Dear Community,
as some of you already know, I'm not "new at TDF" and at the same time I would like to share more about me and my background.
I'm Marina Latini, an Italian living in Germany from 2018.
If I should start to describe myself a bit more I could definitely divide my life in three big chapters, the "before OOo and TDF", the "during OOo and TDF" and the "from 2020" time.
Before starting to contribute to OOo (and after 2010 to LibreOffice) I was a computer science student, curious to learn every day something new while also starting to move my first steps with the Linux side of technology. I had also other passions and hobbies and, all those activities and new people I met, guided me in the next phase, the one I call the "during OOo and TDF" phase.
As it really often can happen, I started to contribute to OpenOffice as Italian translator and in QA. Before as volunteer and later on also with a full time job, those activities brought me to focus completely on LibreOffice.
Those were also the days where I worked on migrations and trainings from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice, with a particular focus on the Italian public administrations. In those years I had the opportunity to work on several migrations, taking care of the technical bits, the deployments, the trainings and also the communication and marketing parts. I had the opportunity to interact with a lot of users that started to use LibreOffice really often for cutting costs, but also for "more noble causes" like a real commitment to open source. 
You know that working on migrations to LibreOffice isn't an easy task. There's a lot of work to do, there's the need to explain why those new users should also "do the next step" and start to "give something back to the Project". There's the need to always push for interoperability and at the same time there's the not easy task to explain that LibreOffice isn't "just an Office clone" but that we are the heterogeneous global community that keep everything working while introducing new improvements.
In this "during OOo and TDF" phase I had the honour to meet several of you, I co-founded the Italian home of LibreOffice that we called LibreItalia, and I started to look at the Project from different points of view. In this phase I also had the honour to serve TDF as board member for two consecutive terms.
In 2020 there's the start of what I call the "from 2020" time. After several years where I was a LibreOffice volunteer and also a paid contributor, I started a new chapter at SUSE.
Let me clarify that at SUSE I'm not part of a LibreOffice team, but as "Maintenance Release Coordination Engineer" I also work on the LibreOffice updates that the SUSE customers and the openSUSE community will receive on those systems. The work requires to also solve dependencies issues, build LibreOffice on really old (but still supported systems) and also help with the backport of fixes on those maintained systems. We are also doing bug triage and more testing and several of those bugs are directly reported at the TDF's Bugzilla.
With the experience I made over those different phases I described, I think I developed a good understanding of the needs of volunteers and also paid contributors and I would like to help in supporting both the areas and their needs always taking into account TDF's mission and vision.
During those years I saw TDF growing and evolving, and I formed the idea that the foundation needs to invest more in growing the Board of Trustee and together with it also involve and grow more members into the governance. In parallel with this I strongly believe that TDF is what it is today thanks to the shared efforts of all its contributors, from volunteers to paid ones. I would really stress the concept that all the contributions are crucial and vital and that everyone who invests spare time and/or paid work on our foundation needs to be included and listened.
With this I also mean that TDF, and in particular the Membership Committee, needs to reduce the gap between what I call the "local communities" and the "international project". With the other Membership Committee's members we recently organised some sessions with some local communities and this disconnection between the local communities and the Foundation is unfortunately still too prominent.
If you will decide to support my candidacy, I assure you that I'll focus on bridging those two sides of our foundation, trying to also support the local communities with what is needed for contributing to TDF's projects in the most efficient way. All the contributors should have the chance to be listened and the users that are still "only" users should be supported and helped to make the first steps for becoming contributors too.
Let me also clarify that I'm generically talking about users and contributors, without any distinctions between paid or volunteer work because, from my point of view, contributing to TDF's projects can be done both as volunteer and as paid work and the mutual respect of all the people involved is something we should all keep in mind.
If you have further questions, please, don't hesitate to reach out.
Full name: Marina Latini
E-mail address: marina.latini@libreoffice.org
Corporate affiliation: SUSE
Location: I'm Italian but based in Germany
I will provide information on all future changes as soon as possible.
-- 75 words statement --
In this term I would like to focus on bridging the local communities and the foundation, enabling more contributions from the local communities and empowering those members that in the future could also be part of the TDF's governance. I would also like to give more voice to the underrepresented contributors and new potential users that found the barriers for joining our Project too high.
----
Have a lot of fun!
Yours,
Marina