Moving forward: How we can unblock the situation together

well, if it’s available somewhere, please just link here, and let’s see how to make it searchable for future interested readers.

I’ve personally no idea what would be realistic, reasonable, useful …;
(I’m still trying to understand why Bylaws are outdated)
just, limbo is no good look at all;

oh good then.
maybe one day priorities would be shared.

and I’m not gonna follow your outrageous style; and I dont pretend to know anything “most effective”.
just ask yourself why this topic is about “unblock”, and what our fellow users, new comers, contributors, think about the non reponses they constanly face.

and to follow your metaphor, would be nice to improve the way our fellow users are made aware of janitorial tasks, so that they don’t get too much caught in the way.

image

Can we please tone down this discussion? Otherwise this thread will go havoc.

Like these?

:+1:

sure, at some point. (then how would they be comprehensovely linked to the wiki? maybe you could tag them “howto”?)
as previously said, I’m far from there yet. (is the ByLaws question adressed in there? is there a howto for the 2026 report?)

the ones I’m able to point so far are more directly user related.

If by shared you mean made public, that doesn’t make any sense as they vary per role, season and initiative. If you mean shared as in collective, I have to make it very clear that your priorities of fast response times and reviewing outdated content align with mine. I am doing a lot of janitorial work all the time and by now I must have fixed a couple of dozen issues pointed out by you. But not everyone shares those priorities and that’s OK. You and I have many ways to get other people involved in the ideas that we come up with, but mocking and humiliation is a very counterproductive way to choose.

I actually did something similar. :wink: See here: Topics tagged training

Whether to use the wiki, the forum or something different is a technical question. We seem to move more and more to Discourse, where we also publish all the minutes and all the decisions.

Which 2026 report do you refer to, the planned budget? This we discussed in the previous board call and we’ll collect budget proposals currently. @italovignoli sent an e-mail to various mailing list to that effect just these days.

We have many topics in our project, some are more user-facing, some are less user-facing. I guess this is also what explains Ilmari’s concern (which I share). We cannot be everywhere, immediately, at the same time. The project is too big, and there is too much cooking in parallel. This is in general a good sign, but TDF is mainly about enabling people to do things. Doing all ourselves, 24/7/365, is quite impossible.

The links I shared is just areas that concern mostly me, I am sure others have similar long lists for their area of the project, be it infra, release management and others. Don’t forget also the less technical roles, e.g. marketing, also here the todo list is possibly quite big.

We’ve been suffering in this project from bad treating of each other for quite a while, and “lost in translation” and “e-mails don’t have mimics” add something too. We need to be careful how we treat one another. People are stretched thin, exhausted, stressed, and we need to come much more back to “safe waters”.

Good advice. Many in the community think that invalidating the MC election results after the election, and after the period to contest it finished - was a totally disproportionate action that has also been shown to be arbitrary. I expect that this could create a serious legal issue for TDF if challenged - there were much simpler ways to resolve the stated concerns. Thankfully Cor is a reasonable person, a founder of the project, with a very long history of contributing positively to LibreOffice and appears not to have pursued this option.

Sadly my encouragement at the time to the board-selected MC which excludes Cor:

Seems to have been ignored - with some quite amazing non-renewals by the MC of long term contributors in good standing - apparently on the basis that they don’t like or agree with their political positions, and with no sight of due process.

As @fpy points out there is a lot of silence from the board, and more from the MC. There are still a good number of un-answered questions from the community around just this sad story, with sadly an ongoing lack of engagement on many other topics in the community that need resolution.

I would suggest that unblocking the situation is more than re-stating one’s own opinion or political position, but a genuine, deep listening, engagement with others - and the forging of wise and durable compromises by the board.

Hi Michael,

it would be great if you checked your statements before making them public as you keep trying to create narratives that have little to no connections with reality. That doesn’t help in unblocking the situation and move forward together.

If you expect that it means that once again you haven’t read the clear and extensive explanations and/or the evidence that your former contractor decided to make public.

It is then unclear to me why you started this post by re-stating opinions and political positions that do not take in consideration the well documented facts that are available also to you.

Of course and naturally starting from a common understanding of the facts.

“Compromises” are in my opinion the wrong approach when talking about legal entities that must act following laws and regulations of their respective jurisdictions.

Due to past experiences I would consider a wise approach to have clear and unambiguous written agreements vetted by the respective legal teams so that there would be less room for surprises down the line.

Clearly boards have to forge compromises inside the law, and inside the statues - I hope you are not suggesting otherwise. Surely we agree that the board does have some role in deciding something; there is often more than one path that TDF is able to take; well meaning people from different perspectives can disagree as to what that path is of course; hence (hopefully) friendly compromise.

Generally good advice, however it is worth noting that (AFAIR) you, Florian (and others?) have opposed proposed rules that would ensure that all board members (from different perspectives) have adequate access to impartial legal advice to develop their own positions in a compliant fashion.

If only the executive staff’s favored position receives a timely legal analysis, this can stop the board and hence the community that elects them from governing.

To un-block TDF and build confidence in its governance by its Trustees - I would again suggest fixing this as a priority; as well as talking and listening across the aisle.

As you well know following evidence, laws, regulations and the statutes is what I’ve always pushed, unfortunately we have well documented evidence that others did otherwise.

It is worth noting that well documented evidence shows that your memory is failing you once again.

The only well documented situation were 2 directors were totally unaware that a law firm was being consulted, as it turned out for interests other that those of TDF while being the one receiving the invoice, was mentioned in the last audit.

Is that a description of an unlikely hypothetical scenario that you wanted to drop here for no good reasons or an accusation of wrongdoing?

You make a very agreeable point but at the end of yet another post were you kept re-stating opinions that have little to no connection to the evidence you have available.

“I would again suggest fixing this as a priority” as it’s years that you carry on doing that. It doesn’t help when trying to have meaningful conversations and is helping even less in moving forward.

Re: [fr-discuss] Traduction de : Aller de l'avant : comment débloquer la situation ensemble – The Document Foundation Mailing List Archives

for the context :

  • that’s the only reaction I could see from the French “community”
  • google translate and similar services provide a decent rendering (to English I could check)
  • the metaphor “les petites fourmies” stands for the lambda laborious contributors :innocent:

Do you have a proposal how to integrate the community more and interact better? What I would like to suggest is townhall meetings for the various commiunities, open to the general public, not only to members, ideally with translators and localizers.

The picture of an “anthill” goes back even to an OpenOffice.org community presentation from 20 years ago, from what I remember :slight_smile:

sounds at this point a bit surreal. and that would be more a tiny desk than a townhall.

IMHO, to quote more precisely from the feedback of this long standing contributor : “C’est l’orga qui amène à cette situation que j’aimerais comprendre.”
It’s the organization that led to this situation that I would like to understand.

then it will be time to explain “course à l’échalote avec MS Office” :expressionless:

a bit chicken&egg.
I would say that interacting better is a priority.
and not just let to “People prefer”, to pile up pending questions all over the place.
otherwise the very sense of “community” is questionable.

hard to rely on just (human) memory.
google found : Proceedings from the Marketing Strategy Workshop – Moved by Freedom – Powered by Standards

maybe nextcloud can complete the picture.

I would like to increase the community participation, too. However, we need to start and offer something, otherwise it will stay a chicken and egg problem - no offers/meetings, little interaction, and things go in circles.

What is meant by this? How we organize things, or TDF as organization?

What would you suggest to increase the interactions, do you have anything concrete in mind?

That’s an old blog posting from 2012, many years ago, few months after the incorporation of the foundation. What in particular do you refer to? :slight_smile:

Ignoring the unhelpful mis-characterizations of the past which have no bearing on the positive suggestion to move forward:

Can I conclude that you are now in favor of a policy that ensures that all board members (from different perspectives) have adequate access to timely and impartial legal advice to develop their own positions in a compliant fashion ?

If so that would be great - I think having a policy in place of this kind would build trust, and could un-block all manner of positive plans from different board members. Also - Collabora Productivity is likely to be willing to reasonably fund (perhaps via a targeted donation) professional advice on how best to get that policy in-place.

When you ignore facts as “mis-characterizations” then you can obviously conclude whatever you want but that doesn’t help at all in having a constructive conversation.

You made an agreeable point when you stated that we need to “un-block TDF and build confidence in its governance by its Trustees” and if you avoid coming up with statements that have little to no connection with reality it would be a great step forward.

The only thing that comes to mind is a case that is mentioned in the audit and a policy to make similar cases to be OK for TDF sounds very odd as German laws anyway prevail on any policies you would want to put together.

Or you had something else in mind?

Can I conclude that you are now in favour of having companies donating to TDF for having the features they care about prioritised and implemented?

We should check with the legal team if that’s in general a viable way for TDF to invest even more in developers which can then help even more in expanding the educational mission of the foundation.

On the specifics of the policy can you share more of what you have in mind and how it can be enforced to make sure that directors won’t act in ways that are damaging for TDF anymore?

that would be some sort of agility then.

there was a nice offer here : Interested in Contributing as a Scrum Master / Project Manager

but the pt is to clarify the process to automatize or simplify the tasks.

being in your position, you have defniitely far more ways.
I’m most of the time just left wondering and waiting. like many potential contributors.

at this pt, it’s really about clear task/responsibiliy descriptions, and a joint effort to use discourse/bugzilla/redmine consistently.

definitely both. with case studies that users can understand.

Do you have statistics on that, if you claim there are many potential contributors wondering and waiting? Or is this just a guess?

That is the technical part of community work. There is, however, a likewise important part, and that is the social aspect. You can have the best tooling in the world in place, but if the social component fails, things won’t work out either.

Case studies, for LibreOffice adoption? Isn’t that a different thing now?

I think you’ll find the answer to your questions here:

Agile doesn’t work in a multi-stakeholder environment (TDF + companies + volunteers). Anyway, it’s mainly a management fad to help managers feel important and busy.