Invitation and agenda for TDF board meeting on Monday, 2025-11-17, 1700 UTC (1800 Berlin time)

Hi Simon,

no strong opinion either way. I think it has some merit to not have archives for some discussions, and then it indeed is a challenge for future boards. On the other hand, in particular now, I feel it will be a challenge for future boards anyways, but that’s a different story…

Indeed, if anyone assumed on the directors list would be a vivid discussion, it’s usually not. I think we should all remind ourselves to have votes and discussions in public whenever possible. There will always be some discussions that cannot be (immediately) made public, but not all of the votes taken needed a private vote in first place, I agree.

Oh, I would agree on that. :wink:

I don’t want to dig into the past too much, but I think a big reason for this in the past was a certain amount of, let’s call it, suspicion and desire to steer, control and micromanage. In such climate, things don’t work out properly. If people’s decisions are driven by fear, that is doomed to fail.

In addition, some wrong decisions ware taken (or rather, some right ones were not taken), ending up in a situation that we are slowly unwinding, but fixing things after the fact is much harder than doing things right from the beginning.

We are slowly getting to a better situation, hopefully.

On that I am much less worried. Meetings are meetings, separate votes and decisions are another thing. I’m fine if they are stored differently, that’s what I know also from other organizations.

Absolutely, TDF has seen way too much fights sadly, and still sees it up to today.

Florian

No it used to be a mere alias (so no archives either) which I was asked to turn to a private mailing list without archives in February 2020. I assume there was some discussion for deciding to set up the list that way, but AFAIK directors@ never had any archives in the first place. That said, directors in office have access to archives through their mail client during their entire term.

Thanks for clarifying! Then my memory indeed served me wrong. Probably we had an archive on the old core list and stopped having one when bod/directors was created.

I suppose it will be a challenge as it has always been. When I joined the board in 2020 I had to spend weeks in trying to piece together the bit of information that would allow me to understand if the outsourcing project, that board members of the previous term were trying to convince us to approve straight away, was sound or not.

True that we’ve been given a paper but it turned out that many statements, assumptions and conclusions were completely wrong or misleading. The project was stopped and a proper legal analysis led to very different choices.

So the fact that someone writes a paper or a motion doesn’t per se guarantees any transparency or the reassurance that the motion has been well researched and includes evidence that support the facts presented.

Similar issues in the motion for the payment of the legal invoice prompted me to propose changes to the process for drafting motions presented at the beginning of this term, which hasn’t yet been adopted, including:

“The proposal should contain a risk assessment if it could create adverse effects for TDF and eventual supporting legal statements if available. If a board member strongly believes that the proposal could have detrimental effects for TDF then the proposal must be validated by TDF’s legal counsel before any other actions are taken.”

and

“It is the duty of the proposer of a motion to validate the presented facts as it’s jointly the duty and responsibility of each board member to obtain and validate the corresponding evidence supporting the presented facts. Motions found to be misrepresenting or omitting evidence must be amended accordingly to provide board members with actual facts on which they can take informed decisions.”

So if some want properly written motions then the whole board must participate to ensure the correctness of the motion.

Then in some cases we should have a board private section, to be release once the confidentiality requirement is over (eg. legal matter settled), where facts are presented in full as they are together with the evidence and a public and more diplomatic version to hint at the need to take that decision.

We can start a public discussion on the the process so that we can finally vote it in quite soon and see how we can make it fit in the process.

A big part of this problem is what I mentioned earlier on. You may recall as a first, let’s call it strange incident, that I was shouted at in front of the full (old and new) board for my reluctance to sign trademark agreements, which later turned out to be problematic agreements indeed. That already should have led to consequences for the involved director, but it didn’t, and my concerns were ignored.

Then, February 17 of the same year (2020), a team member sent, on behalf of the team, “Questions on” that very outsourcing project. The aftermath is known, including the “Meeting to discredit staff in March 2020”.

Also that, by the way, is only on a restricted mailing list, and never was made fully public. So when we talk about secret discussions, also that needs considering, so we have everything in public and not on secret lists.

Also here, no consequences for the involved directors, and even worse, if the concerns of the team had been taken seriously back then, we would have saved a lot of issues.

Yes, indeed, TDF’s board act(ed) quite differently from any other board I know, because in other organizations, such concerns would have been heard and taken seriously, but we all know the outcome.

Happy to have more in the open, to not repeat that kind of issues.

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I do remember. That, together with other comments made by members of the outgoing board, made me think that there was something seriously wrong with the way some were discharging their duties during my first ever meeting as a soon to be deputy director.

Trying to bring clarity on the decisions and the processes that led to those decisions has been a very painful struggle that attracted attacks of all sorts for myself and others for years from the same people that created the issues.

These same people could have avoided further issues by simply apologising for their mistakes, back in 2020 when these mistakes could have been considered excusable errors of judgement, but instead decided to double down with attacks, misinformation, influences and decisions to cover up their mistakes creating even more serious problems for TDF.

I find it quite annoying to read posts lecturing us on how things should be done when the same people were doing, and are often still doing, the opposite of what they are now preaching.

As it seems like lessons haven’t been learned by some it is necessary to put these lessons in governance documents that will reduce the risks of having a repeat of these behaviours and issues in the future and move on.

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