Hello,let me jump in with some explanations, as I can imagine that this notice might irritate some people.
Since you know from our bylaws, the members of TDF play a very central role and have lots of powers inside the future foundation -- just like what we promised, a community-driven project. These powers will also be legally fixed and can therefore be enforced, so the community's powers do not depend on the goodwill of the board or any entity, but they are legally enforcable. This is a major difference to the situation we had before, and a major improvement, since now finally all the powers are in the hands of the members, i.e. of our community.
Many of you will remember that this was also one of the reasons to go for a German Foundation, because this helps us in ensuring these community powers.
The members' addresses are required for TDF itself for administrative tasks, e.g. in order to to verify the membership or to get in touch with members in case the e-mail address becomes invalid, but also for the authorities, because they can ultimately ensure the foundation follows the will of its members -- for which they need to know how to reach these members.
I of course understand and do agree that in these times of data mining web sites and corporations, people are very sensitive in handing out their data.
The e-mail by Sophie was meant as an advance notification that soon, we need to ask for your data because of the reasons stated above, and that we will provide mechanisms for the secure transfer of this data, together with explanations and a dedicated privacy policy. You are *not* required to send in your data right now.
So, sorry for this rush and the confusion -- seeing it positive, it means that the foundation status makes great progress and that soon things will be hopefully finalized. (I will, of course, blog on the progress soon.)
So, stay tuned for soon we will be sending out detailed information on this topic. For any questions, feel free to ask them in this thread, as I am sure a dedicated FAQ on that topic will be quite helpful.
And now: Happy birthday, LibreOffice, and thanks to everyone for being with us! :-)
Florian -- Florian Effenberger <floeff@documentfoundation.org> Steering Committee and Founding Member of The Document Foundation Tel: +49 8341 99660880 | Mobile: +49 151 14424108 Skype: floeff | Twitter/Identi.ca: @floeff -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to discuss+help@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/discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted