Invitation and agenda for TDF board meeting on Monday, 2025-12-15, 1700 UTC (1800 Berlin time)

Dear Community,

I hereby invite you to our next TDF board meeting which takes place on Monday, 2025-12-15, 1700 UTC (1800 Berlin time) at https://jitsi.documentfoundation.org/TDFBoard

For time zone conversion, see e.g.: Time Zone Converter – Time Difference Calculator
Agenda:

Public section:

  • Community Q&A: 10 minutes
  • Welcome Dan: 5 minutes
  • FOSDEM plannings: 5 minutes
  • Budget 2026: 5 minutes
  • Update on developer hirings: 5 minutes
  • Community bylaws: 10 minutes

Trustee/members-only section:

  • Nothing for this meeting

Board and MC only section:

  • Legal situation: 10 minutes
  • Wealth management: 5 minutes
  • Advisory Board setup and composition: 10 minutes

Best,
Eliane Domingos

2 Likes

Hi Elaine,

Can we also get an update from the Membership Committee on their schedule for the overdue Board election process please? This will also feed in to our discussion of FOSDEM planning.

Thanks

Simon

I feel that there is currently a disconnect between the foundation’s mission and the actual distribution of energy invested.

A significant portion of collective time seems to be absorbed by governance and process issues, while the core mission — technical production and knowledge sharing — relies on a limited number of contributors.

This imbalance may be worth looking at collectively.

I find this assignment of the next two Libocon events without consulting the trustees to be problematic. Three times in Italy, and a member is appointed to administer Libocon 2027. Other communities in the field have set up booths during 2024-2025 but are apparently invisible. I personally supported a group of Linux users in the Alps for 25 years. Without recognition or reward, but simply because I saw it as being of personal and collective interest.

This year, I’m going to take a closer look at the Collabora community. Tea Time Training sessions are to be encouraged and are in line with the spirit of knowledge sharing that I would like to see flourish.

The TTT sessions are great, but I am baffled by your implication that similar knowledge sharing would not be happening in parallel in a solidly established way. I myself have held 315 live streaming sessions on the topic of bug triaging open to everyone since 2020. I would also not discount the design and doc team calls which are, in effect, regular open house events and invitations to learning.

1 Like

Hi Ilmary,

I need a more structured basic approach. I used AI to explain the code to me a little, and I realised that there are many things that are left unsaid, undocumented or very poorly documented. This may be obvious to an experienced developer, but not to me.
I’ve spent a lot of time tracing and understanding certain bugs on my own, but the tools themselves have their own logic, and even the type of compiler has an influence. For several months/years, I’ve been trying to compile a semblance of knowledge that is a little more robust than knowing how to debug one or two lines.

The code is large, complex, and relies on many implicit conventions. Before being able to ask good questions, newcomers often need time to explore and trace how things work.

Collabora online introduces a new level of difficulty in managing web and asynchronous processes.

(deepl translated, hope it’s clear)

pas vraiment :confused:
ça donne quoi au final ce " semblance of knowledge " ? tu as un exemple de résultat sur un bug précis ?
et en quoi TDF devrait / pourrait agir sur le fait que COL complexifie le contexte ? :thinking:

Now you are talking about a specific thing, the bad habit of neglecting code readability and documentation. I am sure entire dissertations have been written about the topic. I think the explanations are usually limited time and deadlines and perhaps a feeling of exhaustion and wanting to move on. Good naming etc. might be difficult for some to produce. The problem then is that fixing this after the fact is rather expensive, especially when it’s about architectural solutions that are somehow clever.

We have had and continue to have hundreds of easy hacks with the aim of making the code easier to understand and reason about. There are layers of abstraction that can be peeled away, nested structures that can be flattened, convoluted bits that can be rewritten as concise code, obsolete custom types and homegrown methods that can be replaced by standard ones. All improvements like these by themselves reduce the need to have code comments in the first place, but we should still be adding more comments and expanding our readmes.

I see the Bylaws are listed on the agenda although there is no proposal for next steps. Since there are clearly revisions needed - both conceptual revisions that go beyond mere text corrections and smaller changes that might be possible via text changes to Sophie’s contribution - I suggest we use the slot tonight to:

  1. Plan a process through which a set of bylaws might reach consensus. I am willing to assist in this process.
  2. Plan a process by which consensus among the trustees can be established before making any bylaws final. I am willing to assist in this process, which might run in parallel with the first process as we consider principles.
  3. If possible identify tools to enable these processes (I suggest using Gitlab and Markdown with any proposed text as we did for the procurement rules for example)
    Cheers

Simon

Hi, I’m working on the call minutes and it should be published this week, after Board review.

1 Like