Summary meeting
Summary of in person meeting Board of Directors
The Board of Directors met in person on Saturday July 8 and Sunday July 9 in Budapest. The MC was invited to join.
- From the board,
Present: Thorsten Behrens, Gabriel Masei, László Nemeth, Cor Nouws, Gábor Kelemen
Not present: Emiliano Vavassori, Paolo Vecchi.
- From the Membership Committee
Present: Miklos Vajna (Saturday), Shinji Enoki (remotely)
On July 8 and 9 the board held a face-to-face meeting in Budapest. It was initiated by Gábor early March to take place in April, May, but clearly there were some delays in organizing all.
The board had good time to pay attention to quite some topics, enjoy each others presence, and I share a summary here.
Governance review
We started with looking at the governance review done by [contractor for consultancy]. Directors mentioned what in their opinion are the clearest and most important recommendations to work on.
Quite often mentioned are resolving relationship issues, improve engagement and respectful conduct, Nolan Principles and more governance framework.
There will be a first action plan, built of the opinions discussed in the meeting. Since it is important that all directors engage, that will be brought to the full board for discussion, allowing also directors not attending the meeting in Budapest to engage.
Online
The boards realizes its decision from last year for formalizing atticization status is not yet executed. It will pay attention to that.
Board marketing & communication
Various ongoing items and ideas in this broad area were discussed.
- Board news letter and townhall meetings (around elections) are considered very useful and efforts appreciated.
- Improvements are possible wrt explanation of decisions, e.g. when they take a longer time or are more complex. We’ll work on a sort template with background, process and also room for minority positions.
- Communication also influences how people may be interested to stand for the board (or likewise the MC). So finding ways to have people engaging around certain topics, showing also the nice and human side and results of our work, could maybe result in more people from a diverse background being interested.
- For the boards meetings we still need to improve on minuting. Wrt interactions with the community in the public calls, it is in line with an open and welcoming approach if participants tell who they are and that people who speak turn on the camera. For certain topics a members-only part is considered relevant.
- Thinking about encouraging members to run for the board: the situation on board-discuss will regularly not be experienced as attractive. There is still the plan to investigate possibilities for external moderation. That needs a follow up too.
Staff & team items
- The decision to that defines the process to work on a board-staff-policy needs publishing. It is useful to do that with sending an extra message out, reviewed by e.g. Italo, to encourage people to participate in the process, starting with giving input.
- The board carefully discussed interaction with the team. The will clearly is to resolve long-standing issues. And of course it is also the boards responsibility to take care of the situation. The recent discussion on TDF internal regarding a meeting of directors that took place some two years ago, also shows the clear signals of a longer lasting unhappiness among team members.
It seems just a very good idea, given the situation, that we need to find additional expertise, with experience in HR, workplace harassment, and creating happy, fulfilling environments. This helps avoiding issues of (dis)trust that make the process harder for the people in board/staff themselves. The board will work carefully on the process, obviously also engaging with staff.
- Also briefly touched was the area ‘vision, direction and purpose’. The idea is that this is best discussed in more detail with the team after progress on the two issues mentioned above is made. The conference in Bucharest seems the natural moment to meet and discuss this again.
Miscellaneous items
- Apply with LibreOffice as a digital public good. This has been discussed late April on the tdf-internal list, and LibreOffice clearly meets the standard. Vote on this (in Discourse/board-discuss).
- Check further fund-raising opportunities. Has been mentioned several times over the years. All seem in support, so let’s start working on this.
- The AB seat of FSF is still suspended after the fierce public debate some years ago. Some time ago the board approached [new FSF leadership], to learn about how the situation evolves. It is expected that she will be available pretty soon - after having enjoyed parental leave. We are interested in that contact, and will do a follow up on LibOCOn latest.
- CoC committee and policy. The board was informed that there are enforceability issues with the CoC policy. Also [contractor for consultancy] suggested to improve CoC policy, making it more helpful for the board itself. Finally the Board approached the committee with suggestions & questions. Since we have no idea about the status, before starting working on improvements, we’ll approach the CoC committee for an update.
Strategic goals for TDF
These have been discussed and defined in 2022. The work on those started but didn’t get enough attention.
The board takes the opportunity of the face-to-face meeting to look make some progress here.
- Double number of developers
- Significantly increase contributions from non-EU citizens & entities
- In 2 years, get 2 additional companies into project
- Important, but not urgent:
- 10% of project budget decided on i.e. voted by members
- Substantially increase diversity in the project
- Teaching LO programming & coding details by university - computer science subject
The source of information for all these is
https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/f/1129829.
The board again wants to encourage members to look and participate whenever possible.
We think, having clearer communication in the future, should help to increase activity and engagement to make progress on these important strategic items.
Review legal backlog
Over the years, various legal topics have been recognized that need an update or a check. For example with statues, bylaws, various procedures.
Handling those more or less at the same time, in relation to each other, seems the most sensible approach. The board will start creating a clear process for that, making it easy to collect input from various sides.
TDF’s Manifesto
Over the past years, there were various attempts to write TDF’s new ‘Next Decade Manifesto’ The first one* served us well, but the decade is over, and alas the efforts for the new one didn’t yield a clear
result yet.
In hindsight, the board considers that apparently topics on which clearly diverging opinions exist, were playing a large role in that process. So it could be a successful approach to really focus on the shared ideals, visions. Having a text proposed by an external copywriter could be one way to have this done, but would need that person to be instructed and understand what is a sort of controversial and what not. Maybe it is feasible to find someone in the community to help? Needs to be further discussed and a plan to finish the process, ideally, in Bucharest.
*) TDF/Next Decade Manifesto - The Document Foundation Wiki
Cross-check Board actions with Surveys
The MC conducted a survey in the wider community and presented the results* in 2021.
*) https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/f/1003299
Of course the outcome of the survey did have attention already.
During the meeting the directors again looked at the results section ‘improving and contributing’, also from the perspective of the ongoig board actions and priorities.
It is good to notice that many are getting attention from team, board, wider community already or even finished. For other items, more work is needed, and with checking the survey outcome, that becomes clearer.
The survey result section with the more ‘open comments’ will be checked in a similar way during the coming weeks.
The board is grateful toward Gábor for initiating the meeting and to members of staff in helping organizing it.