Candidacy: Bjoern Michaelsen

Hi all,

I hereby state that I will be running again for a Board of Directors seat with
The Document Foundation.

Im Bjoern Michaelsen, the Ubuntu maintainer for LibreOffice and am working for
Canonical. I have been elected to be a deputy to the board of directors of the
Document Foundation in the first election, and am serving as a
full member of the board since November 2013.

I have been a contributor to LibreOffice since long before the Document
Foundation became incorporated to be its steward and a contributor to this
codebase even longer. While I do work in quite a few of TDFs formal and informal
bodies (the Board of Directors, the Engieering Steering Committee, the
Certification Committee) I try to keep up at least casual code contributions to
LibreOffice itself. OpenHub tells me that -- at least by commit count as of
today -- I continue to be in the Top Twenty of code contributors over the last
12 months. Beyond coding I had a role in a wide set of efforts and projects in
LibreOffice, for example:

- I helped LibreOffice getting rid of the old OOo build system
- I started bibisect to allow QA to pinpoint regressions more quickly
- I helped with administrative task needed for the Document Foundation, e.g.
  interacting with authorities, representing the Stiftung and boring
  banking administration
- I helped kickstarting the LibreOffice QA community that these days thankfully
  going strong all by itself
- I helped organize and coordinate LibreOffice events, from conferences to
  Hackfests
- represented and advertised LibreOffice at a wide range of events
- steamlined EasyHacks to be easily found and maintained and kept up-to-date
  for mentors via Bugzilla
- helped the execution of tendering the Android work from the foundations side,
  navigating quite a few challenges this posts to an NGO
- helped setting up other tenders and job positions, interviewing candidates
- contributed in kickstarting some of TDFs employees into the crazy world of our
  project
- encouraged, supported and pushed to get LibreOffice to use tools and means to
  improve the onboarding for newcomers: e.g. the recent TDF hiring of a mentor, but
  also gerrit code-review and CI

To biggest challenge for LibreOffice as a project continues to be bridging the
gaps from end users and enterprise users over casual contributors to core
developers and helping everyone to strive towards our common goals. As
LibreOffice grows, I will continue to support efforts to bring together
contributors from different backgrounds to ensure we push LibreOffice, the
product and the project, to new heights.

75-words version:
Im a longtime contributor to the LibreOffice codebase and maintain LibreOffice
packages on Ubuntu. While I do work in quite a few of TDFs formal and informal
bodies, I am still regulary active on the code. Beyond that I did take part and
led various efforts beyond pure code at both TDF and for LibreOffice:
from administration, training to organization and coordination. I aim to help
LibreOffice to continue to grow organically.

Best,

Bjoern