Questions for the candidates to the board of directors of the Document Foundation

Board Discuss
#1

Dear candidates to the board of directors of the Document Foundation,

I would first like to thank you for running as candidates for the board of directors. At this time, not every candidate has declared his or her candidacy. However, I would like to ask a few questions about your views and intentions regarding the Document Foundation and your plans as potential directors of the entity. I hope they will be helpful in englightening our membership and hopefully, all of you will be able to answer them.

1. Do you commit yourself to have enough time and the necessary technological tools in order to participate to the regularly scheduled board calls?

2. Do you commit yourself to follow up and work on (at least) the main items and actions you have volunteered to oversee or that have been attributed to you by the board?

3. What are your views on the foundation's budget? How should the money be spent, besides our fixed costs?

4. Should we work towards broadening our pool of contributors, both technical and non-technical?

5. Should the Foundation -as an entity distinct from the LibreOffice project or the Document Liberation project- engage into growing its influence and promoting and defending Free Software and Digital Freedom? It is, after all, an integral part of its mission per its very Statutes. If yes, do you have ideas on what should be done about this?

6. How do you view your (potential) role as a member of the board of directors, given that this position does not give you any specific functional role inside the LibreOffice or Document Liberation projects?

7. What is the biggest problem of the foundation in your opinion? What is its biggest opportunity?

Thank you for your answers,

Charles-H. Schulz.

#2

Dear future or existing candidates to the board of directors,

I just wanted to remind you that:
1) the nomination deadline is approaching fast
2) don't forget to answer my questions below -two candidates have declared
their candidacy but have not replied so far.

Thanks,

Charles.

Charles-H. Schulz <charles.schulz@documentfoundation.org> @ 2015-11-02 17:38 CET:

#3

Dear Members,

I would like to stand for elections to the Board of Directors of The
Document Foundation.

I am Jan Holešovský, 38 years old, married, father of two girls, living
in the Czech Republic. Many people know me under my nickname "Kendy".
I work for Collabora as Engineering Manager.

In the LibreOffice community, I currently serve in the Membership
Committee. Regarding my contributions, I am a developer with deep love
of the user interface - hacking it, improving it, measuring it. I am
active in the Design team, organize the calls there, and take & send
minutes to the appropriate mailing lists. I represent the Design team
in the Engineering Steering Committee.

An important part of my involvement in LibreOffice is mentoring and
onboarding of new community members. Every year I am a mentor of a
student or two via the Google Summer of Code. I am also actively trying
to lower the barriers to entry for non-developers, either in the Design
team, or recently in the Documentation team too.

Should I be elected into the Board of Directors, I will resign from
the Membership committee. Also, I recuse myself from overseeing the
elections due to conflict of interest.

That's it about me - if you need to know more, please do ask!

Full name: Jan Holešovský
Email: kendy@collabora.com
Corporate affiliation: Collabora

75 words candidacy statement:

"As a long-time contributor to LibreOffice, I would like to serve in the
Board to help making decisions that support doers in their work, and
that lead to having more people involved in the project. I can offer my
experience from cross-team work: I am primarily a developer, but very
active in the Design team, and recently interested in the work of the
Documentation team too. I am deeply committed to LibreOffice and its
success."

To answer Charles' questions:

Charles-H. Schulz píše v Po 02. 11. 2015 v 17:38 +0100:

1. Do you commit yourself to have enough time and the necessary
technological tools in order to participate to the regularly scheduled
board calls?

Yes.

2. Do you commit yourself to follow up and work on (at least) the main
items and actions you have volunteered to oversee or that have been
attributed to you by the board?

Yes.

3. What are your views on the foundation's budget? How should the money
be spent, besides our fixed costs?

to support people doing (fun) stuff; ie. on top of the tools that are
necessary for the day-to-day operation, it has to offer & improve tools
that lead to more people being involved. I think it is wise to spend
money on lowering the barriers: Like eg. developing infrastructure for
easier editing of help files, and similar.

4. Should we work towards broadening our pool of contributors, both
technical and non-technical?

Definitely.

5. Should the Foundation -as an entity distinct from the LibreOffice
project or the Document Liberation project- engage into growing its
influence and promoting and defending Free Software and Digital Freedom?
It is, after all, an integral part of its mission per its very Statutes.
If yes, do you have ideas on what should be done about this?

As LibreOffice and Document Liberation projects grow, The Document
Foundation itself has to grow too of course. Having said that, the
focus on _documents_ and their relation to Software and Digital Freedom
has to stay; we have it in the name, and there is no need to become a
general Free Software foundation - there already is one :slight_smile:

6. How do you view your (potential) role as a member of the board of
directors, given that this position does not give you any specific
functional role inside the LibreOffice or Document Liberation projects?

I suspect it will mean more of the invisible or "boring" work, like
attending more meetings, writing minutes, finding consensus between two
(or more) competing ideas, and similar. But that is something I am used
to, and willing to do; after all, I am prepared to _serve_ in the board.

7. What is the biggest problem of the foundation in your opinion? What
is its biggest opportunity?

I don't think we have any particularly big problem at the moment from
the foundation point of view. We just must not forget that we are still
at the beginning of the journey - there is still so much to do for the
LibreOffice growth.

All the best,
Kendy

#4

I see Charles asked some questions. Here are my responses (in-line).

#5

Here are my responses to the 7 questions:

1. Do you commit yourself to have enough time and the necessary technological tools in order to participate to the regularly scheduled board calls?

Yes, I’m used to have international meetings on a regular basis. In particular I have managed the International Conference on Computational Science and Its Applications (http://www.iccsa.org) since 2004, and participated to International/European Initiatives (EGEE/EGI European Grid, COST Actions). I reserved the necessary time for attending the calls and participating to the mailing lists activities.

  1. Do you commit yourself to follow up and work on (at least) the main items and actions you have volunteered to oversee or that have been attributed to you by the board?

Yes. I am strongly committed on honouring the duties the board will assign, if elected. In my life, in several occasions I have carried out hard tasks as a volunteer and I have sacrificed for a project simply because I believed in its core values and its usefulness to the community. LibreOffice is the most important project in my life.

  1. What are your views on the foundation’s budget? How should the money be spent, besides our fixed costs?

I think the money have to be spent:

  1. To pay the professional developers who are working full time or part time for the project.

  2. To launch and finance projects which will strengthen LibreOffice and make it even more competitive and attractive.

  3. To reward the active members on their activities related to TDF (LibO Conf, International meetings and events, etc)

  4. To support people and local communities running events that will increase the LibreOffice visibility among users.

  5. To coordinate the users’ activities and the local communities, which are contributing significantly to the LibreOffice growth, thanks to the coordination and the facilitation of the migration process they are carrying on.

  6. Should we work towards broadening our pool of contributors, both technical and non-technical?

Yes, definitely. A broader community, made by people active in the various roles: development, Q&A and User support, localization, migration, is fundamental in order to facilitate the LibreOffice success among the users. In particular, being employee of a University, I want to contribute making LibreOffice more and more popular among students, teachers, employees. I want to increase the project popularity also for the employees of all Public Administrations.
As President of the Open Source Competence Center of the Umbria Region from 2007 to 2013, I coordinated several actions in favour of the Open Source in general and of LibreOffice in particular, inspiring the LibreUmbria Project. This project is still a headlight for the Italian Community and for Italian Public Administrations. I co-founded LibreItalia and launched several training courses on LibreOffice in primary and secondary schools, signing several agreements with schools and with the Italian Ministry of Education. I’m also involved in the supporting activities for the Italian Army migration (150.000 PCs to migrate) and the supporting documentation developed by LibreUmbria and LibreItalia is still the base on which to build the new documentation necessary for a so important migration (second in Europe, largest in Italy).

  1. Should the Foundation -as an entity distinct from the LibreOffice project or the Document Liberation project- engage into growing its influence and promoting and defending Free Software and Digital Freedom? It is, after all, an integral part of its mission per its very Statutes. If yes, do you have ideas on what should be done about this?

Yes, I think TDF has a strong vocation to be the headlight at the worldwide level in favour of Free Software and Digital Freedom, being the most important and fascinating success story of the last six years and for its intrinsic strength, in cooperation with Free Software Foundation and other organizations sharing the same aim.

I think the success story of the British Government and its commitment in favour of Open Formats and Open Data has to be considered as reference for similar actions to be carry on worldwide.

  1. How do you view your (potential) role as a member of the board of directors, given that this position does not give you any specific functional role inside the LibreOffice or Document Liberation projects?

As member of the Board of Directors, if elected, I will be in charged, representing the community, to take the right decisions, contributing with new ideas. I think that the community may growth and LibreOffice may evolve and become always a better software suite, if the Board is able to harmonize the various souls and tendencies and take the right and prompt decisions.

  1. What is the biggest problem of the foundation in your opinion? What is its biggest opportunity?

I think the biggest problem of the foundation is the financing scheme, since even if till now the users have supported the foundation almost on a regular basis, such income is not certain. However I think that, if TDF will assume the proper actions, such funds will continue to be available and even to increase.

The biggest TDF opportunity is inherent in its own history and in the successful development of LibreOffice. What TDF has done since the origins has to be consolidated and increased. TDF has in my vision the tremendously important opportunity to transform the productivity of companies, public administrations and end users, guaranteeing the wide adoption of Open Formats and Open Data.

#6

Hi Charles, dear Community,

below my answers to the MC questions:

1. Do you commit yourself to have enough time and the necessary
technological tools in order to participate to the regularly scheduled
board calls?

Yes.

2. Do you commit yourself to follow up and work on (at least) the main
items and actions you have volunteered to oversee or that have been
attributed to you by the board?

Yes, absolutely.

3. What are your views on the foundation's budget? How should the money
be spent, besides our fixed costs?

The foundation has an articulated, specific mission [1]:

- to eliminate the digital divide in society by giving everyone access
  to office productivity tools free of charge to enable them to
  participate as full citizens in the 21st century the ownership of
  office productivity tools by monopoly suppliers which imposes a de
  facto tax on global electronic free speech and penalises the
  economically disadvantaged

- to support the preservation of mother tongues by encouraging all
  peoples to translate, document, support, and promote our office
  productivity tools in their mother tongue the creeping domination of
  computer desktops by a single language forcing people to learn a
  foreign language before they can express themselves electronically

- to allow users of office productivity software to retain the
  intellectual property in the documents they create by use of open
  document formats and open standards the ownership of file formats by
  proprietary software companies – documents belong to their creators,
  not software vendors

- to an open and transparent peer-reviewed software development
  process where technical excellence is valued

So personally, my decision making tends to be guided by those broad
ideas, with a clear preference (when given the option) to attract
contribution, make working for LibreOffice or the Document Liberation
Project more effective & fun, and generally have every Euro of
donation money spent (into tools, mentoring people, outreach &
marketing) return tens of Euro worth of enabled volunteer time.

4. Should we work towards broadening our pool of contributors, both
technical and non-technical?

A resounding yes!

5. Should the Foundation -as an entity distinct from the LibreOffice
project or the Document Liberation project- engage into growing its
influence and promoting and defending Free Software and Digital Freedom?
It is, after all, an integral part of its mission per its very Statutes.
If yes, do you have ideas on what should be done about this?

It is in TDF's self-interest to continue promoting and defending Free
Software and Digital Freedom. The most natural way for us to do that
is to keep LibreOffice successful, growing, and fun.

At this stage, I think there are other organisations much better
positioned to do generic FLOSS & Digital Freedom advocacy, so I don't
believe we should divert focus (and resources) too far away from
LibreOffice & DLP. This is not to say we shouldn't raise our voice to
support those fighting for that in public, nor missing opportunities
to share our vision in the political arena.

6. How do you view your (potential) role as a member of the board of
directors, given that this position does not give you any specific
functional role inside the LibreOffice or Document Liberation projects?

In the board - I'd like to make things running smoothly in the
background, for others to do their work & have fun. I have some idea
what that entails. :wink:

7. What is the biggest problem of the foundation in your opinion? What
is its biggest opportunity?

I don't think TDF currently has any particularly nasty problems, which
ironically might be its biggest problem - becoming too complacent,
leaning back, and to stop improving would be a terrible thing.

TDF's biggest opportunity is the fact that we're at the center
(jointly with a few other large FLOSS foundations) of a sea change in
the software industry - opensource has won & became the norm, and it's
moving up the software stack, from compilers, to operating systems, to
complex userspace applications. If we play this right, there's no
reason why our software in the end shouldn't be as portable, and
pervasively used, as e.g. the Linux kernel.

[1] https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/TDF/Next_Decade_Manifesto

All the best,

-- Thorsten

#7

Hi,

To answer Charles' questions:

1. Do you commit yourself to have enough time and the necessary
technological tools in order to participate to the regularly scheduled board
calls?

Yes.

2. Do you commit yourself to follow up and work on (at least) the main items
and actions you have volunteered to oversee or that have been attributed to
you by the board?

Yes.

3. What are your views on the foundation's budget? How should the money be
spent, besides our fixed costs?

* infrastructure TDF provides to run website, wiki, repository, gerrit
  and other services (including people to improve and keep it running);
  well, these are fixed costs..
* marketing to spread the word and encourage use of and migrations to
  LibreOffice and attract contributors
* employ people for core duty tasks, i.e. administration, mentoring leads
* regional events (hackfests, small conferences) for community building
  and attracting new contributors
* decide on grant requests (TDF introduced a process this year)
* assign budget to specific areas to be developed (tenders, ...)
* sponsor LibreOffice conference attendees' travel costs

4. Should we work towards broadening our pool of contributors, both
technical and non-technical?

Yes, of course.

5. Should the Foundation -as an entity distinct from the LibreOffice project
or the Document Liberation project- engage into growing its influence and
promoting and defending Free Software and Digital Freedom? It is, after all,
an integral part of its mission per its very Statutes. If yes, do you have
ideas on what should be done about this?

Yes and No. TDF should grow presence and influence and have agreements
or friendship with organizations who are active in these fields, and of
course by providing a home for collaboration for those who contribute to
the software TDF projects develop. This includes promotion of Free
Software and Digital Freedom in general, but I don't see TDF in
a position to defend these freedoms by getting actively involved into
politics or legal affairs. There are other organizations that are much
more effective on these grounds.

6. How do you view your (potential) role as a member of the board of
directors, given that this position does not give you any specific
functional role inside the LibreOffice or Document Liberation projects?

I do have a functional role in LibreOffice anyway :wink:
The role of the members of the board of directors is to oversee the
foundation and its projects and drive things into a direction that makes
projects attractive and help them grow.

7. What is the biggest problem of the foundation in your opinion? What is
its biggest opportunity?

I actually couldn't name "the biggest problem". One challenge is to
wisely spend the money donated to TDF with a perspective on the future
of two years to have a stable ground on which TDF can operate. One
opportunity in my opinion is to develop and strengthen the position of
TDF and Free Software and LibreOffice in countries where we are not much
present yet.

  Eike

#8

Hello,

I would like to thank the candidates who already took the time to answer my questions and the candidates who will soon reply :slight_smile: . I hope their answers will help our members get a better idea on the opinions and the vision of each candidate to the board!

Best,

Charles.

#9

Dear candidates to the board of directors of the Document Foundation,

1. Do you commit yourself to have enough time and the necessary
technological tools in order to participate to the regularly scheduled board
calls?

I have made the time in the past five years for the ESC, for the
Membership Committee, for which I wrote the 'technological tools', and
for the BoD.

2. Do you commit yourself to follow up and work on (at least) the main items
and actions you have volunteered to oversee or that have been attributed to
you by the board?

Yes, by 'volunteering' to do a task, by definition I commit myself to
doing it... No I do not commit myself to be designated volunteer and
be 'attributed' task without my consent. In practice I have a very
good attendance record, and I tend to deliver what I promise and try
not to over-promise.

3. What are your views on the foundation's budget? How should the money be
spent, besides our fixed costs?

There is no reason to exclude our 'fixed' cost of the analysis.
In fact, rampant increase of fixed/recurring cost is a concern to me,
as such can make it painful to adjust our expense level to a
fluctuating income stream.
as for how the money should be spent: as I said in my earlier statement:

+ Favor spending directed directly to support the community of
volunteer to have the tools needed to work, to be able to communicate
and interact with each other.
+ Favor project driven by volunteer committed to bring them to
fruition. In other work, helping those that are helping themselves

In other words: if you need resource to support your volunteer
efforts, you'll find a sympathetic hear.
If you just want money to be thrown at a problem, but are not willing
to actually do anything about it yourself... then I'm much, much more
reluctant.

4. Should we work towards broadening our pool of contributors, both
technical and non-technical?

Why the artificial divide ? and why the focus on this particular axe.
Of course the more _contributors_ the better. There are plenty of
activities that can benefit from even more contributors, all of them
are 'technical' in their own right, from Documentation to Coding, from
QA to l10n, from Infra to RelEng, each of these activities and plenty
others, need skills and hard work, each require the mastery of some
techniques.

In any case it is misunderstanding the role and power of the board, to
reduce the growing of the community to the Board's will.

5. Should the Foundation -as an entity distinct from the LibreOffice project
or the Document Liberation project- engage into growing its influence and
promoting and defending Free Software and Digital Freedom? It is, after all,
an integral part of its mission per its very Statutes.

It is a bit troubling when you answer your own questions.

Of course what the statues actually say is:
"spreading the philosophical and cultural ideals of FLOSS"

I certainly agree with that.

6. How do you view your (potential) role as a member of the board of
directors, given that this position does not give you any specific
functional role inside the LibreOffice or Document Liberation projects?

I view my role in the BoD as a steward. My goal is to make sure that
the 10's of thousand of 10 euros donations entrusted to us by
individuals all over the world are spent wisely and fairly -- within
the legal constraints imposed on the foundation -- on things that
support the community that make these projects exists and thrive.
The board is not a group of exalted visionaries. The board is an
administrative body whose function is to insure and orderly
functioning of the Foundation itself -- work which mostly consist in
administrative trivia.
The foundation's purpose is to provide a home to the community of
volunteers.. the volunteers are the one that bring visions and
direction by they collective work.
The BoD is not a 'leader' it is a 'Shepard'

7. What is the biggest problem of the foundation in your opinion? What is
its biggest opportunity?

Both boils down to the same topic.
On one hand the foundation benefit from a wide support by the public,
providing it with substantial financial support, on the other hand,
as a foundation we have some difficulties to 'execute'. We are a
volunteer and meritocratic organization. that means, to me, that we,
as a board, should support the volunteer that show up to work, and
discourage the make-a-whish attitude.

Norbert

#10

Hi All,

Dear candidates to the board of directors of the Document Foundation,

I would first like to thank you for running as candidates for the board
of directors. At this time, not every candidate has declared his or her
candidacy. However, I would like to ask a few questions about your views
and intentions regarding the Document Foundation and your plans as
potential directors of the entity. I hope they will be helpful in
englightening our membership and hopefully, all of you will be able to
answer them.

1. Do you commit yourself to have enough time and the necessary
technological tools in order to participate to the regularly scheduled
board calls?

Yes. In all transparency members should know that I very likely will not
be at LiboCon 2016 due to work obligations. Looking at my record this
term (minutes) you can see that I was very consistent with attending
meetings and was always an active participant.

2. Do you commit yourself to follow up and work on (at least) the main
items and actions you have volunteered to oversee or that have been
attributed to you by the board?

Yes

3. What are your views on the foundation's budget? How should the money
be spent, besides our fixed costs?

Our budget should be used to assist the "doers" of the project. This
means investing in the tools, travel, and other things needed by those
who want to contribute to LibreOffice. I believe in our new grant
program where individuals can request funds and hope that it will gain
wider recognition over the next term. Finally, I believe that paying for
team mentors is a wise use of funds in some cases, although I much
prefer volunteers being given as much responsibility as they are
able/willing to take on.

4. Should we work towards broadening our pool of contributors, both
technical and non-technical?

Yes.

5. Should the Foundation -as an entity distinct from the LibreOffice
project or the Document Liberation project- engage into growing its
influence and promoting and defending Free Software and Digital Freedom?
It is, after all, an integral part of its mission per its very Statutes.
If yes, do you have ideas on what should be done about this?

Yes. As others have said, I agree that the most important thing we can
do is continue to put out a great product that uses open standards and
is built on open principles. I think that there is room to continue
improving our place in public entities and that this will be
tremendously advantageous for Free Software and Digital Freedom.
Furthermore, I think that the Document Liberation Project fits well
within our mission and answers this question as well.

Outside of our project I think that others are in a much better position
(and have much more specific statutes/missions) to defend FSDF. If those
organizations reach out to us to support a particular stance, I'm more
than happy to review and give a +1 where appropriate. I believe that
generally our donors donate money to be used on maintaining our core
software and the communities surrounding that software.

6. How do you view your (potential) role as a member of the board of
directors, given that this position does not give you any specific
functional role inside the LibreOffice or Document Liberation projects?

My primary job on the board (and what makes the Board distinct from any
other position, whether volunteer or paid) is to oversee that our funds
are used in a responsible manner. For me this goes back to a principle
previously said, to remove barriers for the "doers" to do and to provide
tools for those same people to do the incredible work that they
accomplish daily. Finally, this also means that we are responsible for
balancing a lot of demands on our budget.

Outside of this primary job, I currently, and anticipate it would be a
similar situation if elected again, oversee several teams within the
project. Overseeing does not mean dictating, or even actively getting
involved (although I am very involved with QA still to this day), it
means instead, making sure that the teams have what they need to succeed.

7. What is the biggest problem of the foundation in your opinion? What
is its biggest opportunity?

I wouldn't call it a problem but I'd say that the largest challenge has
been explaining some decisions to the wider community. I believe this is
entirely normal for any organization as Boards are responsible for
making some important decisions (sometimes based on difficult choices)
and we can't just say yes to everything.

The way to resolve this is to encourage more people to join
board-discuss and actively ask questions, to join the public board call
(no one does which makes me sad as it's really a great time to interact
with the Board and ask questions) and lastly, to blog a bit more after
decisions are made.

Best,
Joel

#11

Hi

De: "Charles-H. Schulz" <charles.schulz@documentfoundation.org>
I would like to thank the candidates who already took the time to answer

+1

I hope their answers will help our members get a better idea

Certainly, in my case and I expected answers with great interest.

So I would also like to thank Charles-H for his initiative.

Best regards
Pierre-Yves

#12

(...).

1. Do you commit yourself to have enough time and the necessary
technological tools in order to participate to the regularly scheduled
board calls?

Yes. I already did that in the last nearly four years. I asked my
employer for some days of vacation to attend all in-person meetings
(including informal ones).
And I have no issue to use the tools provided by the TDF infra team.

2. Do you commit yourself to follow up and work on (at least) the main
items and actions you have volunteered to oversee or that have been
attributed to you by the board?

I did that already within the current board.

3. What are your views on the foundation's budget? How should the
money be spent, besides our fixed costs?

The project TDF and LibreOffice needs a good technilogical
infrastructure. We invest already in this area and had to go further in
this way. This means not only invest in hardware and the use of free
software but also in growing up the infra structure team that drive this
area (e.g. organize frequent infra meetings/hackfests).
Beside this we need to invest more resources in building local (and
global) communities with technical and non-technical members. We need to
make more local meetings and especially also such with attending devs
and non-technical members.
We should focus more on educating people about our free office suite and
the importance of free standards, especially the default use of ODF.
Thus we need to spend more resources and money on traveling of
especially local people to events, schools, universities and other
opportunities to get our messages across.
TDF will support the growth of the ecosystem and will point of the
opportunity of business entities to contract developers for implementing
features, fixing bugs etc.

4. Should we work towards broadening our pool of contributors, both
technical and non-technical?

We already have a vital community of developers and we just contracted a
mentor for (especially new) contributors to the LibreOffice development.
But I think it's important to focus in the same way onto the more
non-technical part. We need to invest more in helping and growing up our
local communities, e.g. support more local community meetings, local
marketing (roadshows, events etc.) (and joint meetings of technical and
non-technical contributors).

5. Should the Foundation -as an entity distinct from the LibreOffice
project or the Document Liberation project- engage into growing its
influence and promoting and defending Free Software and Digital
Freedom? It is, after all, an integral part of its mission per its
very Statutes. If yes, do you have ideas on what should be done about
this?

It's part of the mission and I'm promoting free software and open
standards as often as possible, e.g. I attended meetings about open data
for this reason and talked there about the use of ODF as standard.

6. How do you view your (potential) role as a member of the board of
directors, given that this position does not give you any specific
functional role inside the LibreOffice or Document Liberation projects?

The members of the board are responsible for running the entity
according to the regulations. Aside this they are only member of the
community with their area of contribution. Their opinions etc. - like
those of other community member too - may have some bigger influence in
the discussion process because of their experience and knowledge. But
that has nothing to do with sitting on the board.

7. What is the biggest problem of the foundation in your opinion? What
is its biggest opportunity?

I would not speak about the biggest problem, but it is always an issue
of organisations and it's the field of our biggest opportunity at the
same time:

Organisations as well as groups tend to have their own language and
struggle always with openess, transparency and the culture of welcome.
TDF has done a good job in this field already with making decision,
income and spendings as transparent as possible. We need to go further
in this direction. This is not an easy task, but it is worth to put some
effort into this, especially to strengthen TDF's widely recognized
organisational culture. This will help us to attract more (also
non-technical) contributors and to get supported by other institutions.

Kind regards,
Andreas

#13

Can you be more specific with what you mean by "necessary technological
tools"?

By way of example, one organization that has been trying to recruit me
for years, uses software that is only available for Windows 7, for their
board meetings. (Software that doesn't run under WINE.)

jonathon

#14

1. Do you commit yourself to have enough time and the necessary
technological tools in order to participate to the regularly schedule

d

board calls?

Can you be more specific with what you mean by "necessary technologica

l

tools"?

By way of example, one organization that has been trying to recruit me
for years, uses software that is only available for Windows 7, for the

ir

board meetings. (Software that doesn't run under WINE.)

We use phone and Google Hangouts for our meetings - some people don't
use Google products so they just call in to the conference line with a
phone which is perfectly fine. Then computer access is usually required
to see live minutes (not OS specific). We currently use Google Docs for
a few things due to the live collaboration/viewing but hopefully will be
able to move to LibreOffice Online at some point next year.

That's the technology that comes to my mind that would be required to
actively participate in board calls.

Best,
Joel

- --
Joel Madero, Member of the Board of Directors
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