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

I think the message Paolo refers to is this one:

Check the edit history by clicking on the pen. More truly worrying events happened, this is probably the most prominent one.

Hi @dlareg,

there are quite a few examples.

Florian pointed to one of the messages where the then chairperson unilaterally decided to edit one of my messages removing 2 paragraphs as I reported here:

Then several posts have been deleted including the following 2:

So my post, as well as the one from Andreas asking why my post disappeared, have been deleted:

The rationale for deleting my post was incorrect as no legal advice from our legal counsel was asked or received.

Other messages and even votes have been deleted or censored sometimes with incorrect motivations other times with no motivation at all by the same 2 individuals.

Happy to provide more examples if needed.

It was majority opinion at the time, to move the more heated topics - and in particular the topics about internal legal questions - to the internal trustees list. See a very long list of posts and discussions leading up to this point: for example trustees asking for effective moderation, reminder that we have community guidelines, people just donā€™t want to listen, and request to move topic to tdf-internal.

As such, I donā€™t see how asking people to tone down their attacks, plus moving delicate topics to a trustee-internal list, can possibly constitute ā€˜censorshipā€™. For the excerpts posted here, there was more than a year of repeated reminders, and time for everyone to adapt habits.

It would be interesting to see evidence of ā€˜deleted votesā€™ though - that was alleged before in this thread. Iā€™m rather certain that didnā€™t happen.

Hi Thorsten,

As you rejected it and Iā€™ve been removed the right to post on board discuss or to moderate my own messages at the time, it might be censoring more than deletion but the end result is the same.

Following that also my attempt to publish the decision failed as the 2 individuals moderating board messages left there message there pending:

I guess that the community would have started thinking why the RoP was changed and working groups eliminated despite legal advice against doing so to then immediately after appoint 2 other person, 1 in CoI on the matter, to conduct a self-review.

The vote included some opinions and advice from some members of the legal team but no privileged information or nothing that wouldnā€™t have been seen as common sense by most.

Hereā€™s the vote in full:
Dear all,

Rationale:

the 06/04/2023 Thorsten Behrens published ā€œ[DECISION] Rules of procedure changeā€ on our public forum:

Concerns expressed by Emiliano and myself in private and Gustavo, Marina, Andreas, Emiliano and myself in public were, again, ignored.

The 09/05/2023, the Board received a legal statement in relation to the evaluation of these Rules of Procedure changes.

The lawyer confirmed that while procedurally the board has the power to make changes to the RoP and the changes proposed are not contrary to Statutory principles, they raise major concerns:

(all quotes are from the legal statement)

  • The Board did not seek legal advice before voting on the Rules of Procedure changes and my request to do this was ignored. The lawyer confirmed that ignoring this request is surprising and seeking legal advice from TDFā€˜s legal counsel is not just common practice but actually advised.
  • Conflicts of Interest have not been factored in and once again we received recommendation to have an explicit mention to avoid CoI also in subcommittees and choose the members accordingly.
  • The only vote proposed immediately after changing the Rules of Procedure shows that previous recommendation to avoid CoIs have not been taken in consideration. That vote that was taken is ā€œto form a special committee to oversee the performance of the member of the staff who is tasked with contracts and tendersā€. The lawyer further states ā€œWhat I mostly see troubling is that a member of the Board who has been found in a state of CoI for more than one month has been charged with co-preparing the review of the member of the staff who has the task to run the procurementā€.
  • The lawyer reminded us again that staff must be free from pressure and shielded from potential interferences and ā€œthis includes first and foremost members who are also affiliates with successful biddersā€. This is a major concern for Emiliano and myself as we are aware that attempts to interfere and pressure haves been already exerted by members of the board affiliated with bidders in the past through the appraisal process in which they had a majority control.
  • The lawyer confirmed once again that a non profit organisation dealing almost exclusively with affiliates of board members is a ā€œquite unusual situationā€ and ā€œthis is a considerably strong understatementā€.
  • The lawyer concludes his statement as follows:
    ā€œThe only way I see this line of decision can be considered neutral is that the committees impacting the matter I am trying to fix are kept as they were prior the change in the RoP. In other words, considering the turning point at which we are, a standstill principle should be adopted on anything that could impact the procurement rules. I strongly advise to revert the decisions following the same principle, at least for the time being and as far as practical.ā€

Vote:

This matter directly concerns procurement and other processes so it is to be considered urgent.

Emiliano and myself are therefore calling for a VOTE to:

  1. revoke the ā€œ[DECISION] Rules of procedure changeā€: [DECISION] Rules of procedure change
  2. revert the Rules of Procedure to the version prior of that change: Board of Directors Rules of Procedure - The Document Foundation Wiki
  3. remove former board members Kendy and Caolan from the internal delegation of responsibilites in Section 3, as already requested by Membership Committee back in December 2022

Having applied point 3. on the restored Section 3 of the Rules of Procedure would read as such:

Section 3. Internal delegation of responsibilities - Internally, the board has decided on the following split of responsibilities:

  • Employees & hiring: Thorsten, Paolo, Emiliano
  • infrastructure & community: Emiliano
  • QA & community - Gabor, Gabriel
  • documentation & community: Gabor, Ayhan
  • native language projects, translation, localisation & community: Laszlo, Gabor, Ayhan
  • certifications and other business development activities: Cor, Laszlo
  • licenses and development & releases including schedules & community: Gabriel
  • affiliations, e.g. advisory board, peer foundations, politics: Paolo
  • marketing, events, communication & design, brands & community: Emiliano, Cor, Laszlo
  • assets, finance, taxes: Thorsten, Paolo
  • contracts, legal compliance, GDPR, trademarks: Thorsten, Paolo

The vote runs for 72h.

In a subsequent discussion, that should be put on the next board call agenda, we need to discuss the removal of board members in CoI from specific areas of oversight (Employees & hiring - infrastructure & community - assets, finance, taxes - contracts, legal compliance, GDPR, trademarks) and allow board members to join areas of oversight, in which they have no CoIs, where their skills and experience allows them to bring value to TDF by completing the current assignments.

I remind to all board members that it is their duty to participate in votes, that include those in conflict which should explicitly state their abstention.

Iā€™m sure that many, after having read other statements and audit results, would understand that it was necessary to inform the community about processes and decisions that were in need of more scrutiny but that right has been denied to a member of the board.

1 Like

Hi @PaoloVecchi ,

It is good to have that established - thanks for admitting that indeed no votes were ever deleted.

Beyond that, the factual basis of your above statement again appears to be rather weak:

  • youā€™ve never been removed the right to post on board-discuss. There was a temporary limit on your account, for posting new topics (the details and rationale for that was outlined at length, at the time)
  • your vote was cast on the internal board list, and therefore not censored, either
  • no other area (neither on Discourse, nor on the remaining TDF infrastructure, such as mailing lists) was limited
  • you could have posted new topics even on board-discuss, after review by any other board member

It is rather curious to read the outrage here, over what appears to be a minor inconvenience - compared to the fact that other former directors have been outright banned from internal communication channels, apparently while their actions and votes were being debated at length, judgements were passed & further actions against them contemplated. So we couldnā€™t even passively watch, let alone share our point of view (or set the record straight).

It is rather curious to read the outrage here, over what appears to be a minor inconvenience

I am sorry, but I do not second that this is a ā€œminor inconvenienceā€. As a community member I do not agree what has happened and I am sure many other share this sentiment. Many things escalated in the past, what I memorize quickly is this:

  • There was a board meeting when, for a controversial proposal, ā€œthen over the weeks all BoD members apart fromā€ two board members ā€œhave been contactedā€, as confirmed by a former board member
  • The back-then person warned the board about ā€œwillfully and actively excluding just one single legally elected director without any whatsoever valid reason for this exclusionā€
  • We have reports from several community members (I count at least six) about intimidating private e-mails
  • We have reports by a former board member that ā€œa board member claimed all 7 members voted for agreeing on the vote he proposed, by his own interpretation of the TDF rules, while only 3 of the members votedā€
  • Also quite interesting is a board call where in public some board members complained one board member ā€œfailed to establish a business relation withā€ two ecosystem companies and that ā€œthe board should look into this issue firstā€

The most obvious example is the silent editing of a board memberā€™s message to board-discuss. From what I remember, that happened without informing either the board member, nor board-discuss. What the affected board member reported on this is that ā€œsome members of the board voted to delete my voteā€ but then ā€œthe deputy chairperson [ā€¦] was not informed and involved in the voteā€. Should that be true, that raises an additional eyebrow.

All this is very grave. It is NOT just a ā€œminor inconvenienceā€. For the sake of a healthy, happy and prosperous community, it shall never happen again.

1 Like

At the time you stated to the board: ā€œProblematic post is removed, and Iā€™ve temporarily changed the board-discuss settings to require new topics to be approved.ā€

I had no way to know otherwise as my rights to check what happened to the post were removed so for me and anyone else out there the vote I sent out has been deleted as you stated.

Only 3 weeks later I discovered that you rejected it and that you mislead the board stating that it has been removed. The end result is exactly the same and the vote that I published as it was confirms the intent of censoring a director and to mislead the community by hiding the real reasons for that vote.

I reported the censoring action here:
https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/2023/msg00004.html

and here I replied to Cor which was trying to justify the censoring action:

https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/2023/msg00006.html

It turns out that the rationale did not have any link with reality and it has been used other times to delete other messages that were inconvenient to some.

Internal communications channels are reserved for current members of the board of trustees so it is normal that non members cannot post messages there.

Unlike what you did as chairperson, this board is not censoring, rejecting or deleting your messages in this forum.

Former directorsā€™ point of view, actions and votes are on written records, have been taken in consideration by auditors and in evaluating the suitability of membership renewal for the former directors.

You are free to post your opinions here but it would be great if you started validating your statements with the evidence you might still have before posting them.