usual. Once the confirmation from our lawyer arrived it should have not been ignored but here we are.
True that a board could choose not to implement legal advice but then that decision should be motivated, evaluating actual evidence instead of summarily dismiss it, and voted on. My request to have that, and other votes, validated by our legal counsel has been denied and now the confirmation of the issues and the advice to revoke the vote is being ignored.
Both our chairman and Cor claimed that “rigidity” or the excuse of using CoIs was used to express their opinion in some areas. It is obvious and public knowledge since a while that CoIs and undue influence by conflicted members of the board/bidders should actually be avoided.
So while it is true that in general a majority vote should be respected I’m not going to stay silent if the argumentation used to convince board members to send their +1 are misleading or actually contrary to what facts and evidence demonstrate.
I have complained several times that facts get summarily dismissed in discussions which since, the beginning of this term, see several members of the board being mostly absent (apart from Emiliano), do not engage in the evaluation of the facts but then their +1 appears regardless of the evidence against that. I don’t think this is the way a board should work and claiming secrecy for board internal processes that can be considered dysfunctional at best is just a way to hide the issues.
As you correctly stated each board member is collectively responsible for the decisions taken by the board but don’t forget that each member of the board is also liable for those decisions. Should I just accept decisions that in my opinion could lead to liabilities that can be avoided? If in doubt we must have those decisions checked by our legal counsel and if he states that all is OK then at least I can at least state that we did our best to avoid issues. Lawyers confirmed the issues and that the decision should be revoked, should I just accept that some members of the board want to ignore that advice?
I agree with you that discussing these issues in public doesn’t inspire a great deal of confidence… if they don’t get fixed. If we have an open debate followed by a transparent process to fix those issues would instead demonstrate that we are collectively working to improve the legal entity which is the home of LibreOffice.
Ciao
Paolo
True. In the beginning of the last term. I remember that I was surprised how they could demean some staffs like that.
The “consensus building” sessions were a painful experience. Fortunately in the last board there were enough directors looking at facts and evidence to manage to push back on some of the plans we were told we should accept, especially at the very beginning of the term.
As it was my first term I had to do a lot of reading (documents, old board minutes, etc.) to understand the situation and take informed decisions. It was not easy but I believe every new member of the board should go through it and not blindly believe what old members of the board say as they could easily take decisions that are contrary to what the evidence show. I recommended to do the same to new board members but I’m not sure they applied themselves enough on the reading part.
Anyway at least for me the calls to convince me one way or another didn’t last long as I read enough to disprove the arguments being promoted. What we have now are just endless email threads where there is no intention of looking at the matter at hand or the evidence pro/cons, the scope is to create noise to drawn the facts into useless comments and then claim that the board had extensive discussions about the subject. That’s it, I know that sometimes I get drawn into playing their game but at least is all documented in the directors mailing list.
Thank you to everyone who has commented. Unfortunately, what I’m reading here does not sound like a functional system, nor does it seem very reassuring. Indeed, as Paolo identified, it seems rather dysfunctional, and surely not what was intended in the spirit of the creation of the Foundation.
Seeking consensus on an issue per se doesn’t seem particularly problematic to me, but generally this is done before a vote takes place, not afterwards. I find it somewhat odd that consensus should be being sought after a vote has occurred, and as an alternative to the voting process, unless of course, the aim is to alter vote result.
If the MC is aware of the issues, can it not intervene in some form? Usually, boards answer to their members, do they not? Why hasn’t that happened here yet?
What I can say in this public forum, is that the MC also in other occasions asked to get more details about some important topics, and the board agreed to share only some of those information, and only after repeated and insisting requests, and after an artificial delay.
Hi Alex,
Again, that does not seem what is happening - where did you get the impression?
It should BTW be normal, that people try to convince dissenting board members ahead of a vote. Given how relatively easier it is to find consensus in a board of 10, rather than a community of thousands, valuing that compromise-building has served TDF well in the past.
Best, Thorsten
If you thought that things were dysfunctional now the chairman reached a new low.
He hid one of my posts in reply to Daniel and Franklin which, have also been hidden, which reported facts that show bad behaviour from which lessons haven’t been learned.
He also edited my post to remove a part where I stated that he’s directly affected by some “items” which put him in conflict of interest in acting or interfering on those “items”. Guess if he’s avoiding interfering.
He has also removed the part related to a decision that must be made public.
And just now, he moved the topic away from the vote so that for future reviews the dissent won’t be linked to the vote anymore. I’m not aware that there has been any discussion about this further action with anyone.
This is the last drop, in my opinion Thorsten lost all respect and legitimacy to hold his position.
Hi y’all,
beyond all the hyperbole & outrage - let’s please keep having the constructive part of this debate (how a board should work viz its rules of procedure, consensus building vs. fundamental disagreements - and of course how to move on, once decisions were made).
What should be discussed among the members (if not kept inside the board/MC), is legal briefs. Please take this to tdf-internal, or expect to be moderated.
Best, Thorsten
Fully agree, this behavior is way beyond any boundaries.
My reading of this is that we can discuss the matter as much as we want but the board will not revoke the decision despite having received only negative comments about it and legal advice to revoke it.
What’s the point of even discussing things if the chairman and board members ignore feedback and evidence?
From Daniel and Marina’s posts.
What should outsiders make of the accusations of deletion of parts of other people’s posts? At the very least, if true, it doesn’t look good from the outside trying to understand what is actually happening on the inside.
Hi Alex,
regarding moderation of specific content, see Discuss “Rules of procedure changes” - #6 by webmink why that should be assumed good policy.
I admit it must be frustrating for people watching, having to constantly deal with vague allegations & content moderation.
Then again, please ask those who are trying to use this forum as a public courtroom, by selectively sharing private matter – knowing full-well that me and others will hesitate to counter that with even more leaking of privileged details in our defense – why they don’t use tdf-internal, where we can be much more forthcoming.
Best, Thorsten
Nobody ever disputed that privileged legal information should not be shared.
I’ve checked before publishing the vote and the quotes used are just a confirmation of the issues that have been already reported both in private and in public.
Repeating the same argument that the vote has been taken down because it contained privileged legal information doesn’t hold at all. Then, while I used quotes to keep the rationale short and to the point, I could as well have used my own words and ended the message with “the above has been confirmed by our lawyer” which is also common practice when boards wants to show they went through due diligence.
The result would have not changed, the issues were already public and our lawyer advised us to revoke the vote but some members of the board keep ignoring the criticisms, the obvious issues and legal advice confirming those issues. Stating that some board members cannot defend their position as it would reveal more legal information does not hold as there is no legal documents stating the contrary. Processes to be implemented which affects both board and ESC, which will be published shortly, actually confirm the issues which are also linked to another vote that will be also published shortly.
Instead of going around in circles it would be great if our chairman just acted following taking onboard the criticisms, the confirmation of the issues and revoked that vote.
Indeed, also hidden a message I sent arguing it mentions HR topics.
Unbelievable what both the chair and Cor are doing. And, of course, unacceptable.
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