Re: [board-discuss] TDF Advisory Board Members
On 2021-03-23 17:46, Simon Phipps wrote: I'll be more direct than Andreas in this matter. Given the FSF Board has demonstrated[1] that it is aware that reappointing RMS would be regarded as bad judgement by everyone at LibrePlanet, and given other organisations[2] are choosing to disconnect FSF from their governance, TDF's Board should also consider removal of FSF from their advisory board, at least temporarily until it has achieved representative governance. This was very effectively stated, and I'm hearted by the swift response by the community at large. While Stallman's contributions in the past have been monumental for us all, his continued abuses of his status has seriously harmed the cause of free software. I would be delighted for TDF/LibreOffice to sever ties with FSF America and instead solely rely on FSFe for advisement. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [board-discuss] [DECISION] LibreOffice Online - repository and translations
On 2020-12-03 11:01, Florian Effenberger wrote: [...] Keep in mind the decision on the repository is TEMPORARY, it is not a permanent one. For how long is the freeze? The most exact information I could get was "until we figure things out", which appears to be a bit vague. :) I attempted reading through the minutes to get a "why" on the freeze. Am I correct in gleaning this was proposed because LOOL isn't maintained/this is viewed as a Collabora-only product? signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [board-discuss] MCC questions ..
On 2020-09-05 18:53, Dennis Roczek wrote: Hi Michael, I missed something. ;-) Am 05.09.2020 um 18:07 schrieb Dennis Roczek: * To what degree should the MC's decisions & discussion be transparent (ie. publicly available) ? Most internal discussions are about improving the tools or about concrete applications. The discussion about applications should NOT be public. Discussions about how the tools should or could be improved (e.g. dashboard) can be opened without any problems. I missed to add a reason why the discussion about the application should not be published: see our disaster with the mascot: if we make everything in public the members of the MC might get spammed, pushed, and bullied. The mascot incident is a great example of why public involvement matters! The lessons learned should not be "make everything more closed-door" but "What can we learn from disappointing our users/community?" Users were angry and hurt for a reason and brought very valid concerns to a very flawed event. (Bullying is *not* acceptable and I vehemently denounce any acts of harassment from the controversy). Even more fatal: some groups might get pushy to get their folks into the group. Moreover the GDPR sometimes prohibits every discussion public: as already said we do have corner cases with heath issues, corona-problems, being too young and other cases which do not should be public! I have anecdata: A high-profile "rockstar" developer applied to be an Arch Linux TU last year [1] and we received colorful remarks from the peanut gallery. Contention and disappointment was voiced with our questions and handling, and the applicant ultimately withdrew but the discourse was not toxic. In fact, I'd say that the comments from the general public provoke reflection - even if I do not agree with them. I lean toward making applications public (GDPR concerns put aside). From a pragmatic perspective, private list mails can easily be leaked the moment contention bubbles up. My Debian outsider perspective sees private lists as good for promoting their issue with political drama and causes sites like [2] to sprout up. I'm not qualified for much more than speculation; I'd love to hear the opinions of the more experienced. I'd be curious to know how other communities like Debian or Fedora manage applications and whether public/private have been helpful. [1] https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/aur-general/2019-February/034918.html [2] https://debian.community/ signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [board-discuss] Re: Short Résumé (was: Re: [board-discuss] Questions To MC Candidates)
On September 3, 2020 11:59:14 AM PDT, Andreas Mantke wrote: >Hi all, > >a short résumé: > >a) there are 13 candidates for the MC elections and only 8 are >able/willing to answer two short questions. > >Many thanks to all of this eight candidates to take your time and give >your personal view! > > >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. This is something we have a bit of a problem of in the Arch Linux community as well when a community member applies to become a Trusted User (i.e. a packager in the [community] repository). Existing TUs vet the applicant's package quality and fitness. Sometimes barely any discussion comes during the two-week discussion period. I am guilty of letting this slide as well. We have not really solved the problem past the occasional reminder of our duties. I think this problem is more generally one of doing thankless, "minor" - yet important - work in volunteer communities. I do not pretend to know how to solve this for everyone. Personally, I find that an occasional reminder of my duties in my occupied post keeps the easily-forgotton tasks somewhat near the front of my brain. I would be happy to discuss general topics with all my friends, such as our opinions of TDF's strengths and weaknesses to encourage a healthy stir of the pot. But I encourage community members to ask questions or voice their opinion! Voters possibly already know the candidates well enough that questions don't add any value to an already-formulated opinion. -- 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] Questions To MC Candidates
On 2020-08-28 08:18, Andreas Mantke wrote: Hi, I have two first questions to the candidates: a) regarding the mission of the MC (§ 12 of the statutes) have you already participated in board calls during the last two years as external (non-member)? I attended to ask questions with others about TDC as I struggled with the slide deck/proposal documents. It was made clear during that call that non-board personnel were pesky to board members (exemplified on the mailing list later [1]) so I stopped engaging. It is my hope that the board can approach conflict with a more patient and empathetic way - we mortals care about the project, too. (N.B. This is not to single out one individual or to cast shade upon all of the board as a whole. Some - notably mmeeks - engaged in a very thoughtful, patient manner.) b) What is your personal take on a 'cooling down' periode between being a member of leading bodies of the foundation, regarding the first sentence in the statutes § 12? Good question! I share Dennis' view - leaving an appointed post to go up the ladder seems unhelpful. A post should enjoy the talents of the person occupying it until commitment cessation. If the MC exists merely as a stepping stone to political gain in the BoD then a more fundamental problem needs examination. [1] Message-id: signature.asc Description: PGP signature
[board-discuss] Self-nomination for the membership committee
Name: Brett Cornwall Email: br...@libreoffice.org Corporate affiliation: AI SKY US BIDCO INC. I'm from Oregon, USA. I've been involved with LO infrastructure for a few years, working on server monitoring, Analytics dashboards, Saltstack/IaC, and databases. My interests for LO involve user testing to inform the project rather than blind assumption; Striving to improve project accessibility; and improving LO/TDF's public image to the world. For the MC, I'm interested in upholding the checks against the board to ensure interests do not compromise the user or product. Thanks for your consideration, and best of luck to my fellow candidates. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [board-discuss] Initiative to improve communication channels
On 2020-07-09 19:54, Nicolas Christener wrote: Hi all On Thu, 2020-07-09 at 01:51 +0200, Thorsten Behrens wrote: [...] One comment: - I'd strongly suggest that any new tool we introduce comes with a commitment to shutdown / discourage at least one (but better more!) existing tool. We'll otherwise quickly get to https://xkcd.com/927/ ;) So if https://democraciaos.org/ is to solve the too-many-communication-channels problem - are we then shutting down IRC/Telegram, or even the mailing lists? IMHO IRC/Telegram and mailing lists have different aims. One is for "instant communication" the other is for "more complex discussions". I love mailing lists and was quite "shocked", when other big F/OSS projects started to move away (see for example [0]). However at some point I realized, that the hurdles to participate in discussion on mailing lists are indeed too high([1]) for many people. I'm not sure if killing all mailing lists is what I would propose - but why not discussing to move most of the "non developer" lists to something like discourse (and migrate AskBot as well)? Some half-baked thoughts: * Talk to e.g. the Gnome folks about their experience regarding Discourse * Discuss a migration of AskBot to tool xyz -> could be Discourse or whatever people like * Discuss migrating a set of mailinglists to the same tool Thoughts? [0] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2019-February/msg1.html [1] Younger people don't have an e-mail address anymore, signing up requires too man steps, spam is an issue, most people don't know how to quote mails, etc. All the best, Nicolas I'd agree to using Discourse [1]. I genuinely think this one has potential to solve LO/TDF's communications needs. For the unaware, Discourse was started by Jeff Atwood (of Stack Overflow fame) and is free software. Think of it like a forum software for those that use the web interface, and a mailing list for those that use it with email. Some arguments for Discourse: * Easier user engagement. I like mailing lists, but the amount of obnoxious little netiquette rules are not (and will never be) followed by all but the beardiest graybeards. Half the community (half the board members, even) top post, use HTML, use their own weird ideas of formatting and commit a number of faux pas that mix in chaos to the discussion. Discourse's forum-like web interface provides a much saner, human approach for the general populace. * Providing the opportunity to consolidate needs, such as: * Polling/Voting [2] * Community support channels (Fedora replaced their askbot instance with Discourse [3]) * Mailing lists: Discourse has a "mailing list mode" - Mozilla's got a nice FAQ on how to use it via email [4]. * GDPR compliance tooling is available (not sure how mature it is, but surely it's easier than managing mailing lists). * SAML support [5] I don't like that the web interface requires JavaScript but that battle was lost long ago. I can see Discourse serving all needs for asynchronous communications while the newer Matrix deployment can serve all synchronous communications (Even though Slack-style chat promotes pseudo-synchronous hellscapes there needs to be an attractive alternative to Telegram). Discourse provides a friendly-enough (if ugly/flatly designed) interface to welcome the unwashed but still powerful enough for the particulars. A previous employer of mine used Discourse for internal async communications and it worked pretty well for me using mailing list mode/NeoMutt. [1] https://www.discourse.org/ [2] https://github.com/discourse/discourse-voting [3] https://ask.fedoraproject.org/ [4] https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/how-do-i-use-discourse-via-email/15279 [5] https://github.com/discourse/discourse-saml signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [board-discuss] LOOL user experience
On May 26, 2020 6:10:44 AM PDT, Paolo Vecchi wrote: >4 I think lately Richard Stallman has been involved in controversial >stuff. Maybe it's safer to use Linus Torvalds to avoid comments? Further, Stallman is actually not very technically proficient these days and makes for a poor example of a 'God-tier' hacker. -- 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?
On 2020-03-01 20:32, Brett Cornwall wrote: I believe that Canonical is related here because, like TDC, the proposal appears to be that a for-profit entity be given exclusive rights to a trademark to a supposed community-owned product. Like TDC, Canonical's founding idealized Shuttleworth's pessimism that free software could survive without a for-profit entity as its protector. Correction: Could *not* survive without a for-profit entity as its protector. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [board-discuss] How is TDC compelled to keep the user first?
On 2020-02-28 15:51, Michael Stahl wrote: On 28.02.20 15:04, 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. Sacrifices to user empowerment are off-topic, but: how is Canonical related to any non-profit? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_Ltd doesn't mention anything. Mark Shuttleworth began the Ubuntu project with the express intention of keeping Ubuntu for the community while also creating Canonical as a for-profit company in an attempt to make a consumer-grade support/development experience. Ubuntu has a board wherein Canonical members were allotted a maximum number of a seats to guarantee community member additions. (Disclaimer, I haven't spent much time in the Ubuntu ecosystem for some number of years now so things may have changed). Over time, the boundaries between Ubuntu/Canonical dissolved as more user-hostile measures made its way into Ubuntu - Not enough money was being made from Ubuntu's lackluster business models (AFAICT, selling *tshirts* was practically the only long-term revenue stream they retained...) so the Ubuntu platform slowly degraded into a distribution that went from "not recommended by the FSF" to outright labelled as spyware. I believe that Canonical is related here because, like TDC, the proposal appears to be that a for-profit entity be given exclusive rights to a trademark to a supposed community-owned product. Like TDC, Canonical's founding idealized Shuttleworth's pessimism that free software could survive without a for-profit entity as its protector. 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)? what exactly do you mean? the majority of bugfixes and new features already come from developers employed by companies such as Red Hat, Collabora, CIB, and this has been the case for most of the existence of the project. of course most if not all of the developers employed by these companies consider themselves members of the LO community, and why shouldn't they? Like the Linux kernel, the product's ecosystem benefits greatly from external for-profit organizations' contributions! But I would point out that these businesses do not own the LibreOffice product itself - they merely contribute or create their own commercial fork. There's nothing wrong with this, of course! But imagine if Debian had granted rights to its trademark exclusively to Canonical back in 2005. Debian would be a very different distribution today if it were under the stewardship of an entity expected to turn profits. And the community would likely not be happy with the Debian project as a whole: It'd be just another consumer distro and the tenets guiding Debian's community would have likely withered. Simon claims that I'm overstating TDC's influence - that will be addressed in its relevant thread. My reply here is only to expound on how I found Canonical relevant to my questions. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
[board-discuss] How is TDC compelled to keep the user first?
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. Sacrifices to user empowerment are often made at Mozilla Corporation (e.g. Pocket integration, advertising partnerships to silently install code on browsers, etc. - The list grows longer by the month as new scandals appear). Canonical has made similar sacrifices (e.g. Ubuntu One proprietary service integration, cease-and-desists towards fixubuntu.com). 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. 2. How will TDF assure communities that the creation of a for-profit entity to manage branding that the above examples will not occur? 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)? Thank you for your time. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
