Re: [board-discuss] [VOTE] Ask for additional employement budget
On Thu, 2013-01-24 at 19:31 +0100, Thorsten Behrens wrote: > year, I'd therefore ask the board to approve € 600.00 on top of the > already-approved budget for employment, thus totalling an annual sum > of +1. Michael. -- michael.me...@suse.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot
Re: [board-discuss] additional FOSDEM budget
On Mon, 2013-01-28 at 12:43 +0100, Florian Effenberger wrote: > the board has previously approved [1] 2.000 € for FOSDEM collaterals. > Because we would like to opt for higher quality t-shirts, plus produce > some stickers in addition, I'd like to ask the board to approve an > additional 600 € for collaterals. +1. Michael. -- michael.me...@suse.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot
Re: [board-discuss] Travel Expenses
Hi Italo, On Tue, 2013-01-29 at 14:29 +0100, Italo Vignoli wrote: > Of course, I will incur is some additional expenses for fuel and meals > which could unfortunately exceed the approved budget of Euro 2,000. > > I therefore ask the BoD to approve an additional budget of Euro 500 to > cover expenses for fuel, transportations and meals incurred during the > two trips. Seems very reasonable to me - thanks for spending the time on Evangelism ! :-) +1 ATB, Michael. -- michael.me...@suse.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot
Re: [board-discuss] budget for business cards
On Tue, 2013-02-12 at 11:32 +0100, Florian Effenberger wrote: > I'd like the board to approve this sum for the production. +1 Michael. -- michael.me...@suse.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot
Re: [board-discuss] [4.0] Review
Hi Klaus, On Wed, 2013-02-13 at 12:05 +0100, klaus-jürgen weghorn ol wrote: > Hi to all board members, > as 4.0.0 is rolled out there should be a review about what happened: > > The good points, the bad points > What can we do in the same way, what in a better way the next time? > What is needed to get it better? > A discussion may cause some budget thoughts, community handling, > marketing concepts, Whiteboards, Easy Hacks etc. We will certainly do a retrospective like this from an engineering perspective in the ESC call tomorrow - clearly there were several lessons we already learned from this release, but getting these better tied together would be a useful plan. Sophie was coming up with a better timeline / set of deadlines for the marketing / organisational things around the release put together which (I hope) would help improve communication between teams and general timeliness. Failing that - having a developers in the marketing calls earlier would be helpful I think. Discovering a load of un-translated strings very very late in the day (from the .ui files) was another late-discovered, one-off problem impacting translation completeness - ultimately the software is built by humans so there will always be some problems: so far my impression is that the release has rather reasonable quality for a .0 release - with few-to-no catastrophic / brown-paper-bag type bugs: which is good. Hopefully unit testing is helping with that. HTH, Michael. -- michael.me...@suse.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot
[board-discuss] [VOTE] extend Italo's Travel Expense request ...
Hi guys, Sounds like we should have a formal vote on this: On Wed, 2013-02-13 at 17:54 +0100, Italo Vignoli wrote: > > 1. Vote on having a budget of 2.500 € in total for your trips to > > POSSCON, LibrePlanet and FOSSC Oman, > > > 2. thereby revoking decision # 20121220-01 As per this thread, it'd be great to have a decision. My vote is +1 naturally. Thanks, Michael. -- michael.me...@suse.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot
Re: [board-discuss] [VOTE] extend Italo's Travel Expense request ...
On Thu, 2013-02-14 at 09:58 +, Michael Meeks wrote: > As per this thread, it'd be great to have a decision. My vote is +1 > naturally. And of course Florian in parallel started a vote elsewhere ;-) so vote there instead. ATB, Michael. -- michael.me...@suse.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot
Re: [board-discuss] travel refund for Italo's trips
On Thu, 2013-02-14 at 10:28 +0100, Florian Effenberger wrote: > 1. Having a budget of 2.500 € in total for Italo's trips to POSSCON, > LibrePlanet and FOSSC Oman, > > 2. thereby revoking decision # 20121220-01 [1] +1. Michael. -- michael.me...@suse.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot
Re: [board-discuss] FTP space for LibreOffice Server Install GUI
Hi Florian, On Sat, 2013-03-02 at 13:15 -0600, Norbert Thiebaud wrote: > On Sat, Mar 2, 2013 at 3:49 AM, Florian Reisinger wrote: > > Thanks for helping out. If you have any question, don't hesitate and ask as > > I am subscribed to this ML.. > > The first question would be: what is the license ? I looked in the > repo on github but did not see any information regarding any licensing > regime. Clearly there are some attractions to having uniform licensing / git hosting / translation tooling / release process etc. for everything we create. It seems as if you have a nice solution in the extensions repository though for this already ? is this problem-solved :-) All the best, Michael. -- michael.me...@suse.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot
Re: [board-discuss] BoD call on Wednesday
On Mon, 2013-03-18 at 14:08 +0100, Florian Effenberger wrote: > this is just a quick reminder that the next BoD call takes place this > Wednesday, 1600 UTC. Dial-in details and agenda are available at > https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/TDF/BoD_Meetings Unlikely that I'll be there ( travelling to Hungary ) - I nominate as my deputy whichever deputy attends the call and was the next in the vote ranking :-) Thanks, Michael. -- michael.me...@suse.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot
Re: [board-discuss] LibreOffice Swag/Merchandise Bulk Purchase?
Hi Florian, On Thu, 2013-03-28 at 11:12 +0100, Florian Effenberger wrote: > Robinson Tryon wrote on 2013-03-28 05:19: > > We're looking to purchase some swag and goodies for the contest. Some > > of the ideas we've come up with have included: > > please check with Thorsten first The stop energy has already reached epic proportions here :-) The plan is to encourage SPI to fund this - which should be no issue. ATB, Michael. -- michael.me...@suse.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot
Re: [board-discuss] Reminder: formal board meeting for annual report
On Sat, 2013-04-13 at 10:27 +0200, Florian Effenberger wrote: > I urge all board members to reserve this time for joining the call. In > case you cannot attend, please state your deputy 1. publically 2. by > name 3. in time. It is possible that I'll be on a plane/train at that time, as such I nominate as deputy whomever is in the call, that is otherwise not nominated as a deputy and that had the highest vote rank in the election. But of course, I hope to be there, Regards, Michael. -- michael.me...@suse.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot
Re: [board-discuss] dialling in via Google Hangouts
On Wed, 2013-05-15 at 15:56 +0200, Florian Effenberger wrote: > those of you who have issues with the phone line, here's another > approach that seems to work fairly well - dialling in to the confcall > via Google Hangouts: > > https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Talkyoo#Connecting_from_your_computer That turned out really good :-) thanks for the tip ! It'd be nice to try to congregate as many as possible on-line with video in the hang-out and call into talkyo only for recording / land-line users I think (?). Thanks, Michael. -- michael.me...@suse.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: [board-discuss] dialling in via Google Hangouts
On Wed, 2013-05-15 at 11:53 -0700, Joel Madero wrote: > Room for ESC call to do something similar ? Yep - I'd love to migrate us to a google hangout; we should get some quality webcam hardware for everyone to make that easier. > Also, just a quick question, are board meetings public? (in other > words, could I listen in?) People are encouraged to join in, submit items, and turn up - of course; the meeting is announced ahead of time with all the dial-in numbers etc. well in advance :-) be good to hear you there. ATB, Michael. -- michael.me...@suse.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: [board-discuss] hiring Christian Lohmaier
On Mon, 2013-06-10 at 23:04 +0200, Italo Vignoli wrote: > > After the contract has been drafted now and sent to the board in > > private, I hereby ask the board to > > > 1. vote on hiring Christian Lohmaier, for a limited period of one > > year, part-time with 20 hours per week, specifically for web > > development, at costs not exceeding 25.000 € per year, > > > 2. authorize Thorsten Behrens and me to sign the work contract on > > behalf of TDF +1 there is lots that needs doing that fits Christian's skills. Thanks ! Michael. -- michael.me...@suse.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: [board-discuss] Hackfest Hamburg 2013 budget estimates
On Thu, 2013-06-13 at 12:18 +0100, Caolán McNamara wrote: > On Thu, 2013-06-13 at 12:46 +0200, Bjoern Michaelsen wrote: > > Id like to raise the totral budget for the Hackfest in Hamburg 2013 (from > > the > > Hackfests part of the development budget) to 1500EUR. > > > > @Caolan, Michael: Could you sign this off? > > +1, seems sane to me. +1 to me too. It'd be nice to have a consolidated actual cost of FOSDEM for the wiki page - Thorsten, do you have that data in the end ? ATB, Michael. -- michael.me...@suse.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: [board-discuss] inviting Brazilian community members to Freiburg
On Mon, 2013-08-26 at 17:20 +0200, Florian Effenberger wrote: > over the past weeks, the idea has grown to invite valued Brazilian > community members to the Freiburg Hackfest and afterwards have them > connect with local German hackers, like Eike, Björn and others, to > exchange thoughts and ideas and work together on some tasks. For a week of stay, this makes sense - particularly if Eike & Bjoern can invest in training / working with them on some tasks :-) So +1, Michael. -- michael.me...@suse.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: [board-discuss] Board elections soon - think about your candidates!
On Thu, 2013-10-17 at 10:41 +0200, Florian Effenberger wrote: > This also means that _now_ is the time to think about your favorite > candidates ... ... > In Milan, we have already talked to many of you about the requirements > such a board role has, but for everyone who is interested in details, One detail that was shared at the conference, and is worth saying is that the current board is working to move more of the day-to-day administrative burden that is really a lot of work onto the shoulders of TDF admin staff. That should free up the next board for a somewhat lighter form of oversight & responsibility. At least that's the plan. Hopefully that allows volunteers and contributors with less time to spare to work as a team effectively in that role. > That being said, maybe one personal sentence: Being in the board surely > is a big responsibility, but I enjoyed my time during the last two years > quite a lot - and while it was challenging, it was also an honour to > serve the community and fulfill the duty. And a quick note of commendation here; Florian has done more than anyone to make TDF a reality, and ensure that the many balls don't get dropped here. We owe him a public debt of thanks. HTH, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: [board-discuss] Stepping back
Hi Charles, On Thu, 2013-10-24 at 12:50 +0200, Charles-H. Schulz wrote: > While I fully intend to stay and remain active within the project, Just a few quick words to say: thanks so much for all your hard work as a board member & the insight you brought there. Looking forward to continue working with you in the project ! :-) All the very best, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
[board-discuss] Candidacy for a BoD seat -- Michael Meeks
Hi guys, Just a quick note to say that I intend to run again for a seat on the Board of Directors of The Document Foundation. Who am I ? I'm Michael Meeks: Christian, Husband, Hacker, 36 years old, affiliated with Collabora. My day job is to try to rapidly grow the economic ecosystem around LibreOffice for the benefit of all including Collabora. I also love to hack on the code where I can, and to mentor and include new hackers. I started poking at the code-base before it was open-sourced in 2000, and have served with the team creating LibreOffice from the very beginning in various technical and non-technical roles: inside the Engineering Steering Committee, as a Board member, and primarily as a code contributor and evangelist. Why am I running? I'd like to offer whatever benefits a whole career's worth of experience of mistakes, blunders, failures (mostly my own) and occasional successes (mostly other people's) can bring to the daily life of running TDF. I've also had the privilege of being involved in the creation, hiring, management & bootstrapping of several teams of both paid and unpaid developers over the years - which is perhaps useful as TDF continues to grow and invest. I also believe it is critical for us to continue to safeguard our can-do and relational culture, empowering individuals to make friends and get things done while resisting un-necessary process creep as we grow. One of my priorities is working to ensure that we remain a fluid and adaptive organisation, always open to new and better ideas, new participants and new and better ways of doing things. Finally - I'm a believer in Free Software; while I am critically interested in ensuring that TDF remains a great place for companies to invest and sell services around the software I'm committed to ensuring that the right conditions remain in place for companies to contribute effectively back to the project and work well together with volunteers around the common codebase. Happy to answer any questions of course. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
[board-discuss] nominating Adam Fyne for the Board of Directors
Hi guys, I would love to nominate Adam Fyne (Adam Co / rattles2013) for the board elections. Adam has been involved in the project since April, and in that time has become a strong contributor both directly to the code, and also indirectly in his key role at CloudOn growing the ecosystem of companies contributing to LibreOffice. If you were at the conference in Milan, you'd have enjoyed meeting Adam, and his analysis of the interoperability challenges we face, and the ongoing work to fix them. I'm convinced Adam's enthusiasm, experience and sheer hard work would make him a wonderful candidate for the board, so I'd like to nominate him. ATB, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
[board-discuss] Re: Accepting my position in the Board
I, Michael Meeks, elected [Deputy] Director of the Board of The Document Foundation, hereby accept this position within the Stiftung bürgerlichen Rechts "The Document Foundation". My term will start February 18, 2014. Signed: Michael Meeks Ich, Michael Meeks, gewähltes [Ersatz-]Vorstandsmitglied der The Document Foundation, nehme mein Amt innerhalb der Stiftung bürgerlichen Rechts "The Document Foundation" an. Meine Amtszeit beginnt am 18. Februar 2014. Signed: Michael Meeks -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
[board-discuss] Nominating deputies ...
I, Michael, Meeks, elected member of the board of The Document Foundation, hereby and until further notice, nominate the following deputies to represent me during board calls, in the order set forth below: 1. Andreas Mantke 2. Eike Rathke 3. Norbert Thiebaud ie. re-using the STV electoral ranking. And thanks for attending, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: [board-discuss] [VOTE] Rules of Procedure changes
On Fri, 2014-02-21 at 16:18 +0100, Thorsten Behrens wrote: > The draft text was not fully ready during our board call on Wednesday, > I'd therefore ask the new board plus deputies to vote via email on > this list: Thanks; +1 Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: [board-discuss] vote on travel policy changes
+1 for both. > Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: [board-discuss] Vote on changed rules of procedure
On Fri, 2014-07-11 at 10:30 +0200, Florian Effenberger wrote: > based on an offlist discussion, I hereby propose the board to vote on > changing the rules of procedure. +1 - with thanks to Andreas for his work here. ATB, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: [board-discuss] Travel Expense Approval
On Sun, 2014-11-09 at 18:47 +0100, Italo Vignoli wrote: > I will represent the project at the upcoming SFScon in Bolzano, on > November 14. This year, we will have a 2 hours long workshop in the > afternoon, focused on migrations and certification, in addition to a > booth (staffed by local TDF members). > > I will have to travel by car to bring booth materials with me, and > therefore I am asking to cover travel expenses (fuel plus tolls: Euro 90 > + Euro 41.20) and lodging for two nights (Euro 40 + Euro 55). Seems obviously sensible to me =) isn't there a marketing budget for easy approval of such things ? seems too obvious to need a board vote / distraction to me. ATB, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: [board-discuss] Travel Expense Approval
On Mon, 2014-11-10 at 12:14 +0100, Italo Vignoli wrote: > I was not asking for a vote, but for a simple approval on a public > mailing list. Of course, it belongs to the marketing budget, but - being > myself an approver - I did not want to handle it privately between > myself and Charles. Makes perfect sense; if you want my +1 you have it of course. ATB, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: [board-discuss] [VOTE] Proposal for Budget Process
On Fri, 2015-07-24 at 14:12 +0200, Florian Effenberger wrote: > I ask the board to vote on this, so we can formalize the process. +1 thanks for that Florian ! Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: [VOTE] Re: [board-discuss] Grant request: LibreOffice project dashboard/"All about LibreOffice"
On Wed, 2015-08-12 at 08:31 -0700, Joel Madero wrote: > I'm still a little confused as to why this is happening through the > grant request process instead of the budgeting process - I read the > thread thrice and wasn't clear on an answer but...none the less. Ditto; but it's good to get this thing done of course; +1 Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
[board-discuss] Candidacy: Michael Meeks ...
Hi guys, Just a quick note to say that I intend to run again for a seat on the Board of Directors of The Document Foundation. * Who am I ? I'm Michael Meeks: Christian, Husband, Hacker, 38 years old, affiliated with Collabora. My day job is to try to rapidly grow the economic ecosystem around LibreOffice for the benefit of all including Collabora - what that means is encouraging more people to pay for more features, fixes & goodness to go into LibreOffice. I also love to hack on the code where I can, and to mentor and include new hackers. I started poking at the code-base before it was open-sourced in 2000, and have served with the team creating LibreOffice from the very beginning in various technical and non-technical roles: inside the Engineering Steering Committee, as a Board member, and primarily as a code contributor and evangelist. * Why am I running? I'd like to offer whatever benefits a whole career's worth of experience of mistakes, blunders, failures (mostly my own) and occasional successes (mostly other people's) can bring to the daily life of running TDF. I can type at reasonable speed, and write interactive minutes of calls with reasonable accuracy, helping to make meeting decisions clear in retrospect. I've also had the privilege of being involved in the creation, hiring, management & bootstrapping of several teams of both paid and unpaid developers over the years - which is perhaps useful as TDF continues to grow and invest. I also believe it is critical for us to continue to safeguard our can-do and relational culture, empowering individuals to make friends and get things done while resisting distrust, un-necessary process creep and beaurocracy as we grow. One of my priorities is working towards the goal of being a fluid and adaptive organisation, always open to new and better ideas, new participants and new and better ways of doing things. Finally - I'm a believer in Free Software; while I am critically interested in ensuring that TDF remains a great place for companies to invest and sell services around the software I'm committed to making that the right conditions remain in place for them to contribute effectively back to the project and work well together with volunteers around the common codebase. * 75 word formal candidacy: I'd love to serve you again on the board: as a Free Software advocate, with passion for LibreOffice, deep TDF board knowledge, lots of generic business experience: legal, budgeting, interviewing, management, yet also eager to keep LibreOffice fun and free. I've a long history of contribution to different FLOSS communities in various ways, am currently betting the business on LibreOffice and its success, but also want to help to grow our volunteer participation. * Happy to answer any questions of course. > 1. Do you commit yourself to have enough time and the necessary > technological tools in order to participate to the regularly > scheduled board calls? Naturally. > 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? Sure. > 3. What are your views on the foundation's budget? How should the > money be spent, besides our fixed costs? I rather like the current ranking scheme, which allows board members to each give their input - and then produces an average rank that we sort by against a fixed budget amount. While that sometimes misses things I care deeply about - it seems to produce a good overall result. So what would I rank highly ? really hard to say - I think we need a good balance in the project between all of the different development disciplines from coding, to QA, to translation, documentation. We also need to do marketing, NLP work etc. So the answer changes over time as we identify and plug holes with our reasonably limited resources. > 4. Should we work towards broadening our pool of contributors, > both technical and non-technical? Naturally - although my personal focus is on the technical side - we clearly need more developers, and I'd like us to put emphasis in our marketing and investment on growing and deepening the project from a technical, and feature basis: so I'd prefer to invest in eg. better documentation instead of to-end-user marketing, or in improving automated QA rather than encouraging large enterprises to use LibreOffice for free. I think we need to make the project as easy as possible for new non-technical people to get involved with - and let them rapidly climb the ladder to core contribution in whichever part of the project they want to make a difference in. > 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
[board-discuss] Re: [tdf-members] Preliminary results 2015 Elections TDF Board of Directors
On Sun, 2015-12-13 at 11:21 +0100, Cor Nouws wrote: > The proper results should read: > Directors are the candidates, in this order: > Marina Latini, Michael Meeks This piece matches my pocket calculation too =) and FWIW; I think it's good to have Marina at the top of the list for several reasons; though personally I'm not a fan of any special difference between elected Directors based on ordering. > My apologies for the initial announcement and thanks to all people > that responded. Thanks for your hard work running the election ! =) ATB, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
[board-discuss] Re: Accepting my position in the Board
Hi Cor, Thanks for the reminder. I, Michael Meeks, elected Director of the Board of The Document Foundation, hereby accept this position within the Stiftung bürgerlichen Rechts "The Document Foundation". My term will start February 18, 2016. Signed: Michael Meeks Ich, Michael Meeks, gewähltes Vorstandsmitglied der The Document Foundation, nehme mein Amt innerhalb der Stiftung bürgerlichen Rechts "The Document Foundation" an. Meine Amtszeit beginnt am 18. Februar 2016. Signed: Michael Meeks -- Michael Meeks, Director of The Document Foundation Kurfürstendamm 188, 10707 Berlin, Germany Rechtsfähige Stiftung des bürgerlichen Rechts Legal details: http://www.documentfoundation.org/imprint signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
[board-discuss] Representation in the board in my absence
Hi, I, Michael Meeks, elected member of the board of The Document Foundation, hereby and until further notice nominate the following deputies to represent me during board calls, in the order set forth below: 1. Deputy Norbert Thiebaud 2. Deputy Björn Michaelsen 3. Deputy Andreas Mantke Regards Eike -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: [board-discuss] Representation in the board in my absence
Simon kindly pointed out that I'm not Eike ;-) even if I happened to
borrow his mail ~verbatim; so lets try again:
I, Michael Meeks, elected member of the board of The Document
Foundation, hereby and until further notice nominate the following
deputies to represent me during board calls, in the order set forth
below:
1. Deputy Norbert Thiebaud
2. Deputy Björn Michaelsen
3. Deputy Andreas Mantke
Regards,
Michael.
--
Michael Meeks, Director of The Document Foundation
Kurfürstendamm 188, 10707 Berlin, Germany
Rechtsfähige Stiftung des bürgerlichen Rechts
Legal details: http://www.documentfoundation.org/imprint
--
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Re: [board-discuss] time for next board call
On Tue, 2016-03-15 at 12:56 +0100, Florian Effenberger wrote: > the next scheduled board call would be Easter Monday, March 28, which is > a public holiday and a "long weekend" in many countries. ... > How's the board's availability ? Pretty terrible from the previous poll =) Can we not move this one week in either direction - slipping the cadence from two-weekly to weekly or having a three-week gap ? ATB, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: [board-discuss] Fwd: OSCAL Tirana
On Fri, 2016-03-25 at 00:32 +0100, Italo Vignoli wrote: > The attached message is still waiting for an answer. In the meantime, I > have booked my travel, and the expense is going to be less than half the > amount originally forecasted. > > I need the approval of the expense from the marketing/community budget. Not sure I'm an approver for that budget; but it sounds pretty sensible to me =) +1 ATB, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: [board-discuss] [VOTE] change of travel policy wrt. kilometers driven
On Thu, 2016-03-31 at 16:21 +0200, Marina Latini wrote: > > Change our travel policy at > > https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/TDF/Policies/Travel#Personal_Cars > > to read > > Vote: Yes +1 Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: [board-discuss] Harassment and lack of code of conduct
Hi Bubli, On 12/01/17 11:24, Katarina Behrens wrote: > it has been brought to my attention that one of our (female) contributors, > who > is also a TDF member (this is why membership committee is in Cc:) has been > harassed in a private mail by someone who reads development and general user > mailing list. I have the details, mail addresses etc. and can provide them > via > private channel, for obvious reasons I'm not doing that here. Glad you've got all the details here, no-one should be harassed in the project. Lets take some action: can you bring the specific problem to the board privately to start addressing that ? > This is quite a strong incentive for me to bring up the topic that is > perceived as controversial by many, namely (the lack of) code of conduct in > the community around TDF and (the absence of) action plan, as for what to do, > when bad things happen. I believe the board should discuss and come up with a policy here - my preference is for one that does not introduce a privileged diversity police de-coupled from our meritocracy and focused on micro-aggressions[1] - it sounds like you don't want that either =) which is great - but that's always the fear. Clearly however, this is for the board to decide. Presumably some fairly general statement: that we don't expect harassment from anyone in the community - with re-assurance that if you -feel- you have been harassed - please contact XYZ individuals / whatever alias in confidence to report it - and we will work with you patiently to bring a resolution. With a description of who will be included there, how the complaint will be handled etc. > "but but but, we're such a bunch of nice guys, nothing bad has ever happened >here, nobody has ever been harassed, so why bother, why restrict freedom of > speech I'm aware of some sensitive situations in the past that have been handled adroitly by some community members. At some conference or other we had had a: "If you have any concerns talk to Bubli or Michael" announcement early at the beginning - I forget the language; that seems entirely appropriate for the project as a whole. > Case in point, the above incident is at least 5 months old and she only > decided to come out of the closet *now*. That is bad indeed. > At the very least, in the absence of "real" code of conduct, a clear and > concise public statement (in what particular form, I don't quite care) should > be made by TDF that such behaviour ( = harassment, stalking, etc.) is not > going to be tolerated and the offenders are not going to get away with it. Sounds sensible; if we can define that in a way that is helpful. In fact - I personally thing that defining harassment is a really bad way to do this - I would -strongly- prefer a casuistic story-telliing approach - that explains how bad things can happen - and how they get be resolved to help people understand. I've been itching for the time to write that for a while. I'm not a fan of [2] "Harassment includes, but is not limited to: Verbal comments that reinforce social structures of domination [related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, age, religion, [your specific concern here]." eg. > Related to that, there is no plan of action (or not one that I'd know of) how > to deal with incidents and what steps to take (on mailing lists, IRC, social > networks etc.) when things go wrong. Yep, we should come up with a plan. > But again, some public statement by TDF that incidents are going to be dealt > with, we're prepared to act and people are going to be helped when needed > should be made. It'd make people feel more safe. Sounds good to me; so - I'd suggest we come up with something at FOSDEM at our in-person board meeting. Personally I don't think the whole membership list is a great forum if we want to avoid getting side-tracked into gender-politics discussions that can run progress into the ground =) > I volunteer to be a contact person for those cases (in fact, as you can see, > I > already am) I like that; but I would strongly prefer that there be a diversity of perspectives on the topic in those handling this. It also seems vitally important to me that there be some suitable degree of transparency and community input in proportion to whatever sanctions we dream up: which after all could potentially have significant even career related impact on people working around LibreOffice. Anyhow - thanks for handling this case & getting the ball rolling ! ATB, Michael. [1] - http://contributor-covenant.org/ [2] - http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Conference_anti-harassment/Policy -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lis
Re: [board-discuss] Harassment and lack of code of conduct
Hi K-J & Simon, On 01/02/17 14:38, Simon Phipps wrote: > We should also include João's reactions in this discussion. > There should be a real stop to defame a member or anybody else in > our community. Indeed - it is good timing =) > Maybe if we can't get a code of conduct we should have a plan of > reacting/blocking. I suspect we will get a CoC - but probably not in the next minutes or days; these things take time. > The Code should indicate that a Trustee can forfeit membership > for a serious breach. Interestingly, he was not a member anymore, and had been trying to remove himself from that mailing list for quite some time - it appears. So - in this (rather unusual) case, I suspect encouraging quicker curation of the mailing list would have avoided this problem. ATB, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: [board-discuss] Re: COSCUP Taiwan
On 05/05/17 08:51, Jan Holesovsky wrote: >>> Unfortunately, travel cost to Taiwan are not negligible. At the moment >>> the combination between flight ticket and accommodation is around 1,400 >>> Euro. Based on these figures, I ask for approval of the expense (being +1 - I forget who the other approvers are though - prolly not me ;-) Hope it goes well, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: [board-discuss] Stepping down from Membership Committee
Hi Bubli, On 23/07/17 22:57, Katarina Behrens wrote: > The change I would love to see in TDF and in the community around Libreoffice > is unlikely to happen in any foreseeable future. I tried to change a thing > here or there, but I failed and I feel burned-out from fighting a very lonely > fight. That's an unexpected shock. I'm really sorry to hear that. I'm deeply curious as to the fights you're fighting that burned you out - or is it some cumulative final-straw that breaks the camel's back type thing. > I'm doing this because I grieve for the community I would like to be part of, > but can't anymore. Sometimes values re-align and then people leave. Again - I'd love to persuade you to re-consider; at the least - I'd like to get your list of things that grieve you, and list of fights so we can process them before this is made final. Your contribution has been appreciated and distinctive =) there is much you've offered in the MC, code, mentoring and lots of other places that it is a significant loss to the project. All the best, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: [board-discuss] Hackfests, the next generation: A Call To Action
Hi Bjoern, TLDR; I think we should try this - not because it is without potential problems (I'll elaborate below), but because encouraging trying new ideas is an important thing that we should be doing =) and quite probably this is another great idea from you. And then of course a few concerns: On 22/08/17 22:30, Bjoern Michaelsen wrote:> - TDF selects a small of the tenderable topics (6 man days) Who selects that ? > - TDF selects a "product owner" for the topic (could be an TDF > employee or a qualified and motivated TDF member) I guess one current organizational problem is finding someone to take ownership and/or responsibility, but I would hope that at first you can take ownership =) > - TDF hires 2 certified developers from LibreOffices companies for 3 days each One of the big problems here is open and transparent selection criteria: what are they ? is this based on hourly rates or communication skill, or domain programming expertise etc. ? With a fixed price tender (assuming the tender was well specified) - it is all about price - which is a single number; red-tape aside - I hope that is reasonably easy to select. My other concern was privileging locations - such that travel / accommodation cost become a significant part of the problem. > - Controlling and the need to proof due diligence going away as it is > performed > right in the open and self-documented, reducing the vast redtape needed to > set up and run tenders in the first place Having never been involved in the selection process I've not seen the red-tape internally to TDF; but I have helped to write specifications - which are often arrive in a tender-able state ready to be published. Beyond that I guess there is the need for organizations to estimate & provide bids which is some real effort though not made by TDF - and then for TDF to decide and/or to select the lowest number surely ? ATB, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: [board-discuss] Hackfests, the next generation: A Call To Action
Hi Shinnok, On 30/08/17 09:55, Shinnok wrote: > On this topic, I just probed the idea with Thorsten in my last one on one > with him > about having a BoF talk at the two tech Unis in Iasi, Romania, my hometown: The whole idea sounds like an extraordinarily effective use of time =) I love the initiative, and glad that there are courses somewhere still teaching C++ programming :-) Good stuff, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: [board-discuss] Procedure Of TDF Board Elections
Hi Andreas, On 29/10/17 12:37, Andreas Mantke wrote: > Am 29.10.2017 um 13:02 schrieb K-J LibreOffice: >> The announcement of the elections was done by the >> current chair of the membership committee. Of course, I'm interested in an ideal process - but I'm more interested in a good outcome here. Is there anything in that announcement that particularly worries you and/or that shows any sort of bias or somesuch ? I imagine that this is substantially a boiler-plate mail - presumably re-used from the last one that we sent out two years ago - it doesn't end: "Vote for Cor!" I am assuming (not that I read it carefully ;-) ie. this is a pure theoretical process purity issue, not any real concern ? >> I asked Cor to make his candidacy as early as possible so that the MC >> has the ability to react. Cor makes this in a fine way (for me) as he >> didn't wait too long. Good =) so - we are transparent; I guess I'd leave the rest for the electorate - assuming that Cor is indeed recused from further any MC role until after the elections are concluded. > I think we talk about different things here. I tried to explain that in > my opinion someone who was elected for two years and didn't explain his > electors in front of his election that he wouldn't serve for two years, > but only for one or a bit more years, It is always an option I think for MC members; traditionally it has been a good place to serve, and get to know how TDF works to move on to the board from. IIRC several people did that. It is clear that when you elect someone, they may resign from post for all manner of reasons - I can't think of a better reason than coming to serve on the board. Having said that - in general, it is clearly better for most of the MC to serve a full term so we have continuity in the MC. FWIW - I was rather in favor of 1 year terms for both BoD & MC in the 1st instance which would make this rather less of a problem (IMHO). > He needs to explain, why he'll not serve the whole period and > /or if there is an emergency to apply for another body. I imagine Cor's candidacy statement will explain that sort of thing. It seems pretty clear to me that if the electorate share your lack of happiness with that, they have a free and anonymous vote to express that with - which will (I assume) result in Cor staying in the MC. Traditionally I'm not so sure that they've minded. Regards, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
[board-discuss] Candidacy to the BoD elections: Michael Meeks
Hi there, Just a quick note to say that I intend to run again for a seat on the Board of Directors of The Document Foundation. Like Franklin, self-nomination feels uncomfortable as a concept, but lets try: * Who am I ? I'm Michael Meeks: Christian, Husband, Hacker, 40 years old, I try to shepherd Collabora Productivity. My day job is to try to rapidly grow the economic ecosystem around LibreOffice for the benefit of all including Collabora. That means encouraging more people to pay for more features, fixes, testing, translation & other goodness to go into LibreOffice and accelerate the virtuous circle of its growth. I also love to hack on the code where I can, and to mentor and include new people. I started poking at the code-base before it was open-sourced in 2000, and have served with the team creating LibreOffice from the very beginning in various technical and non-technical roles: inside the Engineering Steering Committee, as a Board member, and primarily as a code contributor, mentor and evangelist. * Why am I running? I'd like to continue to offer the benefits of a whole career's worth of mistakes, blunders, mis-understandings, failures (mostly my own) and occasional successes (mostly other people's). I can also type at a reasonable speed, and scribe interactive minutes of calls with reasonable accuracy, helping to make meeting decisions somewhat clearer in retrospect. I've also had the privilege of being involved in the creation, hiring, management & bootstrapping of several teams of both paid and unpaid developers over the years - which is perhaps useful as TDF continues to grow and invest. I also believe it is critical for us to continue to safeguard our can-do and relational culture, empowering individuals to make friends and get things done while resisting distrust, un-necessary process creep and bureaucracy as we grow. One of my goals is to try to encourage TDF towards being a fluid and adaptive organisation, always open to new and better ideas, new participants and new and better ways of doing things. Finally - I'm a believer in Free Software and also critically interested in ensuring that TDF remains a great place for companies to invest and sell services around improving the software. I'm committed to making sure the right conditions remain in place to help them to contribute effectively back to the project and work well together with volunteers around the common codebase. Full name: Michael Meeks Email: michael.me...@collabora.com Corporate affiliation: Collabora * 75 word formal candidacy: I'd love to serve you again on the board: as a FLOSS advocate, with passion for LibreOffice, deep TDF board knowledge, lots of generic business experience: legal, budgeting, interviewing, management, yet also eager to keep LibreOffice fun and free. I've a long history of contribution to different FLOSS communities in various ways, am currently betting the business on LibreOffice and its success, but also want to help growing our volunteer participation. * Happy to answer any questions of course. Regards, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: [board-discuss] No Candidacy To The Next Board
Hi Andreas, On 26/11/17 23:56, Andreas Mantke wrote: > I have been (deputy) member of the board for about six years now and > from my personal view it's time to take a break or a change. I have been > involved in other volunteer projects for a while now and got the offer > to work further within them. I'll take this offer. Thanks for your long and dedicated service ! I really hope you can find time to continue to maintain the extensions pieces & your other technical contributions to the project. All the best, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: [board-discuss] No Candidacy To The Next Board
Hi Andreas, On 28/11/17 16:34, Andreas Mantke wrote: > I'm really sure that I wouldn't take a workload again, where I used my> whole > (awake) spare time to work on the project and take no real vacation, > break etc. and get in return not too much positive feedback, but some > complaint. I feel your pain ! others have mentioned this on the board too: that our culture of gratitude & taking the time to say 'thanks' has been eroded & this has a real impact on the relationships that bind us, the fun-factor & so on. I don't think we can easily mandate gratitude =) but would love to see more leadership on this; so ... a more fulsome thanks again: not just for the board work but the hard & thankless maintenance of the extensions repo & all the other good things you've done and continue to do for the project ! =) it is appreciated, even if I've been too busy to say so. All the best, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
[board-discuss] Re: Acceptance of BoD role
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 20/12/17 21:46, Gabriele Ponzo wrote: > Then I kindly invite you to officially accept your position in the > Board by answering to this message with a "Reply all". Thanks for organizing that and making it super-easy too =) I, Michael Meeks, elected Director of the Board of The Document Foundation, hereby accept this position within the Stiftung bürgerlichen Rechts "The Document Foundation". My term will start February 18, 2018. Signed: Michael Meeks Ich, Michael Meeks, gewähltes Vorstandsmitglied der The Document Foundation, nehme mein Amt innerhalb der Stiftung bürgerlichen Rechts "The Document Foundation" an. Meine Amtszeit beginnt am 18. Februar 2018. Unterzeichnet: Michael Meeks To celebrate, I even tried to digitally sign this mail ;-) Thanks, Michael. - -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v2 iEYEARECAAYFAlo64OAACgkQRmbdHgsYXW983gCg1i4mwFrRPy1pm5F9tv2S8Wqc 76EAoJcTpmLIBcK+lIOIZAXK/hRwII/X =Fap6 -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: [board-discuss] Re: [libreoffice-documentation] Meeting Minutes for call on Wednesday Jan 10th, at 18:00 Berlin time
Hi K-J, Thanks for your mail, On 10/01/18 20:04, K-J LibreOffice wrote: > Am 10.01.2018 um 20:11 schrieb Olivier Hallot: >> Documentation meeting Minutes Wednesday January 10th 2018 >> Presents: Dave B, Andreas K, Olivier H. >> >> Topics: >> * Book cover: >> + By consensus of the presents, book cover #1 will be used. >> + https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Covers_60 > > Funny decision: We ask the community and 69,7 % say that they want > another cover. Then 3(!) decide to change this voting without any comment. > Ok, the other two covers are from me so it looks like I'm annoyed with > it as personal reasons. But I only want to tell about the next possible > shitstorm. Good to be sensitive to that, thanks for reporting it to the board. If you think the situation is beyond resolution in the Documentation / Design community - then the board might intervene. If so we can add it to the board agenda (our next call in ~2 weeks) and get everyone into the call to discuss; but this should be seen as a very last resort, not a first approach. I looked at the wiki page - there are some great designs there - (thanks for contributing!) =) I note that three designs got around ~30% of the vote each, making it somewhat inconclusive. Were you suggesting a run-off between the two highest ranked or somesuch ? Either way - I'd encourage you to talk with Olivier and the rest of the documentation team! My 2 cents anyhow, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
[board-discuss] Representation statement
I, Michael Meeks, elected member of the board of directors of The Document Foundation, hereby and until further notice, nominate the following deputies to represent me during board calls and meetings, in the order set forth below: 1. Jan Holešovský 2. Simon Phipps 3. Osvaldo Gervasi -- Michael Meeks, Director of The Document Foundation Kurfürstendamm 188, 10707 Berlin, Germany Rechtsfähige Stiftung des bürgerlichen Rechts Legal details: http://www.documentfoundation.org/imprint -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: [board-discuss] Re: License information for extensions on LO's extension site
Hi Andreas, (and thanks for raising this Stephan) I appreciate the work that you do maintaining the extensions repository - and it is always difficult to handle feedback. As you know - if people have a legal concern - they are encouraged to raise it directly with legal@ - and not engage in lengthy public discussions. Andreas - I'd love to talk this through ? can I call you at some stage ? ATB, Michael. On 31/08/18 10:18, Stephan Bergmann wrote: > On 30/08/18 20:08, Andreas Mantke wrote: >> Am 30.08.2018 um 19:02 schrieb Stephan Bergmann: >>> On 30/08/18 18:43, Andreas Mantke wrote: In my view it is necessary, that a LibreOffice extension that is published on a TDF resource, has a clear license statement and presents this license statement to the user during the installation process. >>> >>> Why should presenting the license during installation be necessary? >>> Installing LO itself, for example, doesn't do that, either. >> >> if you want to make an agreement with the user about the license, you >> have to present the license during the installing process and ask for >> accepting it. >> >> Otherwise there is no agreement on the license. > > With all due respect to your work on the TDF extensions site, and with > whatever IANAL caveat, but I don't see this change (requiring extensions > hosted on the TDF extensions site to ask for license acceptance during > installation) as neither necessary nor helpful. > > Maybe the board (as the entity responsible for running that extensions > site, IIUC; now on CC) has an opinion here? -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, GM Collabora Productivity Hangout: mejme...@gmail.com, Skype: mmeeks (M) +44 7795 666 147 - timezone usually UK / Europe -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy
Re: [board-discuss] About LibreOffice Online
Hi Daniel, On 10/10/18 14:51, Daniel A. Rodriguez wrote: > Is there any plan to add another way to deploy LibreOffice Online to the > current docker image alternative? https://hub.docker.com/r/libreoffice/online/ Has a LibreOffice Online image. HTH, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, GM Collabora Productivity Hangout: mejme...@gmail.com, Skype: mmeeks (M) +44 7795 666 147 - timezone usually UK / Europe -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy
Re: [board-discuss] Apache ODF Toolkit migration
Hi Michael, First - thanks for working on this, (and Svante too) - it looks positive overall. On 28/11/2018 09:40, Michael Stahl wrote: > so i'll propose to migrate the ODF Toolkit to The Document Foundation. Seems like something the BoD should vote on, In general, subject to the marketing concerns at the end, it seems like a good idea to me. I assume there are no current contributors to be upset either way. From a licensing / contributor / compliance perspective - I'd expect this to be adapted to fit with our existing policies & practice. Then some other random preferences that I'm not deeply wedded. > the obvious options are: > a) move the git repository to gerrit.libreoffice.org Sounds sensible. > 2. the web site, in SVN (will also be changed to read-only): > > https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/odf/site/ > > the SVN repo contains some MarkDown files that are converted to ... > presumably there should be a way to preserve the (relatively small > and simple) content of the repo to either Wiki markup, or something > that some other MarkDown-to-HTML tool can understand; volunteers are > certainly welcome to help with this. Sounds sensible - what is the scale of the problem: how many lines/tags of markdown ? > 3. the domain "odftoolkit.org" - this currently redirects to > "http://incubator.apache.org/odftoolkit/"; > > this domain would need to be transferred from ASF to TDF before it > expires. Sounds sensible, if the ASF is willing of course. > 4. mailing list: the "odf-...@incubator.apache.org" will be retired; > probably the amount of traffic is going to be quite small, hence > suggest to just use "libreoff...@freedesktop.org" for now; if the > traffic increases and becomes a problem a dedicated list can be > set up later. Sounds great. > 5. currently the ASF JIRA is used as bug tracker, with project > "ODFTOOLKIT": > > https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ODFTOOLKIT-479?jql=project%20%3D%20ODFTOOLKIT > > there are currently 137 issues that are neither RESOLVED nor CLOSED. > > so there are 2 decisions to be made here: > > a) do we want a new component in "bugs.documentfoundation.org" > Bugzilla, I'd say yes; but Xisco should make the call. > b) should open issues be migrated? as long as they will be accessible > read-only in ASF JIRA (and i don't see any reason why not), i > don't see much value in it, since there aren't currently > developers available with time to fix the issues; if anybody feels > strongly about their issue they can re-create/copy it over > manually. Sounds very sensible. > another point that we should probably discuss after the migration is > finished is whether the so-called "Simple API" should be removed from > ODFDOM due to being duplicative and unmaintained for years. I like the idea of immediately sub-setting this - so if people want to come along and resurrect the full project they can do so at Apache - while we continue to maintain the bits that we need. I am slightly wary of how the LibreOffice / TDF support could be used in a marketing context around whatever new stuff goes into odf-dom. I'm not eager for this to become a distraction to our core mission around LibreOffice. As such I think we should scope and frame this as "We are hosting and maintaining a validation tool we use, while we use it" - rather than creating an expectation that we're going to start a significant evangelism effort around investing in, promoting, and improving a Java-based ODF DOM implementation. Does that fit with your goal ? That may sound an odd request =) however there have been innumerable proposals in the past by well meaning, but not terribly technically competent people to "Re-write LibreOffice based on an ODF DOM" - and I want to stop that (damaging) hot-air before it re-starts - it has the potential to be quite harmful to our credibility. From a marketing perspective we should probably continue to emphasize that LibreOffice has no Java dependency - and that this is not going to change. Anyhow; I support the proposal, thanks Michael - waiting for other BoD members' input. ATB, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, GM Collabora Productivity Hangout: mejme...@gmail.com, Skype: mmeeks (M) +44 7795 666 147 - timezone usually UK / Europe -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy
Re: [board-discuss] [VOTE] Host the ODF Toolkit project at TDF
On 30/11/2018 17:03, Thorsten Behrens wrote: > as the discussion seems to have calmed down, and also folks over at > Apache seem to be supportive - let me call a vote: > > * TDF to formally offer the ASF to take over the ODF Toolkit project > * by copying the existing github repo (minus perhaps the simple API) > * taking the existing markdown documentation & website, and on a best-effort > basis either importing that into MediaWiki, or keeping a static HTML > copy available > * offer to take over ownership of the odftoolkit.org domain +1 Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, GM Collabora Productivity Hangout: mejme...@gmail.com, Skype: mmeeks (M) +44 7795 666 147 - timezone usually UK / Europe -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy
Re: [board-discuss] creation of The Document Collective (TDC)
Hi Uwe, On 26/09/2019 15:28, Uwe Altmann wrote: > Just read the paper. It raised some questions. It would probably help to come to the next board call and raise your concerns. > And what I do not understand at all is the reasons there is such a > complicated and a difficult to zero controllable process with a > "Public Software CIC" 50.000 € loan just to get an unincorporated > association (whatever that means in terms of business and liability, > i. e. ability to contract directly with app stores etc. The number is large, but it is a contingency; I don't expect TDF to loan anything like this much, and to provide cash incrementally as needed. In terms of where the entity finally ends up, the CIC is a short-term bootstrapping mechanism - I don't believe there is a final decision on entity location currently. There are some attractions however to having multiple jurisdictions involved - we've really appreciated the flexibility that SPI has helped us with over the years (as an example). All the best, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, GM Collabora Productivity Hangout: mejme...@gmail.com, Skype: mmeeks (M) +44 7795 666 147 - timezone usually UK / Europe -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy
Re: [board-discuss] [VOTE] public vote resolution on TDC (The Document Collective)
On 30/09/2019 11:12, Marina Latini wrote: > at the end of the last board meeting (27.09.2019) I was asked to send > out this email vote to be posted on this public board-discuss list. > > The following vote was proposed during the last meeting: > > - > The Board RESOLVES to start creation of The Document Collective > (TDC) by taking the following acts: ... Thanks Marina; +1 Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, GM Collabora Productivity Hangout: mejme...@gmail.com, Skype: mmeeks (M) +44 7795 666 147 - timezone usually UK / Europe -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy
[board-discuss] Candidacy: Michael Meeks
Hi everyone, Just a quick note to say that I intend to run again for a seat on the Board of Directors of The Document Foundation. Self-nomination feels uncomfortable as a concept, but here goes: * Who am I ? I'm Michael Meeks: Christian, Husband, Hacker, 42 years old, I try to shepherd Collabora Productivity. My day job tries to rapidly grow the economic ecosystem around LibreOffice for the benefit of all, including Collabora. That means encouraging more people to pay for more features, fixes, testing, translation, UX design & other goodness to go into LibreOffice and to accelerate the virtuous circle of its growth. This also involves encouraging TDF to leave space for the ecosystem to flourish, to build a fair and consistent level playing field for companies, and to celebrate all of our varied contributors and their contributions. In common with many, I'm most excited when hacking on the code and making positive changes there, as well as mentoring and including new people. Having started poking at the code-base before it was open-sourced in 2000, I have served with the team creating LibreOffice from the very beginning in various technical and non-technical roles: inside the Engineering Steering Committee, as a Board member, but primarily as a code contributor, mentor and evangelist. * Why am I running? I'd like to continue to offer the benefits of a whole career's worth of mistakes, blunders, mis-understandings, failures (mostly my own) and occasional successes (mostly other people's). I can also type at a reasonable speed, and scribe interactive minutes of calls with reasonable accuracy, helping to make Board decisions somewhat clearer in retrospect. I've also had the privilege of being involved in the creation, hiring, management & bootstrapping of several teams of both paid and unpaid developers over the years - which is perhaps useful as TDF continues to grow and invest. I also believe it is critical for us to continue to safeguard our open, can-do and relational culture. That means helping to empower individuals to make friends and get things done while resisting distrust. It also means keeping TDF as a fun place, that is distictively different from the ossification, risk aversion and bureaucracy that grows in many companies. I'm eager to retain those youthful, fluid and adaptive traits in TDF: always open to new and better ideas, new participants and new and better ways of doing things. Building on that, one of the things I love about LibreOffice is our diversity of contributors with all manner of different and interesting backgrounds, experiences and opinions. I'm eager to create space for people to respectfully build strong relationships with others in the project, even when they profoundly disagree with those that are different or think differently to them. Finally - I'm a believer in Free Software, while being critically interested in ensuring that TDF remains a great place for companies to invest and to sell services around improving the software. I'm committed to making sure the right conditions remain in place to help companies contribute effectively back to the project and work well together with volunteers around the common codebase. Full name: Michael Meeks Email: michael.me...@collabora.com Corporate affiliation: Collabora * 75 word formal candidacy: I'd love to serve you again on the board: as a FLOSS advocate, with passion for LibreOffice, deep TDF board knowledge, lots of generic business experience: legal, budgeting, interviewing, management, yet also eager to keep LibreOffice's spirit of fun, fairness and freedom. I've a long experince of contribution to different FLOSS communities in various ways, am currently betting the business on LibreOffice and its success, but also want to help growing our volunteer participation. * Happy to answer any questions of course. Regards, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, GM Collabora Productivity Hangout: mejme...@gmail.com, Skype: mmeeks (M) +44 7795 666 147 - timezone usually UK / Europe -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy
Re: [board-discuss] Diversity Is Key?
Hi Andreas, As you know, I'm a fan of you & your work on improving LibreOffice. What you write is (I assume) intended as humorous, but doesn't seem a terribly fair characterization from many angles. I'm rather encouraged that lots of board members want to make TDF a safe place for diverse people to get involved and interact, that seems like a good thing to me. I'm also -extremely- grateful for everyone who steps up to volunteer their time to help take part in our governance - they rock! In general it seems to me that "If you look for the bad in people expecting to find it, you surely will." - I'd love instead to see concrete contributions and suggestions for positive change here. I'd like to talk some of those over with you, please don't hesitate to give me a call. Hope all's well, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, GM Collabora Productivity Hangout: mejme...@gmail.com, Skype: mmeeks (M) +44 7795 666 147 - timezone usually UK / Europe -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy
Re: [board-discuss] Self-nomination for next Board
Hi Andreas, I for one am grateful for all candidates that stand in the election. I expect each of them to act as individuals in the best interest of TDF and for all of them to have a shared primary affiliation to LibreOffice. I also think we should be encouraging those people that stand, and not trying to create tribal wedges. At Collabora we encourage our staff to do what they think best in LibreOffice & TDF - and we have no say at all over what our partners do there; I thoroughly dislike your implication to the contrary. However, if people are worried by that (as apparently you are) they should have all the information they need to vote accordingly. On 07/12/2019 09:15, Andreas Mantke wrote: >>> Full Name: Paolo Vecchi >>> Affiliation: Omnis Systems Ltd and Omnis Cloud Sarl ... >> I want only to ask a short question. I looked on the Omnis Systems >> website and wonder, if you are providing NextCloud and Koprano with >> text editing as a service, aren't you? ... > because there is no answer to my question, I assume the answer would > disclose an affiliation to one company with a lot of candidates So this is the second person you've made an unreasonable public assumption about on this list, in this election. Personally I like Paolo, he's a nice guy - I hope being friendly is not also a grounds for suspicion (?) However I can confirm that Omnis is not a Collabora partner - otherwise I would expect Paolo to have mentioned that. If Omnis is distributing and contributing to the software (both things people should be encouraged to do) it does so as its own participant in the ecosystem, HTH, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, GM Collabora Productivity Hangout: mejme...@gmail.com, Skype: mmeeks (M) +44 7795 666 147 - timezone usually UK / Europe -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy
[board-discuss] Re: Acceptance of BoD role
Thanks Gabriele, I, Michael Meeks, elected Director of the Board of "The Document Foundation", hereby accept this position within the Stiftung bürgerlichen Rechts "The Document Foundation". My term will start February 18, 2020. Signed: Michael Meeks Ich, Michael Meeks, gewähltes Mitglied des Vorstands der "The Document Foundation", nehme mein Amt innerhalb der Stiftung bürgerlichen Rechts "The Document Foundation" an. Meine Amtszeit beginnt am 18. Februar 2020. Unterzeichnet: Michael Meeks -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy
Re: [board-discuss] creation of The Document Collective (TDC)
Hi Dennis, On 07/02/2020 17:43, Dennis Roczek wrote: There are some attractions however to having multiple jurisdictions involved - we've really appreciated the flexibility that SPI has helped us with over the years (as an example). As I do not find the numbers in the already published ledgers: how much money did The Document Foundation already paid to lawyers ? So far - exactly zero, and exactly zero expenses for setting up TDC so far. TDF has paid no money to anyone around TDC AFAIK. Then again - we've had some friendly pro-bono legal advice, input from the group of FLOSS foundations, and a sensible group of people have put a lot of time into meeting and discussing options on constitution, jurisdiction and more. And how much are they willing (or planning) to do this? Was the Videolan Community asked how they did handled all these legal stuff? I've talked to Jean-Baptist a fair bit in the past - I would be surprised if he had a lot to offer on this topic, and VLC's profile is rather different from TDF's and TDCs. All these legal stuff is not quite as obvious as it may look at first glance - nevermind getting something setup, bank accounts opened, articles written and so on. Incidentally - one of the reasons that things do not get actually done around TDC (and in other places), is that as soon as consensus appears to be building [ getting a dozen people to agree on anything complex and nuanced is a tough process ] then something disruptive comes along to jam things up. That is really distressing for those wanting to get moving. The Board agreed to create TDC, it created a committee to do that, the committee met at some length, then that committee explained where it is at to a new Board. We're continuing to execute, and I think it's a good idea to publish an update - as a board we need to cleanup and publish minutes from our meeting in due course, which I expect to help. Please be patient; we are currently a few days away from the transition to a new board which (may) be more decisive and dynamic - I really hope so - let see. Then again - I love that you are interested & care! =) it has been a long time since anyone has turned up to a public board meeting, and/or asked good questions - which can surely only be a good thing. ATB, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, GM Collabora Productivity Hangout: mejme...@gmail.com, Skype: mmeeks (M) +44 7795 666 147 - timezone usually UK / Europe -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy
Re: [board-discuss] Representation statement
Hi Andreas, On 20/02/2020 13:57, Andreas Mantke wrote: > Am 20.02.20 um 14:47 schrieb Franklin Weng: >> I, Franklin Weng, elected member of the Board of Directors of The >> Document Foundation, hereby and until further notice, nominate the >> following deputies to represent me during board calls and meetings, in >> the order set forth below: >> >> 1. Nicolas Christener >> 2. Paolo Vecchi > > if I remember correctly Nicolas is partner of Collabora. Thus there > might be three person with the same affiliation in the board call, if > he'll represent you. This wouldn't be in accordance with the statutes. As Franklin is also a partner, that seems rather moot. Beyond that - I think, once again, your interpretation of affiliation is not one that stands up to scrutiny. It is also somewhat offensive to insinuate that Collabora's partners are not free agents who can and do act in the best interests of the community they were elected to represent. Regards, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, GM Collabora Productivity Hangout: mejme...@gmail.com, Skype: mmeeks (M) +44 7795 666 147 - timezone usually UK / Europe -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy
[board-discuss] Representation statement
I, Michael Meeks, elected member of the Board of Directors of The Document Foundation, hereby and until further notice, nominate the following deputies to represent me during board calls and meetings, in the order set forth below: 1. Nicolas Christener 2. Paolo Vecchi -- Michael Meeks, <><, Director of The Document Foundation Kurfürstendamm 188, 10707 Berlin, Germany Rechtsfähige Stiftung des bürgerlichen Rechts Legal details: http://www.documentfoundation.org/imprint -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy
Re: [board-discuss] Trademark policy
Hi Dennis, On 28/02/2020 13:04, Dennis Roczek wrote: > you just were telling us in the public part of the board meeting that > the TDF can remove the trade mark of the TDC with a prenotification of > 30 days. That is the plan. > Is the trade mark policy basically the one published in the wiki? [0] Or > is it another one (and is this the published somewhere else)? We currently have several TM licenses for all sorts of entities across the ecosystem - anyone in our community using the LibreOffice brand on a product, service etc. should be assumed to have one. You can't eg. print a T-shirt or a mug with our branding on it without one. Those are all very similar in substance - and are IIRC all unilaterally revocable with ~zero notice by TDF. If the BoD doesn't like what you do - then they can decide to just pull the plug by a simple majority. I would expect a similar, but bespoke agreement for TDC to give time to wind up TDC & give staff notice. That gives huge influence over anyone who signs one of those and does business with the LibreOffice brand. I know - I used to ship product under one, and it turned every minor suggestion of a BoD member into a nightmare feature-request I had to deliver on or risk termination of my business =) so - have been on both sides here; and it's not at all pleasant being at the whim of 10 people with very different visions. > [0] https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/TDF/Policies/Trademark_Policy This is the general policy, primarily focused at avoiding some of the mistakes & problems Mozilla experienced with Firefox, built on the OpenOffice experience and soon. Hence the bit at the end: "If you have questions about using TDF marks, or if you think you should be able to use TDF marks for any purpose not allowed by this policy and would like permission for that use, or for more information concerning our label program, please contact TDF by emailing le...@documentfoundation.org (non-public)." ATB, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, GM Collabora Productivity Hangout: mejme...@gmail.com, Skype: mmeeks (M) +44 7795 666 147 - timezone usually UK / Europe -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy
Re: [board-discuss] How is TDC compelled to keep the user first?
Hi Brett, First thank you for your questions; cogent, lucid, well articulated & challenging :-) On 28/02/2020 14:04, Brett Cornwall wrote: > Other Free Software projects have had for-profit entities created > underneath the stewardship of a non-profit; Mozilla Corporation and > Canonical are two living examples. Perhaps in both these cases - the difference is exclusive ownership of the TM here, and they totally dominate their ecosystems & communities whether intentionally or not. I guess Mozilla looks to me structurally not unlike TDF plus TDF's captive business entity. Similarly the intention with TDC is not to build a Mozilla style monolith that hires developers - but to contract that out in order to grow the number of independent companies & individuals contributing to development. That can help to build the ecosystem. Over time - new companies and individuals will want to diversify their revenue sources and evangelize LibreOffice to new customers, and niches. We saw this historically with Nokia's investment into Maemo - a flourishing of many companies and interest and investment. > Canonical has made similar > sacrifices (e.g. Ubuntu One proprietary service integration, > cease-and-desists towards fixubuntu.com). I know nothing of the specifics here. TDC will emphatically not own the LibreOffice brand: TDF will. TDC will have a limited, unilaterally terminate-able license and limited exclusivity to use it in app-stores. So in the case of a (critical?) website - TDF could give them a license to use the brand in a suitable way as now; why not. > 1. How would TDF intend to protect users against the inevitable > temptations to prioritize money/brand over users/computing ethics? "We > can always pull the plug" is not a compelling argument as that's only > used for the direst of circumstances, not the slow poisoning of the well > that Mozilla have experienced. I would imagine that the TDF members can elect boards that would put pressure on TDC to stop doing that ultimately up to and including the option of pulling the plug by choosing to revoke TDC's TM license unilaterally. > 2. How will TDF assure communities that the creation of a for-profit > entity to manage branding that the above examples will not occur? Hmm; I don't see TDC as managing branding, I would expect TDF to do that. I would expect TDC to follow the branding coming out of the marketing / UX teams in the community - that TDF are involved with. > 3. What assurances does TDF offer that assuage fears that the lifeblood > of LibreOffice will pivot from one of community involvement to one of > company culture (with community involvement as a PR spin)? So - I think this is an excellent question for any corporate or non-profit's involvement in FLOSS. It is the same question whenever TDF hires a staff member to do something the community can also do - and there really is no easy answer. TDF staff (typically) have a heavy focus on not per-se doing the job, but growing and enabling the community around doing that job. Beyond that, having many diverse entities and individuals contributing is surely a good thing; certainly rather than a monolithic organization which both Mozilla & Ubuntu are. My 2 cents anyway, ATB, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, GM Collabora Productivity Hangout: mejme...@gmail.com, Skype: mmeeks (M) +44 7795 666 147 - timezone usually UK / Europe -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy
Re: [board-discuss] Invitation to public TDF board meeting on Friday, March 13th at 1300 Berlin time
Hi Drew, On 11/03/2020 17:43, Drew Jensen wrote: > I was wondering about the 'FOSDEM goals' is there something that should > be read before that meeting or is the meeting meant to introduce them? The latter =) the old & new boards came up with some key goals for the year a month or go or so at FOSDEM - we intended to publish them at the time, but havn't got to it yet. Hopefully we can get to that, ATB, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, GM Collabora Productivity Hangout: mejme...@gmail.com, Skype: mmeeks (M) +44 7795 666 147 - timezone usually UK / Europe -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy
Re: [board-discuss] OwnCloud offering
Hi Uwe, On 19/03/2020 10:23, Uwe Altmann wrote: > Just got a mail from OwnCloud offering owncloud.online as "ownCloud as a> > Service" - advertising "integrated OnlyOffice for easy and secure > real-time collaboration on documents, spreadsheets and presentations" > > Is someone there to talk to them using LOO instad? Of course Collabora talk to ownCloud regularly, in person & elsewhere; though our bizdev resources are heavily constrained. I suspect this partly a technical / marketing choice rather than a lack of communication. If you want end-to-end encryption, Online cannot do that (though using LibreOffice locally can do that). If you want Secure View then OnlyOffice cannot do that but Online can, so - I guess this is partly a marketing decision. ATB, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, GM Collabora Productivity Hangout: mejme...@gmail.com, Skype: mmeeks (M) +44 7795 666 147 - timezone usually UK / Europe -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy
Re: [board-discuss] Involvement of the board in the Marketing Plan
Hi Sam, On 26/06/2020 17:32, Sam Tuke wrote: > It seems like only one member of the current Board of Directors was > present in that meeting (though there may have been some who stayed > silent; please correct me). Interestingly the slides were also posted here a week ago, and discussed in a public board meeting last week too (IIRC). Then again - the link disappearing is annoying; but IIRC we have no E-mail attachments on-list. Clearly, we're soliciting feedback and eager to get input from the whole community. > If input into the plan from the marketing team is desirable to the > Board, then we as marketing team members need a clearer understanding > of how that should be provided. So - here is a good place to suggest things of course. > I do not take it for granted that this information was shared with > the team prior to adoption (though to gain support from the team it > seems like a sensible move). =) this has been quite widely shared; but we can always do more to communicate better; clearly. > The strain on this coordination is plainly visible in the plan > itself, on the "preface" slides explaining eg the LibreOffice Online > situation. It's a problem when a staff member is forced to hint that > some topics are out of bounds in this way because they are stuck > between "a rock and hard place" and must resort to such things to > discourage input on controversial issues which can have no effect. Hmm? I don't know that anyone is forced to hint anything. And your input is welcome of course on all related topics. The problem space here is a large & really complex one where Marketing plays a vital role - many people coming fresh to the problem-space badly need a primer to help understand the interlocking opportunities & pitfalls, so it seems sensible to have a detailed proposal to kick around; of course improving it, or presenting another proposal is perfectly possible. > The current draft plan is broad in scope, > covering community management, branding, and touching on ecosystem > design. Tough topics could be split into other sections, or strategy > documents if necessary, freeing the marketing team with more room to > influence the narrower, purely marketing topics which remain. We can come up with a better process of course; but I'm more interested in your (and other) concrete suggestions / or new proposals to make things better - so things can be improved. You had some good ideas around KPIs AFAIR, which I imagine will turn up in the next iteration; but I'm personally eager for more. ATB, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, GM Collabora Productivity Hangout: mejme...@gmail.com, Skype: mmeeks (M) +44 7795 666 147 - timezone usually UK / Europe -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy
[board-discuss] Some problems.
Hi all, This is a short summary of some of the problems that I see with LibreOffice, and this is written with my personal / Collabora hat on. People are welcome to question my motivations - but my mission is to try to nurture a successful FLOSS project that creates excellent FLOSS Office Productivity software and makes it freely available to all. Many here will share that goal I hope. Nevertheless there are some big problems currently. Perhaps you think you have a neat solution to one of them. I'd love to hear about it - but solving or obsessing about just one is unlikely to do the job: * LibreOffice is at serious risk Frustration with how TDF markets and positions its 'product' (LibreOffice) against the ecosystem that contributes the majority of the coding work is at an all-time high. That ecosystem itself is under long term stress. Despite years of patient work, writing up the problems here, talks at conferences, personal pleas for change and improvement, and a number of tweaks, nothing -effective- has happened. You can read about the situation here: https://people.gnome.org/~michael/data/vendor-neutral-marketing.html * That's too long (despite the pictures); what are the problems ? Read the Ecosystem / Sustainability minutes from our board call. https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/TDF/BoD_Meetings#Minutes_2020-05-22 I've helpfully appended it to this mail. It has the history of the ecosystem to today presented by myself & Thorsten as bullets. Then we have some of the ecosystem problems: + how to differentiate from LibreOffice: + support - but why buy that ? it's great. + how to differentiate inside the ecosystem ? + proprietary bits suck badly, obviously. + how to get the message out that it even exists ? + for less than the cost of the software. + how to get the message out that it is more authentic and genuine to get LibreOffice from those doing the majority of the code contribution, than the free version from TDF ? + how to build a brand that stands for quality and support vs. the Goliath brand: LibreOffice ? + how to make LibreOffice not mean "everything for free, please don't pay anything" to most users ? Anyhow - more details and some FAQ below: * Surely companies have to buy support & security updates ? They always complain to me about the lack of support wrt. avoiding using FLOSS ! Sadly no. Microsoft gives poor to non-existent support to the majority of users so ~no-one expects to buy it, they expect to buy a product. Enterprises tend to test a version & deploy it to their desktops and leave it there - they can do that with LibreOffice from TDF. It is routinely the case that I meet organizations that have deployed free LibreOffice without long term support, with no security updates etc. Try the Cabinet Office in the UK (at the center of UK Government), or a large European Gov't Department I recently visited - 15,000 seats - with some great FLOSS enthusiasm, but simply no conceptual frame that deploying un-supported FLOSS in the enterprise hurts the software that they then rely on. Or a giant Pharma company in the news right now; companies do it left & right. This became a familiar problem when after the OpenSSL / heartbleed debacle it was discovered that just a couple of people were part-time maintaining something vital to the whole world's internet. This is an extraordinarily common pattern, people come to tell me how many free seats they've installed in large enterprises - and while this is a triumph; they tragedy is that they stop at this point. Far too often the whole thrust of the selling was "zero cost" - which is a terrible way to market FLOSS. They are now used to downloading Chrome or Firefox and deploying these advertising supported products for free everywhere. Building our USP as zero-cost is a horrible way to market LibreOffice to enterprises. So - lets turn this around - can anyone thing of more than five enterprises that paid for support or instead (just as good) contributed meaningfully to LibreOffice instead ? Munich, and ... Of course we maintain and promote lists of enterprises that deployed for free with no support ? => It is the norm to deploy LibreOffice from TDF in enterprises, and pay nothing for support & maintenance that can go into development. + its that good. * You're too expensive: I can get cheaper support from LXYZ instead ? Another pathology is that there are companies who ship LibreOffice, often claiming support, but then file all their tickets up-stream and hope they are fixed for free. Naturally they are cheaper in government tenders, they use our brand, they leave the customer with hundreds of un-fixed bugs, and all of the use
[board-discuss] Re: Some problems.
One clarification since it caused some private questions: On 07/07/2020 21:13, Michael Meeks wrote: > Collabora - despite C'bra still putting a lot of work into > LibreOffice Desktop, having an outstanding support capability, doing > lots of marketing, being the largest code contributor to LibreOffice, > and having lots of existing happy customers / references for desktop > LibreOffice, ... etc. etc. > > We have not had -one- -single- -new- Collabora *Office* > customer since 2018 - zero. I think Thorsten stated more cleanly as: "The market for desktop libreoffice is tough; sales cycles frequently count in multiple years" which I agree with. Of course - we have also sold some seats of LibreOffice Vanilla for Mac in the app-store, which is desktop & has let us fix a number of Mac bugs. That's about 5% of C'bras income / expenditure. Some people kindly offered to buy some seats. Sadly the transaction cost (outside an app-store) of selling to an individual, or handful of users is very significant: sales time, invoicing, accounting, account setup, software setup, responding to tickets etc. makes this loss-making for less than several 10's of users or pre-paid multi-year commitments. > => so it makes no economic sense at all to invest in > -Desktop- Libreoffice you will never see a return. > > That is manageable - we are investing heavily in creating > Online and that is going well, and it funds our work on LibreOffice. And of course for us Collabora Online is the tip of the spear for investment & expected returns, with education being a key sector currently. We have a growing set of customers there. That as well as some intermittent consultancy pieces lets us work on improving lots of things in the LibreOffice core for our users. HTH, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, GM Collabora Productivity Hangout: mejme...@gmail.com, Skype: mmeeks (M) +44 7795 666 147 - timezone usually UK / Europe -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy
[board-discuss] Personal: and software freedom.
Hi Jan-Marek, Thanks for your mail; there are lots of interesting points here, some of them shared by others too. Here is my take: On 06/07/2020 21:52, Jan-Marek Glogowski wrote: > The people involved in the decision set this time frame themselves. > Nothing is forcing this change to be made in the LO 7.0 release cycle. True; and deferring is an option the board has outlined. At some stage soon we need to grasp this nettle as a community though. I guess after you wrote this - I outlined the problems that the proposal solves. I would be interested in your feedback in the light of that really. >> 7. This is a complex decision involving many overlapping concerns... > > It feels strange, that this information is officially shared "after the > fact" (as in "after the LO source was patched"). Clearly we could have done better by blogging, having a wider discussion but there were lots of opportunities to get involved and give feedback in board meetings, on board-discuss and so on, this was in the agenda and public minutes for weeks. We even had abnormally large numbers showing up to those board meetings so people were interested. Clearly next time we'll do more shouting from the roof-tops. > And I personally think, arguments like Michael Meeks (quoting from IRC): > > "Individual users don't need to contribute, but they would be OK with > Personal. But corporate users, that also don't have to contribute, must > realize that any software used in a business process must be supported > by some spercific people: either their employees, or hired staff." > > are simply invalid. LO is free software, so everyone can use it, not > just a "person", like it's IMHO implied by the rename. Because it is free software lots of things are possible is true - that because they are possible they are therefore good, is not necessarily so. Many things are legal, but many fewer are moral. As a silly example: you have the complete right to fork LibreOffice and not contribute anything back - but this is something we generally discourage except in extremis: we want everyone to contribute and work together. Steering people towards things that help to build the community and codebase is extremely useful. In the same way many people think that steering people towards environmentally friendly alternatives might help improve the environment despite there being no legal requirement. > I guess the people are already aware of the support implications, > and otherwise don't care. And if not, then this should be made > more prominent. This is one way of making it prominent,, as you say it is implied by the rename; it is also an industry standard for successful ecosystems: Fedora vs. RedHat Enterprise Linux vs. CentOS. or SUSE vs openSUSE Each has a clear, trademarked brand, and a clear separate positioning, they 'proprietize' via the branding. All of them are "free software, so everyone can use it" =) Just like a potential "LibreOffice Personal". TDF's current positioning (despite the download page having this green/highlighted text): "For business deployments, we strongly recommend support from certified partners which also offer long-term support versions of LibreOffice." is demonstrably ~completely ineffective, as I outlined. It simply fails to encourage ~anyone to get support. We get many hundreds of thousands of people a month ignoring that, many thousands per day. That impacts the whole ecosystem - not just developers but trainers and migrators too who contribute in many other ways across the project. As such - I think a more drastic approach is called for, somewhere; whether it is the product name, or a more drastic steer on the download page, or ... something. Where do you think that should be ? Or are you up for a much smaller, pure volunteer project ? (which is where the status quo heads). > What eventually will happen is a lot of people wondering, what is going > on. No idea, if this will be good or bad marketing in the end; Absolutely. It will encourage a lot of conversations - that's not all bad; some will say: "Just use Personal in our business you don't have to pay, and it has all the features" others will be: "I didn't deploy that because I'm scared of it, I can afford to run a large enterprise and buy PCs but want my enterprise software for free" yet others might be: "I didn't realize its a good thing to contribute by buying support & services, I can't deploy Personal to my staff, so lets see: wow it's far cheaper
Re: [board-discuss] Personal Edition label and define is wrong.
Hi Peter, On 07/07/2020 00:46, Peter Dolding wrote: > Well will all new enterprise need features now appear in the > "LibreOffice Enterprise" first and then "LibreOffice Enterprise" users > have to beta test them before they come to Personal Edition? I think there were some slides which were brainstorming in Italo's deck around having the enterprise version first, and then some delay etc. Probably that's still confusing - and you point out some of the problems with that. The ask for that didn't come from me / the ecosystem - and I think there is consensus that this is not a great idea =) We already have a sensible release-train process with freezes that everybody understands and works around, and I've not seen concerns around sticking with that. That process means that features appear in master, some are back-ported to product builds and shipped earlier, but the TDF version ends including shipping them within six months. That gives an incentive to invest in creating features to differentiate and a lead-time to enjoy that before the next step on the tread-mill of trying to explain why people should buy something when there is (apparently) a free enterprise product --> over there that appears more genuine. > I have had a lot of cases where I have been able to get Libreoffice in > next to Microsoft Office at first by it being free and licensed for > anyone to use. I'm curious - what happens after that at-first ? do you have a business that provides support or services ? do they ever pay for anything that ends up supporting LibreOffice ? >>> LibreOffice Enterprise: only from ecosystem members > > Only from ecosystem members this means if this equals must pay someone > to get this version lot of my deployments in different businesses of > Libreoffice would never have happened.Yes I can see those wanting > to make the "LibreOffice Enterprise" wanting as many paying customers > as possible. It seem you deploy LibreOffice in lots of businesses; I'm interested in your experience of the economics of that. > There are a lot of projects that do Community and Enterprise editions > using those names make sense. Personal editions with open source > software almost never make any sense and normally end up writing > something in conflict with license or their community. I'm not sure that 'Community Edition' has a clear meaning to most people; personally I liked the "LibreOffice Home and Student" as a first cut ;-) but I can see how that would annoy people. But anyhow - interesting feedback. Thanks, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, GM Collabora Productivity Hangout: mejme...@gmail.com, Skype: mmeeks (M) +44 7795 666 147 - timezone usually UK / Europe -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy
Re: [board-discuss] UPDATED Draft Marketing Plan 2020-2025
On 09/07/2020 16:23, Italo Vignoli wrote: > All community members should look regularly at the dashboard, is a very > useful tool which provides a good overview of activities. Indeed; you can see it here: https://dashboard.documentfoundation.org/ Though I believe it is being extended to be even richer and capture more types of community activity. ATB, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, GM Collabora Productivity Hangout: mejme...@gmail.com, Skype: mmeeks (M) +44 7795 666 147 - timezone usually UK / Europe -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy
[board-discuss] LibreOffice Personal & TDF's statutes & purpose
Hi Alex, On 06/07/2020 10:27, Alexander Werner wrote in bugzilla at > https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=134486#c23 > Cleary, The Document Foundation must release a version that is open > to all intended audiences. As clearly stated in the statues, the > intended audience is: everyone, explicitly including COMPANIES and > PUBLIC AUTHORITIES. Some comments on that; the statutes are public here: https://www.documentfoundation.org/foundation/statutes/ > I quote from the preamble: > > "The objective of the foundation is the promotion and >development of office software available for use by anyone >free of charge." A tag and about box text doesn't modify any of this. The fundamental license and availability for use by anyone free of charge stays. Clearly that is so. Beyond tweaking the brand with a tag - no change is suggested to the software or its distribution at all. Moving on let me include the omitted second paragraph: "The foundation promotes a sustainable, independent and meritocratic community for the international development of free and open source software based on open standards." These mission goals are not optional. We need to be sustainable - How large a community do you think it is necessary to have to sustain the software ? how do we promote that ? > The issue gets even clearer: > > "This software will be openly available for free use by anyone for > their own files, including companies and public authorities, > ensuring full participation in a digital society and without > detriment to intellectual property." So - LibreOffice Personal -as-now- will be openly available for free use by anyone; so that is also clearly met. * Some background on the history & philosophical context here: + Free Software has for decades been fighting against the idea that it is free-as-in-beer, and talking of free-as-in-freedom. + RMS regularly distinguishes Libre from Gratis, and talks about the vital freedoms. Arguably the Open Source movement itself is a reaction against this "free of price" frame. + if we take an extreme view of this paragraph in our statutes that would lead me to the conclusion that we are mis-named: we should be called "GratisOffice" - if freedom from price is the core purpose of the project. Perhaps we're overdue for a re-brand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre if our core purpose is Gratis; it's just horribly confusing to call ourselves Libre. + Many commnity members I've spoken to have little sympathy for enterprises that just take, and contribute nothing back except bug reports & associated aggravation. + They have even less sympathy for those who charge for using our brand and software in the enterprise, and then contribute nothing back. + By focusing here, it -can- sound as if you arguing that our core purpose is to give free stuff to large, rich enterprises ? that we should sweat and toil for free, for the good of IBM, or Oracle, or ... =) surely not. + for me that's not a motivating factor whatsoever, I want to collaborate with other contributors to promote and develop an office suite available for use by anyone free of charge; in a sustainable way. LibreOffice Personal/Community could be how we promote that. But really, how it is marketed, what tags go on the splash screen - how we try to -effectively- (we're good at doing this ineffectively ;-) steer people towards even starting to understand that they need to contribute, whether directly themselves or via the ecosystem - these all seem to be tactical issues. We know that existing attempts to do that are an utter failure, with zero up-take. We know that enterprises (charitably) don't even know that they should do the right thing here. We know that changing here might be disruptive, but having some suggestions of what changes might be acceptable and some idea of what success might look like would be really helpful. What do you think TDF should concretely do to solve the problems I outline: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/msg04591.html We know that enterprises don't donate and that the vast majority don't contribute, so it is individual persons via donations, or via awesome contributions =) alongside the ecosystem who end up funding what work goes on the project. I think Bjoern states that rather well here[1]: "IMHO, the same applies even stronger to @tdforg as an NGO: I dont think other institutions -- especially commercial ones that are not contributing to its projects -- have any moral rights to it
Re: [board-discuss] Discussion about options available with marketing plan draft and timetable
On 09/07/2020 17:00, Paolo Vecchi wrote: > That was a temporary placeholder used while the developers implemented a > potential tag line features that may or may not be used depending on the If nothing else, it served a good purpose to actually get the discussion started after we'd had several only partially successful attempts to do that =) > On 09/07/2020 15:30, Alexander Werner wrote: >> 1. LibreOffice Online - Unsupported Warning I don't have much to add to the explanation on the page: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/ AFAIK believe TDF is obliged to educate users, telling them not to do silly things is perhaps wise. >> 2. LibreOffice Online - Containing Support Keys >> >> Looking through the source code of LibreOffice Online, it can be easily >> found, that there is a build option for support keys, this makes >> absolutely no sense in our software product. >> (https://git.libreoffice.org/online/+/refs/heads/master/wsd/LOOLWSD.cpp#1259) >> >> **I hereby request the board to take action to remove parts of the >> software that are of no use for the intended audience.** Arguably there is quite a lot of useless features in the software =) if we apply this widely it could take a very long time. This feature is disabled even in most of our C'bra product builds but is in some. Why ? We sell support & services based on the number of users, and by baking a public key into the code we can then sign a 'key' that tweaks that limit per customer; that shares the binary across many customers. Mostly though we do trust-based per-user licensing. C'bra wrote that code and published and included it - I believe CIB has used it too, others are welcome to if they find that useful. I imagine it's no different from innumerable other OSS support activation keys in software. Is your concern that TDF hosts the bits? Or is it your concern that the ecosystem sells support and services on a per-user basis ? or ? Generally as a development team we've had rather a friendly and open view to including random features that are only of minority usefulness - from Haiki OS support, to configure options to bundle proprietary templates and so on. The more FLOSS the better. Would be good to have more precision on this concern, Thanks, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, GM Collabora Productivity Hangout: mejme...@gmail.com, Skype: mmeeks (M) +44 7795 666 147 - timezone usually UK / Europe -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy
Re: [board-discuss] Re: [tdf-members] Personal: and software freedom.
Hi Kev, I havn't had a chance to get back to your rather detailed and interesting feedback en-mass; but let me respond to just this one (nearly totally off-topic) nugget =) On 10/07/2020 05:15, Kev M wrote: > Personally, in the IT world, I usually ignore the "contact us for > pricing" vendors; you have to chat with someone for 30-60 minutes to try > to get them to tell you how expensive their software is.. it's easier > just to find a competing vendor that has a price calculator on their site. We tried this at Collabora both ways. As a developer my instinct was always to be as easy to do business with as possible: public pricing, no discounts, provide as much information as possible to every inquiry so that with minimal round-trips people have all the information to make their own decision without having to interact with or relate to anyone etc. I spent my time leaning on professional sales people to tell them that this is the right way to do business. But - you know, it basically doesn't work in the enterprise space (or perhaps anywhere outside supermarkets selling ultra commodity products ;-). It was an expensive lesson for me to learn. Putting less information on our website for example - increased inquiries (no surprise), and with the friendly conversations that ensued we managed to explain our proposition, answer any objections and then sell (and we're not expensive of course). What can I say; it's not my preferred approach - but then, if it works - and that delivers funds we can turn back into LibreOffice improvement: needs must ... ATB, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, GM Collabora Productivity Hangout: mejme...@gmail.com, Skype: mmeeks (M) +44 7795 666 147 - timezone usually UK / Europe -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy
Re: [board-discuss] Discussion about options available with marketing plan draft and timetable
On 10/07/2020 11:12, Florian Effenberger wrote: > With all the feedback received, I strongly propose to leave 7.0 without > tagging and finalize the plan for a later release. I share Thorsten's view. While I've generally been a big proponent of getting everything nailed down in one try, I would strongly prefer to get a weaker solution "Community Edition" out which seems to be collecting a weight of support against Personal. That support arriving even before we had a clear write-up of the issues we want to solve. Perhaps we can iterate it based on feedback, we at least generate some hard data on its effectiveness. I would also really like to avoid stalling effective improvements to our website to encourage enterprises to support the project. The improvements there to date have been really small and incremental, and as we now know ineffective. > I know there are concerns this would delay things > infinitely and nothing will happen, Ultimately, we're getting press, and interest, and relevance, and feedback from the community: integrating that into something better while people are interested sounds good to me. I'm sure marketing can turn that into a success story. It is now widely known that the status-quo is working extraordinarily poorly. Rather than accepting and extending that for six months - I'd prefer to use the momentum to encourage at least some improvement. > The name “Personal” excludes even small educational organizations, which > are a part as per slide 29. It also excludes small NGOs - thinking of > the local street worker office with two volunteers, or the youth care ... > but still, I think “Personal” sets the frame too strict. ...> Also, if we go to universities for the budgeted campus ambassador > program, with the above wording, even using in smaller working groups ... > I know the plan is to draw a line somewhere, but the above, at least for > a non-native speaker, feels quite narrow. I really don't think we want to discourage contributing to LibreOffice. That's why it's important we get our marketing right. However carving out Education, Universities, NGOs, youth care - as markets which should not support the project financially is really unhelpful. It is hard to predict the future, and the best predictions are sold to people rather than being free but checkout: https://www.gminsights.com/industry-analysis/collaboration-software-market This has a pretty pie-chart in it "Canada Collaboration Software Market share by Application 2026": https://www.gminsights.com/assets/img/collaboration-software-market-by-application.png Education is approaching 25% of that. In recent time, Education has been a bright point for actually contributing to the ecosystem. As one example - we can now build and run on iOS and tablets because of a single education area in Switzerland - as well as a big chunk of Adfinis and Collabora's investment. Perhaps a good thing we didn't tell them that they don't have to contribute or get support. Education sales has helped to fuel a similarly significant chunk of C'bras development team via sales in lockdown. It is quite unclear to me why some segments that pay for a premis, heating, lighting, hardware, sysadmin time, network bandwidth, deployment, a Windows OS ;-) and more should not be encouraged to contribute to LibreOffice's growth. For our friends, we can sooth their conscience and tell them that using the Personal or Community version is just fine for them, and that we contribute for them - or whatever =) that's easy to do personally surely? That means we can help our friends and neighbours while not killing the market for whole segments. > What we want to do is to very strongly encourage them, convince them, > make things clear to them, because the project can only survive if there > is sufficient funding, and the ecosystem is one of several key > parameters for the success of TDF - we wouldn't be where we are without > all of you, all of the community. Thanks for those words. > I find it much easier to celebrate things with a positive message than Problem is; this celebration party is great - but currently has nearly zero attendees =) The hosts are tapping their watches and wondering if they even bothered to send an invitation out =) I would really like to see some messaging that we can show is effective. > TDF is no different in this regard! We ourselves, we use lots of free > software as an organization - be it for web, database, file services, > mail, chat, conferencing and other servers. We have the skills in-house > and we often rely on pre-compiled binaries from free software projects. > We do contribute back e.g. by supporting upstream development, doing > advocacy and working together on a common goal. I think this is generally acceptable in the society of FLOSS projects because we contrib
[board-discuss] Re: [tdf-members] Personal: and software freedom.
Hi Lionel, First - thanks for your thoughtful feedback. I essentially agree =) On 10/07/2020 02:40, Lionel Élie Mamane wrote: > Redhat will sell you a yearly subscription for a single workstation, > as low as 180 USD. So will SuSE for 32 GBP. Will any ecosystem company > scale down ? That takes a fully automated setup, where people > self-register and pay on your website. Right - and such infrastructure requires significant investment to setup; absent any need for that - no-one will do make that investment I guess (outside of app-stores). Currently interest is negligible, so that investment looks premature. > Closer to home, Microsoft will sell you a single licence for their > office suite, either as "perpetual" or "subscription" starting at 5 > USD/month or 8.25 USD/month, no upfront payment, pay each month. I > wouldn't call the process entirely pain-free, but from their point of > view, it doesn't require human intervention for every sale, for every > invoice, for every payment. Right. > So, if ecosystem companies want to attract the same "every business > user pays" model, they need to make that actually workable, easy and > as painless as possible. Currently, my feeling is that it is > deadlocked into a chicken and egg type problem; the ecosystem > companies are the chicken, and they need to invest effort (and > capital) lay the first eggs. They cannot wait for the economies of > scale to drop into their lap and make it worthwhile to setup the > human-free "pay us" system. They need to put the system in place, and > only then can the number of small scale paying users actually grow. Sure. Then again - if there is an explosion of interest that proves demand (this would be a good problem to have) - I'm confident that the ecosystem can respond in a matter of days to weeks to plug that gap =) > If the developer ecosystem companies are not willing to put their > money where their mouth is (and "lay the first eggs" for the SME > market), the whole presentation needs to be refocused so that it is > clear that only "enterprise" deployments of "many" (for some value of > "many") users are invited/encouraged/under moral obligation to pay. Which is a completely fair comment too. It's unclear of course if eg. a Community Edition will yield any significant traction, and certainly encouraging enterprises of a certain size to contribute (because others might swamp the ecosystem with transaction & setup costs) is hard to do in a single word =) I imagine this can be finessed initially by careful marketing on the LibreOffice Enterprise portal to steer the right people to use LibreOffice Community vs. an Enterprise version. Thanks, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, GM Collabora Productivity Hangout: mejme...@gmail.com, Skype: mmeeks (M) +44 7795 666 147 - timezone usually UK / Europe -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy
Re: [board-discuss] Discussion about options available with marketing plan draft and timetable
Hi Toki, On 12/07/2020 22:41, toki wrote: > They might be mistaken, but in as much as Collabora has > stated that they have had zero new customers since 2018 To correct this mis-apprehension; I spoke about new Desktop product customers, and Thorsten reported a similar experience at CIB. > it looks a lot like Collabora, and the rest of the > LibreOffice Ecosystem are looking at TDF/LibreOffice to > also do their marketing for them. Clearly both Volunteers and Ecosystem are important parts of the LibreOffice community. If we frame the discussion as them vs. us, we exacerbate conflict. You will be surprised to know that C'bra and CIB have funded TDF/LibreOffice Marketing / outreach in the past too. Mike can perhaps report on the results there. It heavily foundered on the hard-gratis messaging. Everyone wants something for free, then they want to complain about it =) IMHO TDF needs to build space for an ecosystem that can afford to invest in improving LibreOffice. Or alternatively - it needs to bin its ecosystem and become the one-company that controls the brand and does everything: Mozilla style (though I'm far from a fan of this model, I think it's broadly doomed to failure as I wrote in my ecosystem paper, and our current efforts at TDF to spend money on development are are not encouraging). > 2) https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=76842 exemplifies > the potential client that the support vendor was unable to convert. > 8,500 seats would be either £51,000 per month, or per year, assuming the > publicly stated seat prices are accurate. This is an example of a spectacularly entitled and unpleasant government deployment expecting free LTS, rapid response to their problems, and also not to pay anyone for it. > (One place gave the base price > as being per year. A different place gave the base price as being per > month.) Without having the facts on hand, I'd guess that the issue was > money --- specifically, that the bug-reporter was blind-sided by both > the amounts involved, and was provided with none of the virtues of how & > why paying for support would enable his organisation to be more > effective. (Did the vendor rep point out that their support included > software that enables rolling out new releases on a more timely basis, > including extensions, templates, corporate palettes, and the like?) Sure; Tim worked for me back then - he was a professional sales person, and I'm sure he provided a compelling view of the value-add (vs. what you can get for free without support). Of course - being aggressive in up-stream bug reports to try to get free support is something that many try. It would be nice if they did not. It seems to me that having deployed something for free, saved a significant amount of money on Microsoft Office licenses - say half a million per year; it is unhelpful to complain. Problem is - he was talking to a sysadmin who wants an immediate fix: by which time we're -far- too late in the cycle; much better to have worked this out in advance. There are a number of larger deployments that buy the gratis message, then they fall over an increasing number of small annoyances that cumulatively drive them away over the years. It's not a good model for the project to promote, it results in unhappy users, a bad experience of the brand, and starves product development. Another thing that strikes me is - that I travel on RyanAir, and the flight is crammed but the service is not particularly dire, and yet the number of aggressive complaints is high. I fly on a higher cost airline and I can't tell the difference in service, but there is often much less grumbling when you pay more. Curious. Either way - moving marketing away from gratis towards libre sounds like a good move to me. ATB, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, GM Collabora Productivity Hangout: mejme...@gmail.com, Skype: mmeeks (M) +44 7795 666 147 - timezone usually UK / Europe -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy
Re: [board-discuss] Re: [tdf-members] Personal: and software freedom.
Hi Toki, On 13/07/2020 01:11, toki wrote: > By way of example, whenever I open a document in> Apache OpenOffice I think I've detected the location of the bug already. > and that AOo and LibO are slowly migrating towards > mutual incompatibility. I expect that this is a matter of keeping up with standards. It takes significant investment to stand still in the market we're in. > LibreOffice and A11Y tools ... > Can _any_ of the LibreOffice Ecosystem support vendors provide A11Y > support? Going by the websites I've seen, it would appear that they do not. Collabora sells root cause bug fixes for a fixed (published) price; and have extensive experience available around a11y - so if you want code-fix support; then yes. RedHat have fixed a11y issues, I'm sure CIB and others can to if that is the support you want. If you want training or AT fixing - I imagine Hypra or NV Access would know where to start. The problem is of course, that there is nearly an infinite amount of work and/or customization that can be done in this area. Almost all user want it to have been done already, rather than to pay for that. The search for support you outline was apparently not terribly rigorous; at least I didn't hear of it. ATB, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, GM Collabora Productivity Hangout: mejme...@gmail.com, Skype: mmeeks (M) +44 7795 666 147 - timezone usually UK / Europe -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy
Re: [board-discuss] Some problems.
Hi Uwe, On 13/07/2020 11:01, Uwe Altmann wrote: > TLTR?: Become a professional managed organization I imagine it's not just Italo that has concerns with that =) > Teach people that LibreOffice is not the gratis version of MS > Office but a real great idea which they can and shall support > in various ways. Totally behind that; marketing more of the project and less of a gratis product. > Till this field, then economic returns can be seeded and grow there; > and this is something TDF can do. Clearly we need to educate people. > Don't try to force the TDF to do what it cannot (by statutes > and/or by law) do Of course. > if it is a really important issue, create an independent > structure for it. The ecosystem though has a lot of competing independent structures, each with different strengths, and interest in bringing LibreOffice to different niches. Clearly having more players there would be good, though having a single hyper-privileged one would not. But possibly new structures are needed I suppose. ATB, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, GM Collabora Productivity Hangout: mejme...@gmail.com, Skype: mmeeks (M) +44 7795 666 147 - timezone usually UK / Europe -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy
Re: [board-discuss] Re: [tdf-members] Discussion about options available with marketing plan draft and timetable
Hi Regina, First - thank you for your help getting at least one TDF tender un-blocked to get that ODF 1.3 support implemented. That's much appreciated :-) On 13/07/2020 14:13, Regina Henschel wrote: > "Edition" itself is dangerous too, because it implies, that the download > from TDF might not contain all features. Interesting to see you changed your mind on this; your last mails suggested that some sort of Edition tag would be ok for you IIRC. > Another distinction is the kind of support. As I've said - I don't believe that support by itself is something that companies know they should need and value; they don't expect to get it from Microsoft - they expect an extremely polished product. > To make these more visible, I can think of changes for the download page: > Introduction > Download option "fresh" > Download option "still". I think Mike had plans for wire-frames to consider how the website might look, we can perhaps integrate this. > Introduction > The Document Foundation (TDF) provides LibreOffice releases on a /time > based cycle/. TDF provides a feature release half yearly, followed by > usually six bug fix releases. Why would I not choose that for my company ? > Other versions, including long-term support versions, and special > services for the needs of companies and larger organizations are > available from LibreOffice partners, read // for > more details. This presupposes that people want long term support, or 'special' (ie. which I read as not-for-me) services. Microsoft has been moving the world to a stream of constant updates for Windows 10 with some success. On what basis do we think that highlighting this feature will have any noticeable impact ? That we think that they -should- want those things is fair enough, but that doesn't mean that they do. We can of course do the change, and measure the result - and iteratively A/B test the website until it is effective - if we know what effective is of course. I would suggest that saying "are available" is very short of a concrete endorsement, or a call to action, or ... > Remove the comment "If you're a technology enthusiast, early adopter or > power user, this version is for you!" from "fresh"-rectangle. Hmm? we replace that with ? - my (English) download page doesn't have a Fresh vs. Still thing - just versions. > Replace the comment "This version is slightly older and does not have > the latest features, but it has been tested for longer. For business > deployments, we strongly recommend support from certified partners which > also offer long-term support versions of LibreOffice."> with the comment > "Last bug fix release for this LibreOffice series is in ". So we remove a strong recommendation to use a long-term supported version - and replace it with an implicit suggestion that they might need that, and also with a date ? Well - it may do something, but - I'm deeply skeptical that minor cosmetic re-arrangements here will have any effect at all. We can of course test it easily enough. It would be really sad that TDF no longer strongly recommends support from certified partner. That will impact all trainers, migrators and development companies, as well as the certification program. But - the impact is perhaps limited: we already know that this existing strong recommendation is almost completely ineffective in helping our ecosystem thrive. So - presumably weakening it will have little negative impact. It looks to me like a step in the direction of doing even less to help the ecosystem, and more to spread the myth that TDF + volunteers alone create LibreOffice. > The short time where bug fixes are available for a LibreOffice series, > should make it clear to companies, that they need a different solution > than just downloading LibreOffice. So you're happy to say -something- bad about LibreOffice: that it does not have long term support in order to help the ecosystem differentiate ? That's encouraging - but I assume that other people will also want to point out on the page that there is really no need at all to buy anything and that you can just upgrade to the very latest version when that time limit expires. Still others will want to band together to provide a free LTS version - to help enterprises avid feeling they need to contribute anything back because they're worried support will run out. Others will say this creates FUD that the project is going to end in under six months =) >> On a related topic, I also wanted to comment on the underlying tone >> that some segments are using LibreOffice, but not contributing. I >> think that is hard to measure because open-source is a very large >> field, and in my opinion, anyone who invests well in open-source >> anywhere should have the moral right to use all open-source products. >> So for example, a company that supports
Re: [board-discuss] Some problems.
DF is sustained by donations from end-users, and
volunteers just train themselves & contribute - so ... no need to
support the ecosystem ? =)
You may notice the other discussions here arguing for a replacement of
the explicit recommendation to get support & services from the download
page (which we know doesn't work) with a suggestion.
>> => The LibreOffice brand is devalued and we have no way
>> of telling people that the product they deployed was
>> not suitable for deployment in an enterprise and has
>> no effective support.
>
> While those companies may not contribute meaningfully to LibreOffice
> upstream, I tend to think that they will probably manage to do their own
> branded build of LibreOffice ("MyOffice" or whatever, without a
> "Personal" tag attached), and then offer that with the same
> (nonexisting) support for basically the same price.
Sure - but they will have to put their own brands on something and
associate the terrible reputation for support with their brand not the
LibreOffice project =)
>> Possibly if we give TDF 10x more more money - it will become a
>> more dynamic organization (though still run by a committee of ten);
>> perhaps that is possible.
>
> That sounds sad and like it would be great to have that improved, even
> if it's only a partial solution.
Sign up, join the board & make things happen. We need more smart polite
people in the board and/or the MC.
>> Probably this nudge alone is enough to try to encourage real
>> contribution to LibreOffice, and get the numbers of users buying
>> support and thus contributing, or else contribuing themselves up from
>> ~zero.
>
> This might work, but as mentioned earlier, I see quite high risks it
> might in the end make things even worse (and it's hard to guess, which
> is true...).
If there are large numbers of users who refuse to contribute anything
in enterprises - and they will switch away if we ask them to: it seems
to me we're unlikely to get much from them anyway.
I try to think well of people, so I do think there are a large pool of
well-meaning people who like our brand, and product and who - if
effectively steered - and can provide a clear and plausible rational to
their management: "We can't deploy the Personal edition - we need to use
the Enterprise edition" - will seek out and support the project in this
way. Every LibreOffice deployment must have an enthusiast behind it: but
(apparently) none of them can effectively encourage anyone to pay; what
can we do to help them ? =)
> In any case, as others have already said, I personally don't like the
> idea of "actively discouraging" the use of TDF's LibreOffice, but it'd
> be great to have an approach to more positively encourage the use of
> enterprise editions.
Differentiation is like that. Somewhere we have to have a page which
says: "Who should use what version" - and/or the enterprise people have
to have a way to say: use XYZ version for ABC reason. I hear lots of
good-ideas about adding proprietary features & value for ABC - but
they're not attractive to me. A simple marketing message would be great
that does this differentiation in one place outside of the software.
> Ultimately, the goal should be to somehow convince organizations
> currently using other office suites to migrate to LibreOffice
> (Enterprise), and I think that the popularity of TDF's LibreOffice plays
> a vital role there as well.
Unless someone tells them that TDF's LibreOffice is not suitable for
their enterprise - their first (and final) stop is to deploy
GratisOffice I'm afraid, ~all the data points in that direction. They
see GratisOffice as more genuine, and legitimate and authentic than
Collabora Office eg. which is pretty depressing given how much we put in.
Conflating your other mail:
On 12/07/2020 08:59, Michael Weghorn wrote:
> On 08/07/2020 14.40, Michael Meeks wrote
>> And of course for us Collabora Online is the tip of
>> the spear for investment & expected returns, with
>> education being a key sector currently. We have a
>> growing set of customers there.
>>
>> That as well as some intermittent consultancy
>> pieces lets us work on improving lots of things in
>> the LibreOffice core for our users.
>
> Out of curiosity:
> Does that mean that much of the work that Collabora does
> for desktop is basically not being paid for by customers
> directly, i.e. something that Collabora invests into by
> itself?
I mentioned New desktop customers since 2018. We have a big mix of
existing larger customers to whom we are grateful m
Re: [board-discuss] Proposed rebranding in global perspective
Hi Tuomas,
Thanks for engaging.
On 12/07/2020 23:59, Tuomas Hietala wrote:
> So if there needs to be an "edition",
> let it be "Community Edition", which sends a message more in line with
> LO's licence and TDF's statutes, yet suggests that this edition is not
> something you want to rely on in an "enterprise" setting.
Fair enough.
> I'd like to thank Michael Meeks for his thought-provoking analysis,
> though, which makes the motivations behing the branding change more
> understandable. While I'm not necessarily sold on the idea of TDF's
> version of LO being an "edition", I agree that staying with the status
> quo would be risky for the overall health of the LO ecosystem as well.
> "Community Edition" could certainly be worth trying.
Good to hear that.
> The big issue I'd like to bring up is that the assumptions behind the
> marketing plan and Michael's analysis seem to be somewhat
> anglo/eurocentric, or perhaps more accurately "global north / major
> language centric". I live in Finland (very much in the global north, but
> not a player in the major language league), and I'm quite astonished to
> hear that in some countries lots of big companies are using LO and
> finding it as good as to need neither paid support nor MS Office. In
> Finland, MSO is ubiquitous in government and business, and the only
> "enterprise-scale" deployments of LO I'm aware of are in schools and
> universities.
Ah - so, I'm always interested by this EU case study:
https://ec.europa.eu/idabc/servlets/Doc4ec2.pdf?id=27850
From the Finnish Ministry of Justice. Section 3.4 "Support services" on
page 9/10 - has this gem:
[snip]
The conclusions of support service evaluation can be summarized as follows:
There is no need for an external Help Desk agreement with an external
service provider for OpenOffice.org user support. The need for support
appears seldom and expert services should be acquired on a case-by-case
basis.
The installations of OpenOffice.org software versions can be done as
internal work. External technical support services should be acquired on
a case-by-case basis.
[/snip]
ie. it's as good/bad as the competition, why bother getting support
(except perhaps for configuration). I rather suspect that our code
quality is now significantly higher than in the days of OpenOffice.org
2.0.x =)
From what I recall (and I may certainly be wrong), the Ministry
eventually switched to MS Office because they piled up lots of minor
problems, and had no effective support / product management / code-fix
partner to help them: but of course no doubt there are political angles
to every such decision.
I've not read that for a long time, but it reads like a multi-million
Euro saving vs. the competition - with no investment back into
OpenOffice (at the time). I may be mis-reading but at least it fits my
personal narrative of life: the situation does suck for enterprises
without support in the longer term.
> The assumption that you could just "nudge" these institutions into buying
> support for LO in addition to, or instead of, paying for MSO licences is
> quite a bold one.
It would require some sort of grass-roots awareness, that large scale
deployments that don't contribute are really unhelpful, for sure =) How
do we build that awareness?
> Maybe they'll install AOO instead
I find that rather unlikely.
> Focusing marketing efforts on nudging
> non-paying users into buying support is premised on the idea that there
> are lots of happy non-paying users in enterprise settings, which I doubt
> is true at all in many parts of the world.
I see these enterprises from time to time; and they don't even know
what harm they do (or what good they fail to do for themselves & the
community).
> The code that the ecosystem companies commit into LO benefits everyone
> regardless of country or language, of course. But TDF should still be
> careful not to alienate the volunteer community.
Of course.
> In any case, I'd be interested in hearing about the situation in other
> parts of the world and would recommend TDF to consider the global
> perspectives.
Likewise,
ATB,
Michael.
--
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Hangout: mejme...@gmail.com, Skype: mmeeks
(M) +44 7795 666 147 - timezone usually UK / Europe
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Re: [board-discuss] Big organisations not contributing
Hi Leo, On 13/07/2020 22:07, Leo Moons wrote: > It strikes me that there's a lot of talk about large organizations, that > don't contribute to the community. But why not talk to these > organizations? Its a good idea, and of course everyone is trying to do that. For example when C'bra first went into business - we sunk Eur 100k+ into a full-time sales & marketing person mostly focused on governments for over a year. They were backed by great enthusiasm and a political push from central government in the UK, net result: around zero contribution. In broad brush-strokes: governments are very good at consuming your time talking, they love that. They even legislate with positive sounding words about open standards, and so on - but getting actual traction in terms of reality on the ground - direct contribution or sales that turn into contribution is extraordinarily hard. I guess that's true of any large organization the writ from the top runs only so far down the hierarchy. I had a section on some of the problems here: https://people.gnome.org/~michael/data/vendor-neutral-marketing.html#commercial-marketing Sorry to copy/paste: "You can sponsor conferences, and attend them. Picking the right conference is a real trick, and the costs here are prohibitive. Imagine spending ~€5k attending a conference filled with Open Source interested Government IT decision makers. Imagine presenting your product, and having the friendly & enthusiastic conference moderator personally and explicitly promote buying your products to the entire conference. Imagine the zero leads that result in paid business, and/or any return at all. Repeat until convinced that this is a dead end. TDF itself has free booths at many conferences donated by the organizers, companies do not." Did I mention that ~no government person has a business card: you can meet them at a conference and chat to them while they pass by your very expensive booth, but following that up and turning it into sales is really tough. They also tend to operate on a timescale that is extraordinarily long - after all - there is little pressure to do any given thing by any given date. Naturally TDF could get free booths, free talks etc. left and right, but by presenting a gratis message in these fora with no firm steer to contribute this will consume TDF resource too for little win for our mission. > Go into discussion and convince them of the usefulness of contributing > to the project. They already get the best office software, but it is > also important for them that this software is further developed, > improved and distributed. So - of course you're right; we need to persuade people one by one, and make winsome arguments that they should contribute in their self interest. The problem is how to get that message across efficiently and effectively - the ecosystem sells software at well below the cost of MS Office. That means that the cost of marketing and sales to just initiate and complete those conversations can very easily swamp any possible return. Currently extraordinarily few enterprises appear to even know they should have that conversation around the desktop version. Hence attempting some changes here to make people more aware; does that make sense ? how can we initiate those conversations with the right people, effectively. ATB, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, GM Collabora Productivity Hangout: mejme...@gmail.com, Skype: mmeeks (M) +44 7795 666 147 - timezone usually UK / Europe -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy
Re: [board-discuss] Re: Some problems.
Hi Jonathon, On 12/07/2020 20:32, toki wrote: > On 2020/07/08 12:40, Michael Meeks wrote: >> I think Thorsten stated more cleanly as: >> >> "The market for desktop libreoffice is tough; >> sales cycles frequently count in multiple years" > > I'd blame the lack of sales on Collabora having a really > bad website So, if getting sales is only a function of a really good website - I would really suggest that you enter the market, make a fortune -and- contribute that back to LibreOffice =) all are welcome in the ecosystem. Beyond that - creating, maintaining and translating a website into a handful of languages is an expensive hobby. Another (fading) problem is that what most of us love to do is to write FLOSS code that improves our customers' lives and to contribute it to LibreOffice =) You're right - we probably should spend less on that, and more on finding FLOSS-friendly people that like to produce polished marketing copy (CV's to my inbox) - but perhaps you can forgive the imbalance. > Is that the online edition, or the desktop > edition? Is that Tier 1 or Tier 2 support? Worth digging out my mail on the counter-intuitive negatives of answering all questions on your web-page =) ATB, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, GM Collabora Productivity Hangout: mejme...@gmail.com, Skype: mmeeks (M) +44 7795 666 147 - timezone usually UK / Europe -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy
Re: [board-discuss] New Version of Strategic Marcom Plan
Hi Andreas, On 15/07/2020 18:48, kainz.a wrote: > If you are at an LibreOffice conference there are 40% people from > ecosystem and 40% volunteers. By head-count - there are a vast number of volunteers doing great stuff, they completely swamp the full-time paid developer head count. Many of them only have the time to make smaller contributions though, so depending on what metric you look at you see different things (of course). > Which mean that there is not many knowledge of the codebase from the > volunteers. We badly need to fix this by getting more C++ / coding mentors to help people improve their coding skills & achieve what they want to. It's particularly easy to do in UX often, so that'd be a great place for a mentor to focus. Currently the ecosystem does a great chunk of the code review & mentoring - but this is really expensive, it's fundamentally education (part of TDF's mission), and so much more could be done there. > Ecosystem partners need payments and TDF need volunteer > coders which is missing at the presentation. In addition > volunteers are needed and welcome everywhere. Absolutely, my hope is TDF gets more developer mentors to nurture those who are frustrated by the code and want to become part of the solution =) Skilled C++ coders with a knowledge of the codebase are rather rare I'm afraid. ATB, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, GM Collabora Productivity Hangout: mejme...@gmail.com, Skype: mmeeks (M) +44 7795 666 147 - timezone usually UK / Europe -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy
Re: [board-discuss] Re: Some problems.
Hi there, I thought I'd pull together a thread that runs through a subset of the comments here: Here is Mark S writing in bugzilla: > Let LibreOffice stay LibreOffice, and let any commercial derivatives > deal with naming issues of their products on their own time. Several other comments are more of the form: "your problem, not mine", or "TDF doesn't need to nurture an ecosystem - why complain to TDF" ? So - of course, that is on one hand fine. Hypothetically TDF could sit at the center of a pure volunteer project, perhaps with enough mentors and enough donations that might work out (though on current trends this might also result in a project a tenth of the size). On the other hand getting there from here, while not loosing all momentum would be wrenchingly problematic. I guess there are some elaboraions of this: On 15/07/2020 14:11, Telesto wrote: > The 'free beer' argument starting to become annoying;-). I'm hearing > lots of self-pitty. > Nobody asks a company to contribute to the LibreOffice code (for free). > Yes, it belongs to a model where you believe in. > If you believe code be open source, while making profit, it's also your > task to come up with a business model generating revenue. Sure, so - it's a harsh market. TDF can choose to make it harsher by competing with the ecosystem that creates much of the LibreOffice code, and mentors much of the developer community. Or it can be passive and do nothing to nurture investment. Or it can create space for those that contribute to its mission and help out. Having a clear approach is helpful though. One of the problems is ambiguity: bait & switch: encourage the investment, but squash the returns by changing the rules =) That is why having a long-term settled consensus is really helpful. > The world is hard and pretty unfair. Indeed, on the other hand - my hope is that we shouldn't use that as an argument to structure things to be deliberately unfair. To a large degree TDF helps to seed the environment for the ecosystem to flourish around the codebase and fulfill its mission with it. Arguably (and I would say this) TDF cannot fill every niche, and serve every market itself - for a host of reasons. On 14/07/2020 16:07, toki wrote: > On 2020/07/14 10:41, Michael Meeks wrote: >> On 12/07/2020 20:32, toki wrote: >>> I'd blame the lack of sales on Collabora having a really bad website >> >> So, if getting sales is only a function of a really good website > > I think it was Brian Tracy who wrote if your website can't sell the > qualified prospect, it needs to be redesigned. I think we're all hopeful that we can create an advert or webpage that makes it impossible not to buy your product ;-) Brian's quote mentions qualified prospects - that's much easier with a sensible lead flow of people who are aware that you exist. >> Beyond that - creating, maintaining and translating a website into >> a handful of languages is an expensive hobby. > > Budget US$100,000 per language per year, for a multilingual website. > This is addition to the cost of designing and maintaining the website. > Before adding languages, look at both the financial ROI, and PR value. > Will the language generate at least US$1,000,000 in additional business > each year ? Well, for our existing ~five languages - if we did that we'd have to transition half of our development staff to marketing at some significant loss to Free software; I assume you'll want a big budget for paid multi-language advertising to bring people to that website, and for sales people too to qualify the leads ? That would consume our entire budget without any contribution back. Either way - given that the same website sells Online but not Desktop, despite advertising both, my suggestion would be that making people aware that they shouldn't be running large un-supported deployments - is a leading factor here. > The last thing any business owner wants to hear from a current > customer is "I went with company x, because I didn't know you > provided that service." I think that's the fundamental problem here; getting the word out effectively that the services around LibreOffice exist, and that buying them is good for the customer, good for the codebase, so good for all our users, and good for the community. ATB, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, GM Collabora Productivity Hangout: mejme...@gmail.com, Skype: mmeeks (M) +44 7795 666 147 - timezone usually UK / Europe -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy
Re: [board-discuss] Big organisations not contributing
On 14/07/2020 12:22, Sophi wrote: > There is another item here, I know several orgs buying services from > companies that are not good players with FLOSS communities. This is > something in my view which is important to address Absolutely. So - the original plan here was not just just to do a "Fedora vs. RHEL" style marketing separation of LibreOffice derived products - but to ensure that the "LibreOffice Enterprise" side of this - could only be used in products backed by a suitable number of a combination of (say the average): * certified developers * contributing developers by providing a clear economic incentive and a distinct postioning we can simultaneously highlight those who take but don't contribute, and also provide a clear economic incentive for them to contribute. > Finding ways to expend the ecosystem is vital too. Exactly - so of course, where there is an economic incentive, investment and hence more developers, a wider ecosystem etc. follows behind =) I believe Bjoern sketched a similar idea in his recent mail too =) Clearly - we need more time to elaborate & communicate how all of those pieces could fit together to make something that drives TDF's mission like a rocket ship =) HTH, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, GM Collabora Productivity Hangout: mejme...@gmail.com, Skype: mmeeks (M) +44 7795 666 147 - timezone usually UK / Europe -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy
Re: [board-discuss] Initiative to improve communication channels
On 17/07/2020 18:52, Daniel Armando Rodriguez wrote: > Well, misunderstanding of ideas can be avoided simply by communicating > in such a way that no aspect is taken for granted when making the > request for feedback. I have no problem with tools to get polls / feedback from our userbase; that's great =) Of course, for decisions - we are a meritocracy^W doers-decide project; so having some separate means for the members to easily inform the board / discuss and/or give their input / views on things would also be extremely valuable. Hopefully some clear separation would make membership - and more importantly the contribution necessary to achieve it more attractive to people too (perhaps). My 2 cents, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, GM Collabora Productivity Hangout: mejme...@gmail.com, Skype: mmeeks (M) +44 7795 666 147 - timezone usually UK / Europe -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy
Re: [board-discuss] 'Free Beer' Office?
Hi Telesto, On 28/07/2020 21:35, Telesto wrote: > I'm still getting a little annoyed by the 'free beer' matter. =) > While at GNU they state "We sometimes call it “libre software,” > borrowing the French or Spanish word for “free” as in freedom, to > show we do not mean the software is gratis." Imagine the ensuing terminological confusion if the Libre-Office project builds a self-defeating over-emphasis on gratis ;-) > So please communicate this properly. You can't expect people to know > what is meant. I think there has been a long term attempt to encourage marketing that emphasizes the project and our values, and the goodness of those over the gratis nature of the software. This is often stated as Project over Product - though of course there needs to be a balance here. > LibreOffice being free of charge is an result of the philosophy/ideals. > It's not something needing extra attention or emphasis. It's merely a > fact; at state of being Hopefully we are going in a good direction there - I think people just being aware, and starting to notice / call-out the more gratuitous "discover why no-one is paying anything for Office" type stuff when they see it. I think largely this is a lack of awareness of the impact of the gratis framing. > You need to create a story around LibreOffice; mission, vision, goals. > Making interest/vivid to read. ... > This is part of the business plan/ marketing plan/ marketing > communication plan from TDF. The ideals should be compatible with they > vision of the eco-system partners I agree, Thanks, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, GM Collabora Productivity Hangout: mejme...@gmail.com, Skype: mmeeks (M) +44 7795 666 147 - timezone usually UK / Europe -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy
[board-discuss] MCC questions ..
Hi Andreas, On 03/09/2020 19:59, Andreas Mantke wrote: > b) TDF currently has 221 members and none of them asked any question to > the candidates! > > That's something to think long and hard about. What does this mean to > the democratic culture of the foundation. It was created to get the > members / contributors a voice and a say. Fair enough =) good point - here are a few questions I came up with. Please note - it is trivial to ask more questions in a few minutes than can be answered in a lifetime - but here are a few things I'd love to know from each candidate: What is the right list for that ? board-discuss I hope. * many MC members say they want to expand the membership. Given that LibreOffice is rather static in terms of its number of those involved in development: coding, UX, translation, documentation etc. + how do you plan to gain lots of new contributors ? + Do you think we expand the membership by accpting more marginal contributions for membership cf. https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/TDF/Membership_Role#Contributing + what effect do you expect that to have on the project ? * If you've stood before, approximately how many people have you encouraged to apply for membership ? * How many applications have you voted against ? * Do you believe we should have a half-way house / badge between membership and non-membership that encourages a person, and gives the a path via more contribution to achieve full membership ? * When there are no concrete metrics (such as translated strings, code commits, wiki changes, ask comments, etc.) available to decide on a person's contribution; what is best practice for MC members vouching for their friends' contributions, and how should other MC members validate that ? * To what degree should the MC's decisions & discussion be transparent (ie. publicly available) ? * How do you believe we can improve the existing election system - assuming the statutes can be tweaked ? + I'm interested in where we have the situation that being too popular can stop you being able to engage at all as a deputy - as we saw with Miklos/Jona in the last MC election, and Kendy in the last Board election. Thanks for any answers =) Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, GM Collabora Productivity Hangout: mejme...@gmail.com, Skype: mmeeks (M) +44 7795 666 147 - timezone usually UK / Europe -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy
Re: [board-discuss] MCC questions ..
Hi Daniel, On 04/09/2020 14:29, Daniel Armando Rodriguez wrote: >> * many MC members say they want to expand the membership. >> Given that LibreOffice is rather static in terms of its >> number of those involved in development: coding, UX, >> translation, documentation etc. >> >> + how do you plan to gain lots of new contributors ? ... >> + Do you think we expand the membership by accepting >> more marginal contributions for membership cf. >> >> https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/TDF/Membership_Role#Contributing > > What's the 'more marginal contributions' meaning? Ah - perhaps I should be more clear: + "Do you think we should expand the membership by accepting much smaller contributions for membership" Sorry for that. The essence of the question is simple - if you want to grow the membership there are at least these two approaches: + encourage more people to contribute more to meet the criteria or + lower the criteria for membership Hence my question - in each case - I'd love more detail on people's suggested approach. >> * How do you believe we can improve the existing election >> system - assuming the statutes can be tweaked ? >> + I'm interested in where we have the situation that >> being too popular can stop you being able to >> engage at all as a deputy - as we saw with >> Miklos/Jona in the last MC election, and Kendy >> in the last Board election. > > 'Too popular'? What about that tiny little issue called affiliation? Sure, so do you have a question about that ? either way I'm curious about MC member's views of an electoral system whereby (given the current CoI rules) discouraging people from voting for you is a good tactic to get elected ;-) and/or that if/as/when people are bumped by these rules that it's not possible to appoint the next most popular person in the ranking etc. I would hope that: "* How do you believe we can improve the existing election system - assuming the statutes can be tweaked ?" Is a legitimate question for the MC candidates ? ATB, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, GM Collabora Productivity Hangout: mejme...@gmail.com, Skype: mmeeks (M) +44 7795 666 147 - timezone usually UK / Europe -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy
[board-discuss] an Online move ...
Hi there, This is a detailed mail, so it shows up as a TLDR; then a status quo / resolution / benefits triplet, and a link to our FAQ. We're excited about this as a way to decisively unwind a number of inter-related problems at TDF. We'll keep an up-to-date version of this in the FAQ. * TLDR; Collabora announces that it will move its work on Online from TDF to GitHub https://collaboraonline.github.io/, in order to ensure future investment in the software development of Collabora Online and LibreOffice. This will allow us to deliver on many of the requests from the community and we expect that this will resolve the lengthy discussions in the TDF Board around a fair strategy for "LibreOffice online", thus freeing energy for other constructive topics. * status quo / resolution / benefits: ** status quo: background & issues + the current status of "Online" at TDF is dis-satisfying to end-users, some community members, Collabora, and it creates strain in the LibreOffice project. + Online has been substantially created, sustained and continues to be developed by Collabora investment: + Collabora's 20+ committers provided 95%+ of the commits in the last year + LibreOffice Online has been a source-only project: a place to collaborate around development, with own-branded products versions derived from that. Publicly available products have encouraged people to buy support when under heavy use. + some TDF community, board and staff members have made it clear they don't accept this compromise, and want TDF to use the LibreOffice brand to distribute a competing gratis product in the marketplace driving the price to zero, (perhaps combined with nags for donations to TDF). Others wish to ship gratis LibreOffice branded builds not immediately but in 3-6 months. + still others dislike the idea of telling users that it is essential that they contribute to the project, in proportion to their ability. Others have concerns about even gentle moral suasion here eg. around tags & naming; others around donation requests. Still others recommend proprietary software, or sale of extensions as a solution. Some claim the TDF statues require one course of action, others that they do not. + this combination of uncertain direction, structure and statutes at TDF make it difficult for an investor today to have any confidence in a future return over the years in which that takes when the Online project is hosted by TDF. + TDF has historically avoided explaining clearly how LibreOffice is created even to its own community. It does not give effective credit to the commercial community members doing most of the indispensable work in any way that can drive a proportionate return. There is little confidence in this improving. + The prospect of the Collabora brand having to compete against something we ~95% build ourselves. ie. with products sold or distributed gratis under the popular "LibreOffice" brand - while Collabora continues to sustain, maintain, and improve the software in an effectively invisible way is deeply problematic. + imagine trying to explain to larger users why they should not use LibreOffice Online, but pay for Collabora Online. Absent significant help from TDF that is incredibly hard to do in a way that doesn't damage LibreOffice as a whole. + For TDF to provide significant support fairly, in a way that rewards investment, is incredibly challenging to achieve inside TDF's structures. + There are lots of good people on all sides of this argument who come from different perspectives. Many of them are unhappy; we seem stuck in a worst of all worlds position currently. + There is an ironic tension here between wanting everything to be gratis, and wanting investment. Ultimately by making everything gratis, while not encouraging users to contribute financially, and having no credible plan to reward investment - TDF harms its own FOSS mission, which aligns well with Collabora's: to produce great FLOSS software for everyone. * TLDR; resolution: a move. + To sustain Online and to improve it requires substantial and ongoing investment and focus, far beyond what TDF can provide via nags & donations. Any returns require a stable environment. + We believe the most elegant way to resolve the strain and uncertainty is to move our existing sub-project & work around Online to a new project at Collabora.
[board-discuss] Re: TDF-Business-Entity
Hi Andreas, On 30/09/2020 09:40, Andreas Mantke wrote: >> c) form sub-group to work out and publish business entity proposals >> URL: https://redmine.documentfoundation.org/issues/3294 >> Status: Criteria list (Lothar) Draft proposal for Luxemburg entity >> (Paolo), next meeting orga(Thorsten) ->> >> https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/NeBWm25cd2LHyoq ... > it's not a really appropriate behavior of a German charity to create a > business entity in a country, which is known as a legal tax shelter. I'm sure no-one would want us to search the world for a jurisdiction that is maximally burdensome to incorporate and run in =) For my part Luxembourg has the major benefit that Paolo wants to be involved and help get something done. It is hard to over-state how important it is to have not only a concrete proposal but good people on the ground. Incidentally this is why I was -so- dismayed to see the UK option discarded on what I felt were poor grounds. Either way - another advantage of Luxembourg is that we are blessed with having Lionel (CC'd) based there - at a professional accountancy that (if we're really nice) may kindly offer us the benefit of their accounting experience & help with oversight. That combination of long term understanding of FLOSS, LibreOffice as well as local company / tax issues would be an incredible plus. Beyond that - having a concrete proposal from any other jurisdiction would be fine - but we should get moving. Andreas - if you want to get involved - I believe Florian is working on a German entity proposal as another option - hopefully we see that soon. Personally I think there may be merit in a UK option still - if Simon is interested in engaging. I think we've discussed a few tests (perhaps there are more) for an entity to sell things in the app-store: * protect TDF by some effective separation ie. a different entity. * have an corporate'y structure ie. no unexpected restriction on activity * provide for effective control by TDF * provide for operational isolation from the BoD + though I'm still hopeful we can de-stress the BoD relationships over time. * have low running costs, risks, and overheads * have local people willing to file forms / documents * have English Gov't interaction so all is transparent Perhaps something else ? One of the wider problems we have I think is a lack of decisiveness. Also some sort of steady stream of people arriving late to a discussion and re-starting it =) perhaps that is inevitable as discussions ripple outwards through the community as they get more concrete. From a process perspective I think we'd want to get a deadline for short, summary proposals - perhaps under some agreed grid / headings (cf. above) - that we can present to the membership as a simple poll (we have a great ranked / voting method to handle this sort of thing). With the membership's views in hand, the board could perhaps vote to give confidence to the teams involved to get on with final preparation and the actual formation. Again - it would be lovely to help out by build a constructive, detailed alternative proposal if you can Andreas, and I imagine that would be welcome. My 2 cents, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, GM Collabora Productivity Hangout: mejme...@gmail.com, Skype: mmeeks (M) +44 7795 666 147 - timezone usually UK / Europe -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy
Re: [board-discuss] Board of Directors Meeting 2020-10-23
Hi Quentin, On 29/10/2020 00:00, Quentin Christensen wrote: > I must admit I will have to go back and have a look at the current state > of issues with LibreOffice 7 and NVDA 2020.3. If you can come up with a list of prioritized / bucketed a11y issues - we can try to estimate what it costs to fix them to get some work funded here. I was personally slightly sad to see though that the last tasks we proposed here didn't make it through the ranking to get tendered. But always worth trying again. ATB, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, GM Collabora Productivity Hangout: mejme...@gmail.com, Skype: mmeeks (M) +44 7795 666 147 - timezone usually UK / Europe -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy
Re: [board-discuss] [DISCUSS] LibreOffice Online - repository and translations
Hi all,
I was interested to see this vote:
On 26/11/2020 10:02, Florian Effenberger wrote:
> The vote that has been proposed is the following:
>
> 1. to freeze (not delete) the "online" repository at TDF's git, for
> the time being
Of course, I'd prefer a clear decision to collaborate in a
positive way with COOL and mutually celebrate each other. Absent that,
it seems to me that Thorsten is rather sensible when he says:
On 26/11/2020 15:53, Thorsten Behrens wrote:
> I'm convinced it's the least-worst short-term measure, and leaves the
> door open in all directions.
Keeping that door open is useful; as I wrote in my original
mail:
https://www.mail-archive.com/board-discuss@documentfoundation.org/msg04727.html
On 01/10/2020 10:13, Michael Meeks wrote (here):
> Of course, we would love to see TDF coming up with the right mix of
> structure, entities, stability, branding, appreciation of corporate
> contributions and so on to build confidence that another approach is
> possible. There is time before our next LibreOffice release in
> January for the community to ponder what to do with LOOL, and to do
> their own thing, or support this move to capture the benefits
> outlined above.
Collabora has so far kept the door open for a smooth reconciliation
by (among other things) continuing to promote LibreOffice positively
(which is easier when it is not necessary to differentiate against
a LOOL) and by keeping COOL building against LibreOffice master.
Simultaneously various positive, confidence building
improvements to TDF's marketing have been planned. These seem to go in
a generally helpful direction for the project; kudos to those
involved.
On the other hand it has been mentioned that first testing
these changes in the Desktop version is necessary. Can we re-build the
necessary company investment there? That, if successful, should
demonstrate there is a stable, predictable environment with a sensible
lead-flow coupled to contribution to drive new investment. It seems
clear that this needs to happen before any changes to COOL. It will
take some significant time probably many months. Time is also needed
re-build the requisite confidence in the board upholding this wiser
approach.
It is also encouraging to see some of our historic concerns
taken on board & creative steps discussed towards meeting some of
them. On the other hand - a recognition of the many benefits that I
outlined which can be easily captured without further changes would
be good too.
Against this, I was surprised to see some Board members'
responses:
Different board members wrote:
> ... the LOOL subproject is key for the future of TDF and its community.
and:
> From TDF we must recognize the strategic importance of LOOL. That is
> why the repository must remain active. That way, those who wish to
> join and make the project shine, can do so.
and:
> "1) No. Let's work to implement better tools to make it easier
> to people to contribute."
The future of the LibreOffice codebase and those that love it
is assured, even in the very unlikely case that Online is the sole
future. The overwhelming majority of the code behind Online is
LibreOffice.
However the direction these votes appear to go in is one of
pre-judging the result, encouraging divergence, and nurturing a
competing LOOL project even while we test adapting LibreOffice
marketing; and for what benefit ?
I wonder if that is a wise, or even intended approach?
The background is that in the last ~two months since the move
there have been >700 commits to COOL, from a growing and diverse set
of developers against two (2) (automated translation updates) to LOOL.
Having votes by non-coders to keep open a sub-project that
falls rapidly behind, currently with no contributors, and using the
LibreOffice brand to keep it relevant is a curious choice.
It also opens TDF and LibreOffice to potential negative
comparisons & criticism. Far from being an un-mitigated positive
for the project.
Is that the intention ? it would be nice to have a clear
statement ? as I wrote before:
On 01/10/2020 10:13, Michael Meeks wrote (here):
> Competing with people who take your code, represent themselves
> as the creators of it, do nothing effective to mention us, and
> compete with us in the marketplace is a problem. RedHat had problems
> with Oracle Unbreakable Linux that were not dissimilar, where morally
> they should be presented as the creators.
This is where we came from, my hope is that it is not where we
are going together.
There are a few other things that are interesting questions:
TDF needs to work out if it will be a pragmatic place where
do-ers decide: we used to call that a meritocracy.
I also hear
Re: [board-discuss] [DECISION] LibreOffice Online - repository and translations
Hi Daniel, On 02/12/2020 17:21, Daniel A. Rodriguez wrote: > I consider that contributions to COOL, should not taken into > consideration for TDF membership. I'm sure the membership committee will take all of these things into consideration as they deliberate. If that is their decision, perhaps it is no bad thing to re-shape our membership over the next year. It does however make it even more vital to get a mentor hired, unless we want a rather smaller proportion of coders as members. From the COOL perspective, our position is unchanged: We respect and recognize the contribution of all the developers of LibreOffice and will honor that in equivalent access: commit, translation etc. on our side. Regards, Michael. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, GM Collabora Productivity Hangout: mejme...@gmail.com, Skype: mmeeks (M) +44 7795 666 147 - timezone usually UK / Europe -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy
[board-discuss] Re: [VOTE] LibreOffice 7.1 marketing plan
On 08/12/2020 08:18, Lothar K. Becker wrote: > Find the SLIDES for this vote at > > https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/Z6Y2YeDKHoRW3s8 > > which are a subset of the initially shared PDF, that was made available > via Nextcloud. Removed from the aforementioned initially shared PDF are > the following slides, that are irrelevant for the vote: slides 2, 10-14, > 20-26, 36, 50-53, 62-64, 84 Having various Online pieces in this which have not been discussed in the context of today makes this extremely difficult to vote for quickly - particularly without a discuss thread. The last board call we had: + re-look at the marketing plan (Paolo) + believe we should remove LOOL mentions for now + should be a live plan, we can modify it + for the moment: don't spend time promoting LOOL until we have an alternative or an agreement That sounds very sensible to me; and: + see all slides - some should not be there (Lothar) + why I'm for this / that. + should have a version next week - separate these out. So I assumed these would be removed. If that is the case - then I support the plan, +1, otherwise it will need significantly more thought. Was that an oversight in shrinking the slides ? and of course, luckily it's a link so easy to tweak ? Thanks, Michael. -- Michael Meeks, <><, Director of The Document Foundation Kurfürstendamm 188, 10707 Berlin, Germany Rechtsfähige Stiftung des bürgerlichen Rechts Legal details: http://www.documentfoundation.org/imprint -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy
