Hi Charles, dear Community, below my answers to the MC questions:
> 1. Do you commit yourself to have enough time and the necessary > technological tools in order to participate to the regularly scheduled > board calls? > Yes. > 2. Do you commit yourself to follow up and work on (at least) the main > items and actions you have volunteered to oversee or that have been > attributed to you by the board? > Yes, absolutely. > 3. What are your views on the foundation's budget? How should the money > be spent, besides our fixed costs? > The foundation has an articulated, specific mission [1]: - to eliminate the digital divide in society by giving everyone access to office productivity tools free of charge to enable them to participate as full citizens in the 21st century the ownership of office productivity tools by monopoly suppliers which imposes a de facto tax on global electronic free speech and penalises the economically disadvantaged - to support the preservation of mother tongues by encouraging all peoples to translate, document, support, and promote our office productivity tools in their mother tongue the creeping domination of computer desktops by a single language forcing people to learn a foreign language before they can express themselves electronically - to allow users of office productivity software to retain the intellectual property in the documents they create by use of open document formats and open standards the ownership of file formats by proprietary software companies – documents belong to their creators, not software vendors - to an open and transparent peer-reviewed software development process where technical excellence is valued So personally, my decision making tends to be guided by those broad ideas, with a clear preference (when given the option) to attract contribution, make working for LibreOffice or the Document Liberation Project more effective & fun, and generally have every Euro of donation money spent (into tools, mentoring people, outreach & marketing) return tens of Euro worth of enabled volunteer time. > 4. Should we work towards broadening our pool of contributors, both > technical and non-technical? > A resounding yes! > 5. Should the Foundation -as an entity distinct from the LibreOffice > project or the Document Liberation project- engage into growing its > influence and promoting and defending Free Software and Digital Freedom? > It is, after all, an integral part of its mission per its very Statutes. > If yes, do you have ideas on what should be done about this? > It is in TDF's self-interest to continue promoting and defending Free Software and Digital Freedom. The most natural way for us to do that is to keep LibreOffice successful, growing, and fun. At this stage, I think there are other organisations much better positioned to do generic FLOSS & Digital Freedom advocacy, so I don't believe we should divert focus (and resources) too far away from LibreOffice & DLP. This is not to say we shouldn't raise our voice to support those fighting for that in public, nor missing opportunities to share our vision in the political arena. > 6. How do you view your (potential) role as a member of the board of > directors, given that this position does not give you any specific > functional role inside the LibreOffice or Document Liberation projects? > In the board - I'd like to make things running smoothly in the background, for others to do their work & have fun. I have some idea what that entails. ;) > 7. What is the biggest problem of the foundation in your opinion? What > is its biggest opportunity? > I don't think TDF currently has any particularly nasty problems, which ironically might be its biggest problem - becoming too complacent, leaning back, and to stop improving would be a terrible thing. TDF's biggest opportunity is the fact that we're at the center (jointly with a few other large FLOSS foundations) of a sea change in the software industry - opensource has won & became the norm, and it's moving up the software stack, from compilers, to operating systems, to complex userspace applications. If we play this right, there's no reason why our software in the end shouldn't be as portable, and pervasively used, as e.g. the Linux kernel. [1] https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/TDF/Next_Decade_Manifesto All the best, -- Thorsten
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature
