Dear Community, Members of the TDF, and Membership Committee, I currently serve as a director on the board of The Document Foundation, and I would like to run again.
My full name is Thorsten Behrens, as of today I'm 43 years old, and a father of three boys. Together with my wonderful wife & fellow LibreOffice hacker Bubli, we live in Hamburg, Germany. My work with the project and codebase started in 2001 as a developer (with the former OpenOffice.org community), which we then jointly took and founded TDF & LibreOffice with in 2010. Since then, I was serving in various roles, including my current one in the board of directors. Since 2008 (with a brief hiatus in 2014), I'm also a member of the OASIS ODF technical committee. As a day job, I lead a great team of LibreOffice developers at CIB software, helping numerous customers to run LibreOffice reliably and securely. Why am I running? * TDF is now a mature organization - with a certain risk of plateauing in its initiative and impact. I'd like to help professionalize the core operations further: towards more impact, a broader fundraising base, and more intense partnering with other, similarly-motivated NGOs. What I want is to have TDF stay for the long run; which also includes adapting to changes in the software landscape like cloud and app stores. * Product versus project - while the world outside looks at us and mostly sees the product 'LibreOffice' - the reason most of us are here is because of the project. Because we like to work on our specific areas, be that translation, marketing, QA, UX, development or all the other sub-projects TDF is running. We should get the word out that using software produced by a community provides unique values, and make sure we provide effortless entries into the community experience for every user out there. * Diversity - while our user base is amazingly diverse, and so is our community around translation, marketing, and native language projects - our QA and development community is rather uniform, in a number of metrics (gender, ethnicity, geography). That's a bit sad, and I'd like to try if we cannot gain many more contributions by encouraging under-represented people in those areas. * I want to keep TDF a friendly & welcoming place - by improving on e.g. the Code of Conduct, encouraging friendly debate, and bridging the occasional cultural gap or language barrier. After all, for most of us here while writing in English, this is only our 2nd or 3rd language. TDF also has a strong culture of operating by consensus, that I helped to shape, and would like to keep continue encouraging. * Integrity - another topic I'm rather passionate about is preventing unfair advantages: the board has a conflict of interest policy that excludes directors from decision-making on items they might benefit from; TDF now also has an established process to award contracts via an open tendering, allowing everyone to apply. I'd like to offer my continued help, going after the above. If you have any questions, about my person or the ideas above, please do reach out in public or in private! Full name: Thorsten Behrens Email: t...@libreoffice.org Corporate affiliation: CIB software GmbH (German software & consulting company, member of the advisory board since 2015) 75 words candidacy statement: I'm leading a team of LibreOffice developers at CIB, and am a long-time TDF contributor to both code and organisation. Serving in the current board as a director, I would like to offer my continued help for the next two years. Things I promise to do: improve & professionalize organisation; grow & diversify contribution; keep things fun, fair & sustainable; and help with the largely-German administrative grunt work. Kind regards, -- Thorsten
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