The Document Foundation - Board of Directors Meeting 2025-09-22 - Call Minutes

The Document Foundation - Board of Directors Meeting 2025-09-22 - Call Minutes

Date: Monday, September 22, 2025

Location: Jitsi

Session chair: Eliane Domingos de Sousa
Notes for the minutes: Mike Saunders, Stephan Ficht (joined 18:41 Berlin time), Florian Effenberger

In the call:

  • Board - Simon, Eliane, Mike, Sophie, Osvaldo, Paolo, László
  • Board deputies - none
  • Membership committee - Andreas
  • Membership committee substitutes - none
  • Team - Florian, Stephan
  • Community - Michael Meeks, Régis Perdreau, Pierre (fpy), Jeff F.T (after 18:34 Berlin time)

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 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 4.

The meeting commenced at 16:05 UTC / 18:05 Berlin time

Public section

  • Community Q&A: 10 minutes

    • No questions
  • Follow-up on LibreOffice 25.8 downloads

    • similar to previous major releases - a little lower (Mike)
      • most users will move to LO 25.8.3 when the auto-updater suggests it
  • Follow-up on LibreOffice 25.8 bug reports

    • one saving glitch that hit after release, but fixed in 25.8.1 quickly (Mike)
  • Conference retrospective and 2026 plannings

    • thanks to everyone involved (Eliane)
      • important to recognise it’s organised by volunteers
      • in previous conferences, criticism expressed aggressively. not acceptable
      • if TDF contracted a company, criticism would be accepted
      • thanks to Paolo and Gabor for organising the conferences
      • need a working group to look at future of the conference
      • conference feels like talking to ourselves about ourselves
      • conference should be more open to home users, govts etc.
    • share what Eliane says - big amount of work (Florian)
      • organising committee getting smaller and smaller each year
      • identify some things that didn’t go so well this year
      • we used to ask for five people, but post-COVID hard to do
      • significant amount of overhead
      • video recording - need deadlines before the event, to know the local setup
      • surprised by some things TDF had to pay on-site without warning
    • share the message (Paolo)
      • in Lux I had to create the whole infrastructure and supplies from zero, with short notice
      • shared budgeting spreadsheet with the team, showing costs and sponsors
      • got criticism for trying to get more sponsors to make the conference for TDF effectively free
      • needs proper guidance, so nothing is left by chance - and have plan Bs
      • LO conferences organised in their own bubbles don’t achieve anything
      • need to increase our visibility
    • two different things being confused here (Simon)
      • LO conference was for LO community to meet once a year, for personal relationships. That need still exists
      • separate need for outreach to the user community, who aren’t fundamentally involved in creating LO
      • need two conferences for the different needs
    • that’s why I want a workgroup (Eliane)
      • in Budapest I saw an event only for the community
      • maybe we should have two events: one for the community, and another to promote
      • when I see the name “LO Conference”, I see something big, many people participating, developers, companies
      • we need an event for the community, a connection, wonderful when you have it
      • but think about two events
    • combining the two events over a week or three days is pretty easy (Paolo)
      • would be difficult to mix on one day, but over three it’s easier
      • having other potential actors there allows to optimise costs
      • can mix without losing the opportunity for the community to meet
    • “greatest enemy of success is premature optimisation” (Simon)
      • find the needs and then optimise
      • assuming we can do an event for the whole world, marketing LO and building relationships, is what we’re doing at the moment and it’s not working very well
      • need to have an internal conference, with a member summit, presentations from localisers, social event for people in TDF to build relationships
      • may be better to do outreach at other conferences, like the OSS Conf in Luxembourg
      • we should have a TDF summit once a year, and then LO conferences around the world throughout the year
    • we have several confs around the world (Sophie)
      • like Latam, Asia, Nepal - already several covering other parts of the world
      • appears that the LO Conf is the European conf, so maybe rename it like that
      • difficulty to have a conference with the whole world community
    • another thing to keep in mind (Florian)
      • can be expensive for community members, and they need vacation time
      • if we had two conferences, not sure if people could attend both
      • many countries have less vacation
      • not sure what other communities are doing, but think they have usually one event
    • Plone community has a conference only once a year (Andreas)
      • Plone community itself is not big but they have a big conference and do it in different countries
      • hackfests - way to get knowledge from people working on the product
      • best to have one conference and make it open to the world
    • we have a Telegram group for the conference (Eliane)
      • one discussion there is about having an online conference for one year
  • Developer hiring

    • thank everyone running that (Florian)
      • Ilmari, Xisco, Jonathan, Hossein and probably others
    • many interviews in progress (Hossein)
      • had one just a few minutes ago
      • ongoing until all the promising candidates are interviewed
  • First thoughts on budget 2026

    • nothing concrete (Florian)
      • but should start to brainstorm, start gathering ideas, asking the community to ask what they would like to have funded
      • ideally something preliminary by the end of the year
      • have something ready by the new Board around FOSDEM
  • Forgot to mention: Latam conference will be in Cuba, early Oct (Eliane)

Public section ended ar 14:36 UTC / 18:36 Berlin time

Trustee/members-only section

  • Nothing for this meeting

Board- and Membership Committee-only section

  • Re: dev hiring, request from team to have BoD members in the next meetings (Sophie)

    • [REDACTED: 9 lines of confidential HR/hiring discussion]
  • Advisory Board composition

    • [REDACTED: 76 lines of non-concluded discussion about our advisory board composition, to be finalized and communicated to the advisory board first]
  • Audit status

    • Deferred to when Florian is available
  • Status of legal situation

    • both items skipped as Florian left at 19:09

Next BoD meeting

  • agreed on Monday October 20

The meeting ended at 17:30 UTC / 19:30 Berlin time.

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

Comments:

  • We note that trustees are kept at arms’ length of the hiring process, a failure noted in the past as well but continuing now, in the tradition of secrecy and community exclusion. This is of particular significance considering it is now practicable for employees to be on the BoD.

  • A mark of a functioning BoD is the presentation to the trustees with a draft budget; the engagement in a public discussion about priorities and alternatives in the budget; and the conclusion of an agreed annual budget before the fiscal year begins. This, as opposed to barely any discussion on decisions on hundreds of thousands of EUR per year, for many years - such as hiring a new 4-person development team.

  • We note that the discssion of our advisory board and its composition is censored in its entirety. This is another example of matters of consequence not disclosed to the trustees, without the requisite formal designation of the matter as confidential, without presenting any cause, nor designating a period of embargo, nor naming a criterion for the embargo ending - in breach of our statutes (§8.c.3).

  • Speaking of the advisory board: I have been a trustee for 3 years. I do not remember hearing from AB members or the AB itself; and I do not recall receiving minutes or adopted statements from AB sessions.

  • If we barely invite anybody but ourselves, then - who would show up other than us? I don’t know what the promotion and publicity work for this year’s conference was like, but judging from our presence in the venue, it was held almost “in secret” - very difficult to notice, very easy to miss.

Who is „we“ in „we note“? I see the mail signed by you, not anyone else.

On the hiring process, do you have any example of any community where the level of disclosure you seek for is fulfilled? HR and hiring are quite sensitive topics, and I would imagine no candidate will ever apply if we tell them thet „your application, your assessment and your acceptance or rejection, including salary requests, will be shared with 170 trustees workdwide“. If you have any concrete example who does as you ask, happy to have a look.

Regarding the budget: What you describe is what happened earlier this year with this year‘s budget, on this very forum. It is safe to assume we would handle it the same way for 2026, with the goal of having the budget much sooner. Of course, if you keep me and others busy with many other requests, having a late budget is more likely to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. So, maybe „we“ can decide what is important to us.

Where in article 8 paragraph 3 section c did you (or „we“) see the advisory board mentioned? You do receive the slides from the meetings, nontheless.

If the Board does not want to waste time responding, there is an easy option: do as public administrations do, administrative silence.

And once again, it would be appreciated if people who hold more than one position at TDF would indicate with what role they write, at the bottom of their message.

Miguel Angel (TDF Member)

1 Like

I am not sure if we ever met and talked in person, Miguel. You seem to be unhappy with certain things. I wonder, are you open to a phone call or a video conference? I‘d like to hear what concerns you, maybe some things can be easily resolved. Let me know what you think.

Having such a hiring process would be a double standard for us as privacy is a big selling point of LibreOffice. We can’t market LibreOffice as respecting privacy and then have our job interview process be a giant violation of privacy.

Absolutely. In particular as it seems that several e-mails I sent to the members only, have been illegally forwarded to external third parties, despite me repeatedly asking to not do so. If something constitutes a breach of trustee’s duties and a violation of the statutes, it is that. It might also qualify as a offense in some jurisdictions.

I don’t want to imagine such thing happening with job applications.

I would love to see a real global conference. At the moment, I’m in favor to simply rename the conference.

Are there already interest parties to host the conference in 2026? Why is there no “call for location” blog post already out? The later the blog post is sent out, the later it can be decided when and where it will happen!

What is a “global” conference, how is it different from our current event? (Honest question.)

There were quite serious complaints about both last year’s conference as well as this year’s. (Eliane’s and my opinion on that you can see above in the minutes.)

Given that, it does not seem to be sensible to just send another call for locations. We should first understand what the community wants (e.g. you mentioned a “global” conference) and how our conference should like like. Otherwise we have a call for locations for the sake of having one, but then again unhappiness after the event.

Does that seem sensible to you?