This statement has been agreed on by all board members and deputies.
Dear fellow members,
The following communications should provide some more insights on The Document Collective (TDC) project.
Let us first address one of the question that arose during one of the last public part of the Board of Directors meeting: what is the status quo of
the project?
The Document Collective project, as it was envisioned by the previous Board and thoroughly explained by Simon Phipps in different occasions, has been
stopped mainly because of various reasons:
* The designated CEO of the UK-based CIC that should have been TDC, namely Simon Phipps, communicated that he is not available for now to startup and
lead this company.
* We are at the moment not aware of any suitable replacement within our community who could easily fill the position of Managing Director for a CIC in
the UK.
* TDC as envisioned was undergoing additional legal review, even before this, due to the concerns raised by some community members and some of the new
Board of Directors members, for example to build a independent entity with TDC, to be contracted by TDF, and granting it an exclusive, but revocable
at the will of TDF, app store license.
As such, the TDC project as originally envisioned previously will likely not happen in the future.
Nonetheless, the challenges that the project was conveyed to deal with are now even more significant and the Board is very well aware of them. We are
most notably referring to the issue of maintaining an OS in-store app offering (on macOS and Microsoft Windows platforms) and of getting fixes/code
done with donations.
A part of those challenges will get some sort of different attention from the Board of Directors, as it again committed to streamline the tendering
process both with intentions, strong will and financial planning (tender streamlining has been the most voted item on the last run of rankings for the
2020 budget).
Finally, with TDF being a charitable entity, its core mission is not software development, nor bug fixing; as such, it has been an issue spending
donations’ money these ways.
The Board is determined to have an actionable answer to these challenges as soon as possible; we are reviewing the advices we recently received from
Mike Schinagl (who’s supporting us since our inception) on the options, some of which you provided yourselves with your questions during the last
months. We are now putting on it our efforts at a very high priority and with the following in mind:
1 - TDF addressing these challenges directly;
2 - or creating a TDF owned/controlled company;
3 - a completely separate entity with a TM agreement.
After getting the fundamental questions sorted out and possibly having some guidelines in place, at least to reduce the amount of choices that can be
made, the Board of Directors will design a new proposal to be formally presented to the community through the tdf-internal mailing list; this proposal
will be bound to comments and discussions from the community, so it will hopefully receive amendments and possibly other legal reviews if needed. The
Board of Directors will then finally vote the redefined proposal, so it can take form and come to life.
Until this new proposal is formally presented, though, I think everyone of us can agree that a public discussion should be avoided, because it would
be really confusing, chaotic, difficult to manage and, in the end, inconclusive and ineffectual.
So in the end we are asking for your patience while we are working on the task, as it is pretty hard to deal with, time-wise and energy-wise.
Particularly regarding being in line with our bylaws a lot of details and aspects have to be thought through and discussed.
As soon as a new proposal is taking form, it will be our privilege and duty to involve again anyone of you to get reviews and constructive suggestions
on it.
On behalf of the Board of Directors,
Lothar (Chairman)