Dear Community,
as some of you already know, I'm not "new at TDF" and at the same time I
would like to share more about me and my background.
I'm Marina Latini, an Italian living in Germany from 2018.
If I should start to describe myself a bit more I could definitely
divide my life in three big chapters, the "before OOo and TDF", the
"during OOo and TDF" and the "from 2020" time.
Before starting to contribute to OOo (and after 2010 to LibreOffice) I
was a computer science student, curious to learn every day something new
while also starting to move my first steps with the Linux side of
technology. I had also other passions and hobbies and, all those
activities and new people I met, guided me in the next phase, the one I
call the "during OOo and TDF" phase.
As it really often can happen, I started to contribute to OpenOffice as
Italian translator and in QA. Before as volunteer and later on also with
a full time job, those activities brought me to focus completely on
LibreOffice.
Those were also the days where I worked on migrations and trainings from
Microsoft Office to LibreOffice, with a particular focus on the Italian
public administrations. In those years I had the opportunity to work on
several migrations, taking care of the technical bits, the deployments,
the trainings and also the communication and marketing parts. I had the
opportunity to interact with a lot of users that started to use
LibreOffice really often for cutting costs, but also for "more noble
causes" like a real commitment to open source. ;)
You know that working on migrations to LibreOffice isn't an easy task.
There's a lot of work to do, there's the need to explain why those new
users should also "do the next step" and start to "give something back
to the Project". There's the need to always push for interoperability
and at the same time there's the not easy task to explain that
LibreOffice isn't "just an Office clone" but that we are the
heterogeneous global community that keep everything working while
introducing new improvements.
In this "during OOo and TDF" phase I had the honour to meet several of
you, I co-founded the Italian home of LibreOffice that we called
LibreItalia, and I started to look at the Project from different points
of view. In this phase I also had the honour to serve TDF as board
member for two consecutive terms.
In 2020 there's the start of what I call the "from 2020" time. After
several years where I was a LibreOffice volunteer and also a paid
contributor, I started a new chapter at SUSE.
Let me clarify that at SUSE I'm not part of a LibreOffice team, but as
"Maintenance Release Coordination Engineer" I also work on the
LibreOffice updates that the SUSE customers and the openSUSE community
will receive on those systems. The work requires to also solve
dependencies issues, build LibreOffice on really old (but still
supported systems) and also help with the backport of fixes on those
maintained systems. We are also doing bug triage and more testing and
several of those bugs are directly reported at the TDF's Bugzilla.
With the experience I made over those different phases I described, I
think I developed a good understanding of the needs of volunteers and
also paid contributors and I would like to help in supporting both the
areas and their needs always taking into account TDF's mission and
vision.
During those years I saw TDF growing and evolving, and I formed the idea
that the foundation needs to invest more in growing the Board of Trustee
and together with it also involve and grow more members into the
governance. In parallel with this I strongly believe that TDF is what it
is today thanks to the shared efforts of all its contributors, from
volunteers to paid ones. I would really stress the concept that all the
contributions are crucial and vital and that everyone who invests spare
time and/or paid work on our foundation needs to be included and
listened.
With this I also mean that TDF, and in particular the Membership
Committee, needs to reduce the gap between what I call the "local
communities" and the "international project". With the other Membership
Committee's members we recently organised some sessions with some local
communities and this disconnection between the local communities and the
Foundation is unfortunately still too prominent.
If you will decide to support my candidacy, I assure you that I'll focus
on bridging those two sides of our foundation, trying to also support
the local communities with what is needed for contributing to TDF's
projects in the most efficient way. All the contributors should have the
chance to be listened and the users that are still "only" users should
be supported and helped to make the first steps for becoming
contributors too.
Let me also clarify that I'm generically talking about users and
contributors, without any distinctions between paid or volunteer work
because, from my point of view, contributing to TDF's projects can be
done both as volunteer and as paid work and the mutual respect of all
the people involved is something we should all keep in mind.
If you have further questions, please, don't hesitate to reach out.
Full name: Marina Latini
E-mail address: marina.lat...@libreoffice.org
Corporate affiliation: SUSE
Location: I'm Italian but based in Germany
I will provide information on all future changes as soon as possible.
-- 75 words statement --
In this term I would like to focus on bridging the local communities and
the foundation, enabling more contributions from the local communities
and empowering those members that in the future could also be part of
the TDF's governance. I would also like to give more voice to the
underrepresented contributors and new potential users that found the
barriers for joining our Project too high.
----
Have a lot of fun!
Yours,
Marina
--
Marina Latini
Member of: www.documentfoundation.org
Member and founder of: www.libreitalia.org
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