The Document Foundation - Board of Directors Meeting 2025-08-11

The Document Foundation - Board of Directors Meeting 2025-08-11
Date: Monday, August 11, 2025
Location: Jitsi

Session chair: Eliane Domingos de Sousa
Notes for the minutes: Stephan Ficht, Florian Effenberger

In the call:

  • Board - Sophie, Eliane, Paolo, Laszlo, Osvaldo. (Simon could not join and sent apologies)
  • Board deputies - none
  • Membership committee - Andreas
  • Membership committee substitutes -
  • Team - Florian, Stephan, Jonathan, Hossein, Ilmari, Cloph, Xisco
  • Community - Kristof

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 5 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 3.

The meeting commenced at 16:06 UTC / 18:06 Berlin time

Public section

  • Community Q&A: 10 minutes

    • why are not all members of the board participating in the latest votes? (Andreas)
      • I am puzzled as this is a director’s duty to partipate
    • I repeat my answer from the last board meeting (Laszlo)
      • had some severe issues
      • checked today the votes
      • a lot of the topics for the face-to-face meeting
      • was a shock for me to see only a few participants from the developers in the Budapest LibreOffice Conference
      • apologies for my private issues
      • looking forward to the face-to-face meeting
      • hopefully can then help more on development
    • is there any board meeting face-to-face? (Paolo)
      • perhaps I missed an announcement
    • no, not scheduled yet (Sophie, Florian)
    • if not perhaps other opportunities then to meet/talk (Laszlo)
      • any membership, MC meeting scheduled at the conference?
    • no MC meeting scheduled yet (Andreas)
    • perhaps no plan for an agenda (Laszlo)
    • a lot of issues going on related to general TDF situation (Andreas)
  • Follow-up on hiring developers

    • thanks to Ilmari driving/handling this topic (Florian)
    • others also working on that (Ilmari)
      • got currently around 17 applications
      • gives us a nice situation
      • Jonathan and then also Hossein working on that
    • many thanks to Ilmari (Eliane)
      • happy to see so many applications
  • Follow-up to the release of LibreOffice 25.8

    • some last-minute issues (cloph)
      • but release will be on time
    • people testing the release? (Eliane)
    • yes, but all to normal as we are still in RC mode (Cloph)
      • hopefully most of them fixed before shipping to users
      • back to “The Document Foundation” tagline
    • work on theming continues (eg Sahil) as there were some complaints in the past (Ilmari)
    • next release planned for next week (Xisco)
      • upcoming: RC4
  • Modernization of LibreOffice websites

    • website need a visual update (Eliane)
    • blocking on some issues (Ilmari)
      • Cloph working on this too
      • some last-minute proposals publishing the website
    • last discussions back in Munich, so already quite a while back (Eliane)
  • Follow-up on the LibreOffice Conference 2025

    • schedule mostly finished (Sophie)
      • template to be finished in a few days
      • Around 50 participants registered
    • not so many (Eliane)
    • wondering about the low number (Paolo)
      • improve marketing/promotion around?
    • perhaps, among others, three days are a bit loo long (Sophie)
    • change in comparison to last year (Paolo)
    • no sponsoring this year (Sophie)
      • only one sponsoring proposed
      • avoiding to get the impression of a one sponsor conference
    • need to leave our bubble (Florian)
    • delivering technical dev talks to the conference (Jonathan)
      • myself contributing to a joined talk with Eyal
      • have to go the way to focus on tech talks
    • time-consuming to have a lot of tech talks (Paolo)
      • perhaps perception could be that LibreOffice is too technical
      • more talks about community, LibreOffice, wishful
      • seek to increase audience
    • would be nice to have some training during the conference (Eliane)
      • eg in Brazil we offer trainings satisfying a big interest in this
    • eg migration to LibreOffice (Paolo)
      • who currently is training the trainers?
      • I am trying to propose trainings in LUX
    • an important topic to think about for the next conference (Eliane)
      • have trainings besides the talks
    • what’s the plan regarding CRA? (Paolo)
      • perhaps discuss this by email to follow up
      • Cloph, Xisco, Guilhem in the call (Florian)
        • let us know what is needed to move forward here
      • had training sessions in Budapest and in Luxembourg (Xisco)
        • training or a session? (Eliane)
        • there were workshops, e.g. from Hossein (Xisco)
      • try to offer more here (Eliane)
      • hopefully we can organize sth like this for the next here (Hossein)
      • propose some brainstorming after Budapest (Eliane)
    • perhaps Budapest conference suffers from the general issues at hand at TDF (Osvaldo)
    • had a controversial discussion for last years conference in Luxembourg (Florian)
      • people voted for Budapest
      • in the future would be helpful to choose properly the venue in the light of general/political issues (Osvaldo)
      • not helpful promoting LibreOffice for ourselves but for those who do not know much about LibreOffice (Eliane)

Public section ended at 16:52 UTC / 18:52 Berlin time

Trustee/members-only section

  • Nothing for this meeting

Board- and Membership Committee-only section

  • [REDACTED: 105 lines of legal discussion]

The meeting ended at 19:40 UTC / 17:40 Berlin time.

Eliane Domingos de Sousa (Session chair)
Mike Saunders (Keeper of the minutes)

  • What does “CRA” stand for?

RC = Release Candidate
LUX = Luxbembourg

  • Missing the decision regarding the embargoing of the legal discussion, and the indication of when it will expire, i.e. when it is to be disclosed.

Google gives three initial results for this search term:
Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), Clinical Research Associate, Charles River Associates
From there, it’s easy to guess which one applies. The Cyber Resilience Act.

As per our statutes, § 8 III c, “once the need for confidentiality has been resolved”. A timeline cannot be given, as this an ogoing topic that has no concrete deadline. We hope it will be soon, indeed.