[steering-discuss] Candidacy for a BoD seat

Dear Simon, Membership Committee, Members of the TDF,

I'd like to hereby announce my candidacy for a Board of Directors seat
with The Document Foundation.

My name is Thorsten Behrens, my e-mail address is
thb@documentfoundation.org, and I'm employed by SUSE.

Why am I running?

It is my firm belief that an independent, open, and meritocratic
organisation is the right home for a project the size, and the
diversity, of LibreOffice. Being one of the founding members, I
consider it my duty to help creating, shaping, and maintaining such an
organisation. As a board member, and based in Germany, I'd be willing
to help with the daily admin work, and also representing the developer
community at the board level.

Cheers,

-- Thorsten

Hi Thorsten,

Please let me start by thanking you for your past service on the SC,
and your important contributions to TDF and the LibreOffice project.

I would like to ask whether you would be willing to make a commitment
for a term of office on the BoD.

I am certain that you will assure us that you support openness of the
source code of LibreOffice.

But I would like to put it to you that no software source code is
truly open until it has been rendered as understandable as possible to
as many people as possible. This is not yet the case with the source
code of LibreOffice.

There is no global design documentation available to someone who would
like to learn to hack it. The devs have made some progress towards
documenting the code base, but only at a more-microscopic level (the
API documentation at http://docs.libreoffice.org, for example).

But, IMHO, it would be extremely valuable to have more-global
documentation outlining the architecture and working of the code base
and its various components and modules.

The solution of interested individuals gleaning knowledge by lurking
and asking questions on IRC is not an effective and community-oriented
method of sharing knowledge.

Would you be willing to commit yourself to actively work with me on
developing global design documentation that will be a major asset to
any party wanting to start hacking the core and developing extensions?
I am thinking of something along the lines of:

- a global description of the architecture of LibreOffice;
- a global description of the architecture of the LibreOffice
programs, Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Math and Base;
- a listing of all the libraries and components used in the software,
and an explanation of why they are used and what they do;
- a description of the differences between the versions of LibreOffice
for *nix, Mac and Windows;
- whatever other material that your expertise as a core dev tells you
is useful and needed for genuinely opening up the source code to the
world in the broadest possible sense.

This could usefully be a collaborative initiative actively worked on
by Caolan McNamara, Thorsten Behrens and Michael Meeks.

Please may I ask your thoughts about this idea and whether you would
explicitly agree to be part of it?

In any case, wishing you all the best and, again, thanking you for
your past work for us. :slight_smile:

David Nelson wrote:

Would you be willing to commit yourself to actively work with me on
developing global design documentation that will be a major asset to
any party wanting to start hacking the core and developing extensions?

Hi David, all,

beyond what others said, let me add my very personal statement to
that question - I do think good documentation is an enabler. Where
I'm unsure is how to best get both good quality and up-to-date
documentation. You know that the code base is changing, and rapidly
so - and as Caolan said, nothing, not even missing documentation, is
as bad as wrong documentation.

So, I'd be committing myself to improve the developer experience -
but please let me make my own educated decision where to best spend
this effort. :wink:

Cheers,

-- Thorsten