The Document Foundation Board of Directors Meeting 2024-09-02 - Call Minutes

Date: Monday, September 2, 2024
Location: Jitsi

Session chair: Eliane Domingos de Sousa
Keeper of the minutes: Stephan Ficht (unanimously accepted by all participants)

In the call:

Members of the Board: László Németh, Osvaldo Gervasi, Eliane Domingos (Chairperson), Sophie Gautier, Italo Vignoli, Simon Phipps (Deputy Chairperson), Paolo Vecchi

Deputy Members of the Board: Mike Saunders

Membership Committee: Gabriele Ponzo, Shinji Enoki (Deputy member)

Team: Stephan Ficht (Administrative Assistant), Florian Effenberger (Executive Director), Michael Weghorn, Ilmari Lauhakangas

Community members: Andreas Mantke, Régis Perdeau, 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 attended 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 was quorate. Motions could be passed with the agreement of a simple majority of those remaining present. The majority threshold is currently 7.

The meeting commenced at 16:05 UTC (18:05 Berlin time).

PUBLIC SECTION

  1. Questions and answers from the community

There were no questions.

  1. Status update from the board

Eliane updated the community that Paolo Vecchi is now a full member of TDF’s Board of Directors, and Eike Rathke had resigned for personal reasons. She also talked about: the Board and team meeting in Munich; publishing of previous Board minutes; revoking Board decisions about TDC and the demotion of Emiliano Vavassori from Deputy Chairperson in the previous Board; and the budget and TDF’s Annual Report. She added that TDF is sponsoring the OFE EU Open Source Policy Summit 2025, along with supporting the FSFE movie and we signing the Open Regulatory Compliance working group participation agreement.

  1. Planning of regular community sessions (Sophie, 10 minutes)

Sophie said there had been zero feedback about this so far, and she will work on it again after the LibreOffice Conference.

  1. Status update on the LibreOffice Conference 2024

Paolo said that all was going pretty well, aside with some issues regarding the speakers. He said he was working on a video streaming solution, and evaluating options for lunch. Italo said he had no comments to add.

  1. Update on procurement policy and tenders

Sophie said she contacted Carlo Piana, who is now available to work on it again. She added the the policy will be discussed among Board members when it is finalised.

  1. Status update from the project, the ecosystem and the team

Florian described the joint team and Board meeting in Munich, and said that a similar meeting is planned at the conference in Luxembourg. He mentioned that the German version of TDF’s Annual Report 2024 is available, while most English sections have been published on the TDF Blog, and Italo is working on a PDF of the designed version.

Florian also said that Stéphane Guillou, TDF’s QA Analyst, had taken another job opportunity, and that when to retender the role is not yet clear. Florian also pointed to the “town hall” live Q+A sessions for candidates in TDF’s Membership Committee elections.

Italo reported on the Asian LibreOffice Conference in Taipei, including interesting exchanges, nice sessions, and talking to Ahmad Haris about bringing young people into the LibreOffice project, with their different generations and cultures. Italo also talked about sessions at the conference including Inkscape, people from the Ministry of Innovation, and technical discussions about ODF. Shinji added that in Taiwan, there is a thriving community called g0v, which is a movement to create government IT systems by open source, and Audrey is one of its leaders.

Public meeting ended 1630 UTC (1830 Berlin time).

TRUSTEE/MEMBERS-ONLY SECTION

Nothing for this meeting.

BOARD AND MC-ONLY SECTION

As there were no agenda items in the Trustees/Members-Only section, the meeting progressed to a closed session also attended by the Membership Committee as observers. The closed session was due to the most urgent matters discussed being of a sensitive commercial/legal nature.

The meeting ended at 18:01 UTC (20:01 Berlin time).