As one of its tasks, the current board is looking into decisions and meeting minutes taken in the past that were not yet published according to our statutes. What follows are previously private minutes from the 2024-09-02 meeting of the current board, which are now made public. Some elements in the minutes might be redacted as there is a need for confidentiality, or as individuals are mentioned in specific contexts.
Disclaimer: The following private minutes from the current board are published as is. They have not necessarily been confirmed by the respective session’s chairperson or keeper of the minutes, nor approved by the board. Some of these minutes, or parts of these, might have been previously made available to the trustees already.
The Document Foundation
Board of Directors Meeting 2024-09-02
Call Notes
Date: Monday, September 2, 2024
Location: Jitsi
Session chair: Eliane Domingos de Sousa
Notes for the minutes: Stephan Ficht, Florian Effenberger
In the call:
- Board - László Németh, Osvaldo Gervasi, Eliane Domingos, Sophie Gautier, Italo Vignoli, Simon Phipps, Paolo Vecchi
- Board deputies - Mike Saunders,
- Membership committee - Shinji Enoki, Gabriele Ponzo
- Membership committee substitutes -
- Team - Stephan Ficht, Florian Effenberger, Michael Weghorn, Ilmari Lauhakangas,
- Community - Andreas Mantke, Régis Perdeau, jucasaca/Juan Sanchez
Representation: None
The Board of Directors at the time of the call consists of 7 seat holders without deputies. In order to be quorate, the call needs to have 1/2 of the Board of Directors members, which gives 4. A total of 7 Board of Directors members are attending the call.
The board waives all formal statutory requirements, or requirements in the foundations articles, or other requirements regarding form and invitation, time limits, and for the topics discussed in this meeting.
The call is quorate. From now on, motions can be passed with the agreement of a simple majority of those remaining present. The majority threshold is currently 7.
The meeting commences at 16:05 UTC (18:05 Berlin time).
Public section
1. Questions and answers from the community (all, 10 minutes)
- Any questions? (Eliane)
2. Status update from the board (Eliane, 10 minutes)
- Paolo now full BoD member, Eike resigned due to personal reasons
- meeting Munich
- BoD minutes publishes
- revoked decision of TDC and of Emiliano’s demotion
- we have approved a budget and the annual report
- Sophie is working on the procurement policy and will give an update later
- we sponsor the OFE EU Open Source Policy Summit 2025, we support the FSFE movie and we signed the Open Regulatory Compliance working group participation agreement
3. Planning of regular community sessions (Sophie, 10 minutes)
- zero feedback, working again on this after LibOCon (Sophei)
4. Status update LibOCon (Paolo, 10 minutes)
- all going pretty well (Paolo)
- some issues wrt speakers
- working on get video streaming, etc.
- answers expected within the next few days
- maybe spend some money needed
- evaluation options for lunch
- same for dinner
- no comments (Italo)
5. Update on procurement policy and tenders (Sophie, 10 minutes)
- have contacted [REDACTED: name of lawyer or law firm], being now available to work on (Sophie)
- discuss among bod members when finalized
- hopefully will come next years
6. Status update from the project, the ecosystem and the team (Florian, 10 minutes)
-
we had a joint meeting in Munich and talked about several items (Florian)
-
we will have a joint meeting also in Luxemburg
-
the German annual report is out, translated by the team; the English one is published bit by bit in the blog
- Mike sent version (Italo)
- some adjustements for final version within this week
- apologize for being late
-
Stéphane unfortunately took another job opportunity, information on how/when we retender the role not clear yet
- no decision taken now to retender, is on to do
-
we had three townhall/Q+A sessions for the MC elections
- elections starts tomorrow running for one week
- tokens have been already sent
-
Asian Conf in Taipei (Italo
- present: Italo, Svante, Lothar
- interesting exchanges, nice session
- LO track was part of coscup (users, ‘FOSDEM’ of Asia)
- talk to Haris to understand in a better way how they integrate young people
- their view of LO very interesting, maybe based on diff. generation and culture also
- sunday: session about LO and inkscape
- monday: interesting talk w people from ministry of innovation
- suggested to be part of technical discussions for ODF
- lab sessions showing use of LO software, esp. Calc
-
[Shinji comments in chat: In Taiwan, there is a thriving community called g0v, which is a movement to create government IT systems by open source, and [REDACTED: name of community member] is one of its leaders.]
-
try to invite with experience ODF (Paolo)
- already invited, but shy to speak in English outside Taiwan (Italo)
- maybe find a way to do the presentation for them!? (Paolo)
- [REDACTED: name of community member] would have accepted, but some reshuffle now
- [REDACTED: name of community member] has been very dynamic in pushing ODF but she unfortunately is currently out of the scene, not being reachable at the moment
-
Latin-American event in Urugay at the end of the year
-
MC elections will start tomorrow, please all check for your tokens if you are member
-
the Asia LibreOffice Conference took place
Public meeting ends 1630 UTC (1830 Berlin time).
Trustee/members-only section
Nothing for this meeting.
Board and MC only section
[REDACTED: HR topic]
Imari leaves at 16:39 UTC / !8:39 (Berlin)
- revoke vote by the last board wrt to decision of MC (Sophie)
- the sooner the better (Paolo)
- will send vote tomorrow (Sophie)
- Budget and related topics, audit (Florian, 15 minutes)
-
documents are beeing prepared based on budget (Florian)
- see Florian’s email
- contract w/ auditor has been signed
- collect all bits and pieces now
- requirements from auditor to report directly to auditor upon request
- contracts therefore w/ banks and lawyers
-
[REDACTED: two lines of sensitive legal statements]
-
auditor needs full access to team for any information needed
- one bod member reach out to [REDACTED: name of lawyer or law firm] to get this done
-
happy to do (Paolo)
-
risk of CoI (Simon)
-
does it make sense to abstain on this for Bod members being also part of team
-
potentially CoI (Italo)
-
most of work on my end (Florian)
- let’s see what happens
-
declaration of completness (Florian)
- big discussion last year
- brain storm now to avoid ‘last minute’ issues
-
is that an official form? (Simon)
- include concerns
-
section C is a big issue (Paolo)
- was a problem last year, would not sign this year
-
narrow down to relevant items (Florian)
- Sophie brought alreasy up the [REDACTED] thing
-
[REDACTED] too (Paolo)
- among other problematic elements
-
suggest to collect these items (Florian)
- not being aware of all things
- the reach out to auditor within next weeks
-
auditor will get batch of documents soon (Florian)
-
ponder about when and how inform the members (Florian)
- brainstorm how to communicate
- deadline end of Nov
- [REDACTED: sensitive statement]
- Ten motions regarding trademarks and tenders (Italo, 45 minutes)
-
financing book allowing devs from outside understand LO source code and its specifities (Italo)
- idea from Michael Meeks
- information scattered, hire a technical writer to put bits and pieces together
- book is a suggestion but not mandatory to be a book
- reduce steep lerning curve
- most information mostly only with two ecosystem members
- not everybody able to bid for lack of competencies
- when starting LO several companies available but then concentration of ecosystem or w other words a concentration of devs in only a very few ecosystem
- find a solution
- happy of all motions to be rewritten but aimed to find a solution
-
good idea and really needed (Sophie)
- perhaps note in big sentence ‘not for beginners’ but for ‘confirmed devs’
-
brilliant idea regardless of the form (book, or other doc) (Paolo)
- should be a adaptably doc
-
need of a project manager for this (Italo)
- not me to be the right person here
-
just for coordinating things (Paolo)
- try to have initially a table of contents
-
lot of information available (Laszlo)
- Gabor collected all inforamtion at NISZ
- ask Gabor to update
- sooner or later all will be in the source code
- ask list from Gabor of programmers and collect
- need two books
-
if interesting let’s start with pointers to collect items and ask arounf for this kind of information (Italo)
- and then, after ~10 days, have a first draft
-
other motion is about limiting terms (Italo)
- encourage more people to take responsibilities
-
good to have more people interested (Florian)
- risk of everybody changing at the same time
-
support term limits on BoD and MC (Simon)
-
remaining other motions to address out issues (Italo)
- would like all of us agree to write them in a way to get to solutions
- don’t think that a solution that hadn’t worked in the past will suddenly work now or in the future
- reach a point to get solved most of the issues
- not worth to discuss about a diff. amount of 2k €
-
we had solutions (Paolo)
- now wondering about such strong comments
- bundle all together
- [REDACTED: legal statement]
- not hide the truth
-
[REDACTED: legal statement] (Simon)
-
regard line 22 of motion #1
-
support very much Italo’s motion #1
-
don’t forget that there is a overall issue, see e.g. motion #3
- issues wrt declaration of completness
-
appreciate you approach (Sophie)
- appreciate to have our lawyers opinion on that
-
you, Paolo, are repeating the same things for 48 months (Italo)
- even easy issues to be solved have not been solved
- smart manager adapt no brainers to make solution feasable
-
repeating things is based on evidence (Paolo)
- story of misbehaviour of former bod members
- what has been done was seriously wrong
-
you insist in your wrong approach (Italo)
-
the solution is there (Paolo)
-
agreement on a solution would be a first step (Florian)
- thanks to Italo for the initiative to split the issues
- [REDACTED: legal statement]
- focus on how to proceed and on a solution
-
should we call a vote? (Simon)
-
can send last iteration of motion by email
- sanitize names of companys in motion #1
- keep first two paragraps and…
- can send updated motion #1 immediately
+1 Eliane, Simon, Italo, Osvaldo, Paolo, Laszlo, Sophie
-
need lawyers to have a look on it (Osvaldo)
MOTION Solve past issues by splitting them into reasonable and manageable tasks
I spent an entire weekend and part of a week studying all the documents we inherited from previous BoDs. I had already read them, and the re-reading served me to develop an approach to propose to the BoD with the aim of finding a solution within a reasonable timeframe.
To summarise all the documents in the extreme, we are faced with an almost inextricable series of problems that overlap and intertwine, to the point that I think it is impossible to deal with them all at once without unnecessarily complicating our lives.
We must then proceed with the elaboration of a procurement policy that is able to reactivate the tendering process, effectively and definitively (for reasons of project history, the one being elaborated is not sufficient for all cases).
Returning to the theme of this motion, I ask for approval of the approach whereby we will tackle problems - even if they are often related - one by one, and not as a whole, in order to simplify their solution through a more focused and less dispersed discussion.
+1: Eliane, Simon, Italo, Sophie, Osvaldo, Paolo, Laszlo
=> unanimous approval
- proposing a motion about payment of sponsorship 15 days ahead of event, otherwise sponsorship is void (Italo)
Board and MC only meeting ends 18:01 UTC (20:01 Berlin time).