[VOTE] Approve procurement policy and development agreement, revoke previous technical budgeting procedure

[nemeth]

P.S. The list of mistakes discovered by the public review which seems to be unacceptable also for the initial version, but they seem easy to fix:

– Missing deadline for the next version (2025-12-31?);

– Missing deadline for publishing the details of Ranking by the Community evaluation, which not covered by the previous deadline (“Details for this ranking will be published in a separate procedure or a next update of this Technical Budgeting Procedure.”);

– Bad or non-explained terms or actors: “compensate FhG for all damages” without definition of “FhG”;

– Missing parts: “attached Exhibit B” is not attached;

– Redefinition of “affiliate” with a different meaning in the same policy;

Fixing these e.g. next week, I can support the initial version to test the viability of the improved policy as soon as possible.

Otherwise I strongly agree with the other opinions: it’s worth to spend a few weeks to consider and avoid the risk that a development agreement imposing unachievable requirements on small and individual developers, or every previous successful bidder, will deprive the ESC, our oldest and most professional body to help to remove the biggest barriers to future development, also it will deprive our whole community to achieve anything by the upcoming Ranking by the Community process. (By the way, I’ve checked Linux version of WPS Office a few weeks ago, and yes, it has got a wonderful SmartArt replacement, WPSArt – otherwise it’s not a real competitor of LibreOffice yet, because of lack of language support – Hunspell is used only for en_US and en_CH spell checking, there is no hyphenation [like in Google Docs and online version of Office 365] etc.)

Best regards,
László

[floeff]

The Board of Directors at the time of voting consists of 7 seat holders (not including deputies). In order to be quorate, the vote needs to have 1/2 or more of the Board of Directors members, which gives 4.

A total of 6 Board of Directors members have participated in the vote.

The vote is quorate.

A quorum could be reached with a simple majority of 4 votes.

Result of vote:
6 approvals: Paolo, Italo, Eliane, Osvaldo, Sophie, Simon; deputy Mike supports the motion as well
0 abstain
0 disapprovals (Laszlo’s disapproval was sent shortly after the voting period ended.)

Decision: The proposal has been accepted.

[floeff]

Should there be some minor glitches in the document, I am sure the board will address them in an updated version soon.

I think it’s important to have the principles on the policy agreed and shared in public. A previous board voted for tenders worth a huge amount of money at a pace that we would have had one tender approximately every one and a half weeks. This is not a rate that TDF can sensibly handle, especially in light of the discussions during the hiring of inhouse developers and areas they should keep out of.

The ESC budgeting process failed for various reasons last year. Therefore it’s important to have proper processes and roles in place ahead of the budget to not repeat these mistakes. TDF must be in a position to verify deliverables on all it tenders, and people in the various roles must be prepared.

I second Italo’s thoughts. There is a reason why we need a sound and solid procurement policy in place, and it obviously lies in what happened during past board terms.

The discussion around the word “affiliate” is quite interesting - if the changes are rather trivial, why insist so much on having them?

[nemeth]

Hi Florian,

Can you check that you sent a mail on 2024-11-11 15:38, containing “The vote runs 72h from now.”, please? This was the only notification about the vote, what I noticed, and I had no reason to doubt that the voting started earlier than the e-mail claimed, and then I voted within 72 hours.

Thanks,
László

[andreasma]

Hi Laszlo,

I checked the facts within mails from the board-discuss list/forum. The mail from Florian got the time stamp Nov., 11, 15.38. Your vote mail got the time stamp Nov., 14, 15.47.

i’m not a mathematician by education but from my job-related knowledge it is obvious that the deadline ended on Nov., 14 at 15.38.
Thus your vote didn’t meet the deadline.

Regards,
Andreas

[italovignoli]

Although Laszlo email was late, it contains a few remarks which are worth considering. The same applies to other messages in the thread. Apart from the “affiliate” definition, which I do not think could be changed without incurring in legal issues, there are indeed some glitches in the text that should be corrected as soon as possible with a version 1.1.

[nemeth]

Hi Andreas, hi all,

Thanks for checking! I was noticed by the e-mail, but I voted on the web page at Nov. 14. 3:37 PM, before the deadline. You can check the time stamp by clicking on the small gray time on the right top corner of my vote here:

[VOTE] Approve procurement policy and development agreement, revoke previous technical budgeting procedure

Hi Florian, hi all, -1 I suggest to fix the most unacceptable mistakes, i.e. if 1.4 “Developer shall compensate FhG for all damages that result directly or indirectly from the termination of the agreement” FhG means Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, this version is not better, than the previous one. Thanks for your review! Best regards, László

Best regards,
László

[floeff]

Discourse does not send the e-mails in realtime, but in regular intervals, from what I remember.
If you look at the time of the posting (indeed, the small gray time on the right top corner of the message), I see:

• my vote posting: “11. Nov. um 15:28”
• your -1 reply: “14. Nov. um 15:37”

So that -1 arrived a few minutes after the voting deadline.

[floeff]

For the avoidance of doubt, here are the screenshots, where I marked the time code in red:

and