[tdf-announce] The Document Foundation announces the members of the Engineering Steering Committee

The Document Foundation announces the members of the Engineering 
Steering Committee

The body coordinates development activities and defines the technology 
evolution of LibreOffice

The Internet, May 23, 2011 - The Document Foundation presents the 
members of the Engineering Steering Committee, the second body to be 
announced - after the Membership Committee - of those envisioned by the 
foundation bylaws. The ESC has come into being in early 2011, and is now 
officially in place to coordinate all development activities and set 
future technology directions.

The 10 members of the ESC are Andras Timar (localization), Michael Meeks 
and Petr Mladek of Novell, Caolan McNamara and David Tardon of RedHat, 
Bjoern Michaelsen of Canonical, Michael Natterer of Lanedo, Rene 
Engelhard of Debian, and the independent contributors Norbert Thiebaud 
and Rainer Bielefeld (QA). The ESC convenes once a week by telephone to 
discuss the progress of the time-based release schedule and coordinate 
development activities. Their meetings routinely include other active, 
interested developers and topic experts.

The members have been appointed by the Steering Committee, and are drawn 
from key members of the community of developers, which has been steadily 
growing since late September 2010 and is now close to 200 code hackers, 
with another 200 people involved in localization and QA. "This is a 
phenomenal success," says Caolan McNamara of RedHat, "Especially if you 
look at the OOo project, where external contributors were a small group, 
and had to deal with significant obstacles."

There are around 120 developers hacking LibreOffice code on a regular 
basis; these can be divided in three groups based on their experience: 
20 core developers working on features, fixes, and packaging the 
software; 40 more regular devs working on features, fixes and easy 
hacks; and 60 less-regular devs working on easy hacks and code cleaning. 
In addition, there are around 80 developers who are contributing 
occasionally, or have just started to dig into the code. TDF is also 
grateful for the influx of students who will be paid to work full-time 
over the summer by the Google Summer of Code program.

"The ESC has brought the necessary discipline in the development 
process, which is organized in a completely different way from the past 
at OOo, where there was a single company in charge of the decisions, 
which was at the same time a strength - as it was easy to coordinate - 
and a single point of failure," says André Schnabel, a member of TDF 
Steering Committee. "We have instead built an independent process, where 
corporate sponsors are still valued, but the community is able to take 
the software forward even without the backing of any of these companies."

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Italo Vignoli - The Document Foundation
email italo.vignoli@documentfoundation.org
phone +39.348.5653829 - VoIP +39.02.320621813
skype italovignoli - italo.vignoli@gmail.com

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