Board of Directors Meeting 2020-03-13

The Document Foundation
Board of Directors Meeting 2020-03-13
Meeting Minutes

Location: Jitsi

Session chair: Lothar Becker
Keeper of the minutes: Stephan Ficht

In the meeting: Sophie, Stephan, Nicolas (Deputy), Ilmari, Cor (Board), Florian (ED), Lothar (Chair), Emiliano Vavassori (Board), Drew, Michael Weghorn, Franklin (Deputy Chair), Uwe, Michael (Board), Thorsten (Board), Paolo (Deputy), Daniel (Board), Kendy, Gabriele, William, Sam Tuke

Representation: None

Chairman of the Board is in the meeting. One of the Chairman or Deputy Chairman is required to be present or represented for having a quorate call.

The Board of Directors at time of the call consists of 7 seat holders without deputies. In order to be quorate, the call needs to have 1/2 of the Board of Directors members, which gives 4. A total of 7 Board of Directors members are attending the call.

The board waives all formal statutory requirements, or requirements in the foundations articles, or other requirements regarding form and invitation, time limits, and for the topics discussed in this meeting.

The meeting is quorate and invitation happened in time. From now on, motions can be passed with the agreement of a simple majority of those remaining present. The majority threshold is currently 4.

The meeting commences at 13:01 Berlin time.

Agenda:

Public Part

1. Q&A: Answering Questions from the community (Lothar and Franklin, max. 20 minutes)

    Rationale: Provide an opportunity for the community to ask questions to the new board and about TDF.

    * Lothar explains document is in the works, needs some more time, ask everyone to be patient
    * was announced via mail, document will be brought out when it's ready

     * questions:

     - Uwe: problematic situation on TDC, what happend?

    - Lothar: further questions arrived that can change answers, so decided not to bring it out
    - Uwe: quite vague
    - Lothar: shall we use another platform?
    - Michael: jitsi is great, other things cost money, hangouts limit at 10
    - Emiliano: official jitsi servers/bandwidth has been powered in the last days, still the platform is now overcrowded

     - Florian: Jitsi overcrowded

     - Thorsten: keep on going agenda

     - Lothar: head on with agenda...

2. Finalizing and publishing the FOSDEM goals (Lothar, Franklin 10min)
    Tooling -> Nicolas
    - Lothar: what has done for FOSDEM goals (and sub-goals)?
    - Thorsten: plan was to bring them into form and publish these, these were agreed on at FOSDEM
    - Franklin: Nicolas was looking into tooling, latest proposal was to use Redmine, sounds like a good idea to Franklin
    - Thorsten: sounded like consensus here, let's get on with it

    Rational: clarifying todos, timeline
    Proposal: reread and cluster FOSDEM goals for publishing, Blog about Goals in the next 14 days, instantiation of a tracking tool for the goals

    * Key goals from FOSDEM
     1. streamline tendering process in 24 months
        1.1 two more tenders signed in 6 months
        1.2 two more tenders delivered in 1 year
        1.3 need to plan more spending for tax office.
     2. grow the pool of code committers.
         2.1 hire an effective & skilled development mentor.
     3. grow non-coding community
         3.1 encourage Italo, Mike, Heiko, Sophie,
         Olivier, Xisco, Ilmari to grow community
     4. have 5 community bonding / hackfest events before 2022
         where coders & non-coders meet, ESC events.
         4.1 have these in significant geographies
     5. marketing must emphasise project over product
         5.1 focused on new / younger contributors
         5.2 more creative / pro-active marketing
       + emphasising our unique strengths.
         5.3 find & turn USPs into nice stories about
         the project
         5.4 encourage OpenOffice users to join us pro-actively.
     6. Ask team to evaluate new tooling and
        involve the community in the discussion.
         6.1 team to present workshop at LibOCon 2020
         6.2 decision yes/no/where to go by LibOCon 2021
     7. create campus programme for student ambassadors
        to attract contributors
         7.1 write programme description by end of February
         7.2 pilot & move to goal of finding 5 students by April
             for six month evaluation appointments
         7.3 re-evaluate wrt. scaling this up by libocon 2020
     8. Enable the creation of an effective TDC organization
         8.1 complete negotiation of TM agreement by May
         8.2 align marketing with TDC
         [ note renumbered from conflict with campus amabassadors]

3. Take over Document Freedom Day campaign by TDF (Franklin, 10min)

    Rational: discuss take over, checking about consensus to do, next steps (vote via email?)
    - Lothar: asked to explain
    - Franklin: when raised this topic was urgent. Actually takes place last Wednesday of March (March 26).
    - Franklin: no one takes care of the website. DFD is an important part and mission of TDF. Proposal is to take control over DFD, belongs to FSFE. Proposal is TDF to take control over the campaign.
    - lead and encourage more communities to celebrate events about document freedom, collect their events and have a report of that
    - was discussed in the marketing meeting, people supportive
    - for this year just post a blog about DFD to encourage others
    - contact FSFE wrt. DFD domain, so from next year on we can actively run a campaign
    - also mentions ODF Advoacy project

      - TDF in a good position to have such a campaign

     - feedback

       - Gabriele: last year looked like this thing is likely forgotten, this year due to Corona likely no events anyways, take care of in the future

     - Sophie: agrees, important event

     - Lothar: prepare to do it next year

     - Gabriele: prepare internal presentation

     - Sam Tuke: I think SFI have complete control in recent years, not fsfe. Not sure about the domain specifically. Also as ex campaign manager of DFD years ago let me know if I can advise on anything in future

     - Lothar: bring all together to prepare for next near

4. Status quo about Pending Actions (Lothar 5min)

A.2020-01-30.NC get an estimate on template creation cost
A.2020-01-30.MM get an estimate on template code work
A.2020-01-30.TB setup ESC call/discussion on OOXML improvement
A.2020-01-30.FE estimate costs of Campus Ambassador programme
Update bank warrants -> Florian [waiting for Berlin representation statement before]

    Rational: clarifying todos, timeline

     -Nicolas: main idea is to start project to create shiny and high quality templates

     -Lothar: have to end private call because of Jitsi issues...; sorry for the bad connection and the issues, will look into fixing this problem for the next call

Public part ends 13:29 Berlin time.

We discussed the idea last year with Elio Qoshi from open labs (Tirana). There was a rough number of 5000€ in the room for professional Writer templates. Regarding localization there might be a prototype by LBP for Impress templates, see https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/58787