Hi all,
Il 27/11/21 12:20, Marina Latini ha scritto:
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, I commit to be available. In the last board term, I attended all
the meetings, except for the very few cases when I was at a customer's
site for a scheduled network maintenance (I work as a network
administrator, and sometimes we have to plan disruptive interventions).
As such, my commitment will stay the same. I will participate in the
calls, and I have all the tools available to join the meetings, too. If
I miss a meeting, there are always the minutes to read, and fellow board
colleagues to ask.
2. Do you commit yourself to follow up and work on (at least) the main
items and actions you will volunteer to oversee or that will be assigned
to you by the board?
Yes, that's absolutely my intention. During the last board term, I was
overseeing infrastructure, documentation and events. Unfortunately,
there - for obvious reasons - were not so many events, but for
infrastructure and documentation I joined the meetings when possible. I
am glad that with the help of the infrastructure team, we could make two
virtual LibreOffice Conference possible, and hope for more in-person
meetings again in the near future!
3. What is your willingness to delegate decisions, especially in lack of
time?
In the current Board term I had the opportunity to appreciate the hard
work and commitment shown by every of the members of our Team. I am more
than sure they have all the knowledge and skills, additionally to a
strong community spirit and FLOSS philosophy understanding, to carry on
even on decision making. I have full trust in them.
In case of delegation of decisions inside the Board, there are more than
one procedure that call for it (Areas of Oversee for example means that
you trust your fellow Directors in areas where they are experts;
representation statements also offer a delegation over decision making
to Deputies); I used delegation in the current term, and as such I plan
obviously to do the same in the next term.
4. What are your views on the foundation's budget? How should the money
be spent, besides our fixed costs?
Our Statute mandates to provide free software for anyone, so it would be
best to support those tasks that are seldom sponsored from third parties
but that make high value for everyone (e.g. accessibility, just to
mention one between other important topics).
Also, community activities like local language projects, marketing and
events (in the hope we can start again soon in a much more intensive
way) are usually effective in getting in touch with more users and
potential members.
Additionally I think it is important for the future of our Foundation to
learn to tap in the European funds for social activities, as other
foundations in Europe are much more skilled than us to do; this could
unlock even more capabilities to better achieve the Foundation's goal.
TDF's budget and resources should be used to enable our community to do
fantastic things, to share knowledge and to get new community members on
board. Money is important and helps TDF to exist, but the people and the
time and skills they bring in is our most valuable asset.
5. Should we work towards broadening our pool of contributors, both
technical and non-technical?
That's absolutely a must, in my perspective. Every contribution matters
to have a bright future for the Project, in the first place, and then
the Foundation.
What concerns me most is the constant shrinking of the number of
corporate citizens and companies in the ecosystem that accompanied the
first 10 years of the Foundation, but also the shrinking of the
volunteer community in several areas; we tried to underline some actions
in the current Board mandate, but unfortunately these activities have
mid- to long-term planning and results, and need a lot of coordination
over a longer time span.
Another very important thing to think of is diversity and inclusion.
While we are advantaged as contributions come from every corner of the
world, I think more can be done on this aspect, and we can, and indeed
must, improve this as a community as well as a Foundation. This is a
complex topic and has to encompass also different cultures and
perspectives; it is difficult, but margins to better ourselves are there.
6. What actions do you suggest to increase the engagement and
participation of volunteers from local communities around the world in
project's activities?
I came to TDF from one of these "local communities", LibreItalia, so I
fully understand how much these efforts are needed to attract active
contributors and potential new members. Many of our local communities
showed that the task is less daunting while sharing venues with other
important FLOSS projects (we did it with OpenSuSE with LibOCon 2020, but
look at what the Albanian, the Japanese or the Indonesian communities
are all doing, just to mention some).
Usually, hackathons and events in coding and non-coding areas, that also
explain the FLOSS philosophy and why it is important to contribute back
to open source projects, are key, and we should do many more of these,
both in virtual and in person.
Also, creating some shared and ready-to-use workflows, with inputs from
different communities, around how to present and advocate LibreOffice,
the Document Liberation Project, ODF and in general FLOSS might be a
step to assure a common starting point and a less steep curve to
organize such events.
7. 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?
Yes, we definitely should.
I don't have so much PR contacts with institutions and Public
Administrations, but, looking back at what I did in the current Board
term, I surely and firmly approved any decision that asked for
supporting FLOSS and Digital freedom in the public sector.
Joint actions by different stakeholders in FLOSS advocacy can also work
(e.g. Public Money, Public Code).
8. What's your idea to let TDF membership become more appealing?
Currently, the only difference from being Community member and TDF
member is the possibility to vote and be voted for TDF's governance, and
it's fine, but can you imagine anything to encourage more Community
members to become also part of TDF?
The key argument to me is that TDF members should shape and drive what
the Foundation is going to do, so the Board of Directors should just
become the legal responsible entity for such decisions, taken by the
community, and assure the administration part of TDF is running fine.
We need to get better in listening to our community. Some ideas for this
are:
1 - find a way to use platforms our members use to communicate their
voices, as mailing lists are not the preferred channel for everyone;
2 - explain much better to our members the discussions at and and why
certain proposals are made by the Board of Directors, as explaining it
afterwards is definitely ineffective;
3 - try to find out what the most shared view of the community at the
end of the discussion is.
I want to commit myself to involve our members much more to the
governance of the Foundation; we have to work, for sure, on the
publicity of Board's decision-making process and evolve it in a
membership decision-making process. We should do much more in the open,
in public meetings, much less in private meetings. More transparency,
less secrecy.
Daniel Armando Rodriguez tried to do it in the current Board by setting
up an instance of Decidim, an effort that unfortunately didn't come to a
result yet (mostly because of other equally important, but more urgent,
tasks). I think that idea is worthwhile, so it should be in the best
interest of the Foundation to fully back that plan and get to a working
status in the next term.
9. 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?
My role should be ideally mainly as a proxy to the community of the
members, representing their ideas and perspectives to the Board and, if
possible, making them a reality coping with the many challenges that
running a Foundation exposes. The difficult task is always to balance
different positions coming from all the members.
I want to hear your ideas and thoughts, and promise to always have "an
open ear", and listen to your feedback but also criticism. I do really
just want to represent the community at my best.
10. What is the biggest problem of the foundation in your opinion? What
is its biggest opportunity?
The Foundation will have a bright future ahead if the projects it
provides a home for are alive and well, and if the people behind those
are happy and feel at home - namely, all the people behind LibreOffice
and the Document Liberation Project. To this, I would add all supporters
of ODF, which is a fundamental part for the digital sovereignty and
privacy of data.
The LibreOffice project in particular will have a bright future if we
will find the way to make it compelling for all users, potential users,
contributors and potential contributors. As such, we have to deal with
requirements from the general public, which has shifted significantly
from 10 years ago, when things started:
* LibreOffice is now regarded as a commodity by some and the fact that
it is for free is definitely a winning point if used wisely. Up to now,
however, it seems this often contributed to the depletion of resources
inside the project - or rather, a missed opportunity to get some sort of
return from it, mining its sustainability. We have to work more on our
users' awareness on how the project sustains itself and its ecosystem;
* On the topic of sustainability, LibreOffice lost a lot of companies
from the ecosystem through the years, although for different reasons.
The ideal approach is to understand how we as a community can work to
solve these issues together, and then implement further ideas and
suggestions that can help grow interest in LibreOffice and into the
community behind;
* Technology has changed, and as of now we have new challenges around
mobile and web/cloud. We were late already during the last board term,
we are even more late now. Efforts in this respect has been provided, I
think TDF should just provide its support to these efforts.
The Document Liberation Project faces mostly the same challenges as
LibreOffice, as it is definitely bound tightly with it.
For ODF, the challenges lie in a much stronger opponent; I think only
active advocating and possibly lobbying in political environments can be
a good solution. Making decision-makers understand why FLOSS is
important for data privacy and how ODF will assist to that perspective
is key.
All these threats can be turned into opportunities, if we all together
keep the focus on our mission and care for sustainability, working together.
11. If they will occur, how do you think to handle conflicts within the
board
The current Board was definitely different from what has happened in the
past, like many of you have also expressed to us, so it was natural that
some friction could rise up. I always tried my best not to jump to
conclusions but rather understand where arguments stem from, striving to
always keep a balanced point of view, hearing all the voices and opinions.
This is not always possible as we are all naturally bound to bias, to a
different scale of values and to different goals (or perceived goals, at
least).
I have to say my fellow Directors strove to avoid conflict altogether
where possible, mostly by recusing themselves on the obvious cases, but
devil is in the detail and it wasn't always so simple to discern if
there was a conflict or not for the rest of the time.
Fortunately, a new Conflict of Interest policy, which shows more
explicitly where to check for overlapping loyalties, has been approved
in a second iteration, with more work on it ongoing. I plan to use the
indications contained in the document to check if a conflict exists, to
provide fair and respectful interactions, discussions and decisions in
the Board.
Regards,
--
Emiliano Vavassori
syntaxerror...@libreoffice.org
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