Board of Directors Meetings 2011

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Meetings before February 17th, 2012, were done by the non-formal board or non-formal steering committee. Meetings on and after that date, were done by the Board of Directors as official body of TDF.

Minutes 2011-12-14

Voice recording (MP3): File:Talkyoo-537138-2011-12-14-1795330.mp3

Attending: Charles, Florian, Italo, Olivier, Thorsten, Andreas, Bjoern, Simon

Cebit
- Cebit participation would cost 3.000 euro, which have to be paid sometimes in January
- xBudget is unanimously approved by the Board of Directors

Minutes 2011-11-30

Voice recording (MP3): File:Talkyoo-537138-2011-11-30-1774200.mp3

Attending: Florian, Christian, Thorsten, Alex, Italo, Olivier, Michael, Björn, Norbert, Evgeny, Leif, Andreas, Charles

Foundation
- status update
  statutes sent in, to state & tax authorities, promised feedback early next week -> Florian runs this
- insurances: libability, D&O
  collect info about which we need / where to get them -> Florian/Andreas
- money investment
  how to invest the money (i.e. *safe*, but with some interest)? -> Florian/Andreas/Björn
- appointing chairmen
  ping simon/andre to run that -> Florian will do
- access to intranet for BoD and MC
  please, all people not sending in their credentials, do so to florian -> all directors

Implementation of LibreOffice-Forum
- started eval for phpBB [1] and jForum [2], and stackoverflow-kinda stuff. invited Evgeny to the call. setup askbot testsite (http://osqa-test.libreoffice.org/questions/). simpleMachine has not been setup as a test-installation, but it has been mentioned as an additional alternative, but no specific evaluation has be done on that one. (apart looking at it and seeing it doesn't have nice urls)
- askbot looks nice, great extension/improvement to classical forum, you vote for questions/answers, plus karma system. askbot has fast dev cycles, looks very lively. still needs translations, otherwise production ready,
- Florian likes it, proposes to setup askbot *in addition* to forums
- Olivier: are we going to localize it?
- Alex: yes
- Olivier: is available to provide that
- Alex: looks likely we'll use jForums as the classical forum - profile-based: set your profile to portuguese, content & boilerplate will be portuguese for askbot: ready to go. for classic forum: more eval necessary.
- Christian: evaluating jForum, likes it. Java, quite lively, active development. but no plugins, poor docs
- Olivier: will ask people to play with jForum/phpBB
- Alex/cloph will setup a portuguese subforum for Olivier
- Evgeny: asks us to help localizing askbot. currently uses transifex. Alex suggests to use pootle instead
- Evgeny: cannot run a forum in 150 langs - need your help. git repo is open. will usually merge people's pull requests [3]
- Floeff: let's go for askbot, and help for l10n is always possible
- Alex: url - ask.libreoffice.org -> move remaining discussions to website list

Merchandising Shop
- Leif setup shop at spreadshirt.dk, ~4 weeks ago, didn't sell much, some items only. quite easy to integrate shop on facebook, made facebook shop out of it. How can we make localized shops? how accurate can you make designs?
- who gets the money?
- spreadshirt: quite expensive, but quality is good convenient to work with, from the admin site
- Proposal: have landing page - shops.libreoffice.org, that links to various local shops
- Charles: does not like it
- Leif: commissions/earnings will be very low, if any - main thrust for us: get tshirts on the street.
- Flo: agrees
- Flo: encourage local NGOs to run shops, and then have part of the money go to TDF
- Leif: make global shop, in english, with neutral content. then let each local ngo do their own shops
- Leif: make sure the money stays in the community
- Michael: what's the point - we're not making money out of it anyway?
- Leif owns AI on checking spreadshirt shipping costs to US, gets approval from board to go ahead with setting up an international, official TDF shop.

Cebit 2012
- call for projects on the linux magazine
- they'll organize open source forum place where projects can get a booth for free (smallish - but present the project)
- booth maybe shared with FrODeV & other local companies if that does not work, go for the open source park option
- Flo: suggests to apply for the free booth, just in case, if the shared one does not work
- andreas: will sync with Flo on that
- yesterday call for papers opened, for the cebit open source forum, earlier this year Andreas presented LibO portable

US Events in 2012: POSSCON in Columbia, SC (http://www.posscon.org/, end of March), OSCON in Portland (http://conferences.oreillynet.com/, mid July), LinuxCon US in San Diego (end of August)
- Italo added that, question - will someone present there? first one, CfP ends in 2 days. two latter quite important to present there.
- Michael: will submit paper to oscon

Publishing video tutorials for Impress on the website (made by Paolo Pelloni, a professional toastmaster). First example in English: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7tJ8S4weYo
- Italo: put paolo in contact with thorsten
- Italo: 2nd - he's doing a larger tutorial in english, and donate that to the foundation, have a video tutorial place on the website, ask paolo to give us original video, and have someone dubbing it

Certification Roadmap
- Italo is working on that

Minutes 2011-11-16

Voice recording (MP3): File:Talkyoo-537138-2011-11-16-1752514.mp3

cost for a booth at the next CeBit: 2500-300O Euros: should we go?
budget: we should be drafting a budget that goes beyond the incorporation of the foundation… we need volunteers to draft a budget. : THB + Florian + Sophie + CHS for the business model
chairmen: the role of the chairman of the MC is defined in the statutes and the interested parties should check this text in order to decide who should be the chairman of the MC.

Minutes 2011-10-29

Voice recording (MP3): File:Talkyoo-537138-2011-10-29-1727654.mp3

Attending: Andre, Andreas, Bjoern, Thorsten, Florian, Olivier, Michael, Jesus

Foundation Status Update
- ~4 hour call with lawyers yesterday
  - ~in final state
- translation to English for final comments:
  - in progress; lots of text; due by Monday
- then send back to the Authorities
- then final approval from the Board
- send in for formal approval / official filing
- query: wait for MC election, or file sooner and update ?
  - nuanced, lets see how soon we can file first
  - MC elections start Nov 4th, perhaps delay them ?
- decision next time ?

Board Election
- missing an E-mail from Simon, but results un-challenged & final

MC election
- Thorsten volunteered as elections officer for MC election
- need a composition for membership committee:
  - must be between 3 and 13.
- Andre recommends 5 members + 2 deputies
  - AA: send out a formal voting proposal to approve (Florian)

Mail addresses
- BoD members should have official tdf mail aliases
- important for external facing mail
- with shared signature with legal information ?
  - only for acting representatively
- use it only when legally required / as relaxed as possible

Internal lists
- BoD to review composition based on elections & realities

Web site needs updating:

- Steering committee page

Donations infrastructure
- replacing the challenges page

AA:** send Drew's draft to Michael (Florian)

- check the draft & update the web page, kill the

challenge page, and post for localisation (Michael)

Budget
- existing for filing: based on capital stock & interest
- need an updated budget, for SPI, donations, expenses,

travel budget etc. AA:** get the numbers from the conference (Charles) AA:** get details from FroDev (Florian) AA:** get details from SPI (Sophie)

- consolidate into a budget for board discussion

Trademark Policy conformance
- need mechanism for granting licenses to friendly uses

that don't quite conform with the TM policy

- query wrt. approval of individual licenses, contradicting

previous decision not to have to manage exceptions

- some sights there from the beginning, un-checked so far

yet clearly affiliated

Merchandising
- status no progress (Thorsten)
- need it going, attempt to off-load to website list not

a success

- makes sense to have a Europe & US (& other)

AA:** proposal to vote on for next week (Thorsten)

Advisory Board
- call scheduled for next week
- first call; conflicts with next BoD call

Call scheduling
- should we keep this regular call time ?

AA:** create new poll for Board calls (Florian)

- weekly calls seem to make sense.

Hosting user forums (or not)
- decision required ASAP
- discuss list discussion ongoing / not pre-empt it
- Board decision expected by Wednesday pending

volunteer / moderator interest

Meeting minutes of the Steering Committee

Minutes 2011-10-19

Voice recording (MP3): File:Talkyoo-537138-2011-10-19-1713406.mp3

Attending: Michael, Charles, Sophie, Andre, Thorsten

Who is taking notes? (recurring item)
- Thorsten
Foundation status update and board elections
- no news wrt foundation
- preliminary results due tonight, 27th final results (if nobody challenges)
donation button for nonprofits
- decision was made, andre will record at the wiki, poke website team for action
LibOCon 2012 CfL
- Sophie posted to marketing list, will post it again & put to the wiki.
- When drafted - needs a deadline. and final announcement go to announce@
Pledgies for individual projects/bugs/features
- andre: good idea, but does not seem to work in practice
- charles: can work, but on a non-systematic basis. poke suse/redhat/lanedo. or go to document machinery to code one feature.

Minutes 2011-10-05

Voice recording (MP3): File:Talkyoo-537138-2011-10-05-1692787.mp3

Attending: Sophie, Michael, Thorsten, Christoph, Italo

call for location of next year's conference

Who is taking notes? (recurring item)
- Thorsten
Foundation status update and board elections
- Feedback from one federal state, lawyer works on the answer - some definitive answer by the end of the week
- elections: final list of candidates up, ready to mail members on Friday
donation button for nonprofits
- proposal seems fine
- follow-up with that in Paris
LibOCon 2012 CfL
- Come up with a list of necessary criteria for proposals

Minutes 2011-10-01

Voice recording (MP3): File:Talkyoo-537138-2011-10-01-1687798.mp3

Attending: Charles, Olivier, Florian, Andre, Thorsten, Italo, (Sophie joined later)

Who is taking notes? (recurring item)
- André
general info
- ODF 1.2 has been accepted as OASIS standard
- happy birthday LibreOffice ;)
Foundation status update
- Florian will clarifiy with our lawyer, if and when parts of the statutes can be published
- we are still waiting for feedback from authorities on our first draft (we expect some questions, remarks ...)
BoD elections
- time for nominations ends today
- 13 candidates so far
Donation Button for NGOs
- Thorsten sent a suggestion to steering discuss mailing list
- unclear, if we reached quorum at mailing list.
- André will count the votes and ping SC members to vote again, if we do not have a quorum yet
LibOCon 2012 CfL
- Simon published an early draft for a timeline in August
- Sophie forwarded info to the marketing lists
- We will officially announce the CfL at Libocon2011 in Paris

Minutes 2011-09-21

Voice recording (MP3): File:Talkyoo-537138-2011-09-21-1674232.mp3

Foundation. We sent a letter to the authorities. It is not a public letter and it outlines what we do and what we intend to do. We must hand out the community statutes over to the german authorities. The contents of this and the questions we received will be discussed in a special private call. There is the question on the elections of future BoD members who might want to be in the know of these discussions.

The lack of button and awareness of a donation page is critical as it now forces us to lower our budget expectations. Donations page should be redone, decided about in Paris pointing not just to FrODeV but to a list of NGOs.

The call for location for the next conference question has been postponed to another call.

TM policy could perhaps be clarified again in the sense of exceptions being kept in a limited number.

Minutes 2011-09-17

Voice recording (MP3): File:Talkyoo-537138-2011-09-17-1668259.mp3

Attending: Michael, Olivier, Florian, Sophie, Thorsten, Italo, Chris Noack

call for location of next year's conference
- Florian will send out ping to the marketing list
- we'll just need a short note that the call is open, and Simon's timeline needs adaption
Ian's request for the trademark usage / policy to handle such requests
- postponed to when Andre is around
foundation status update
- lawyer is contracted
- all papers submitted to authorities
- authorities started to ask questions
  - charitable? does not seem to be a problem, since the German association is accepted-charity, and does pretty much the same thing
  - is the setup viable / amount of money sufficient? authorities would be happier with 75k capital stock
  - lawyer is following up on that
- ETA kinda unknown still
- Olivier: are the authorities questioning TDF?
- Answer: no, they're just doing their due diligence
- Timeline for that: unknown
- Florian will give weekly updates
Olivier: Brazilian authorities will apply for an advisory board seat
development funding request
- Florian: account balance - ~92k EUR on it, minus 50k capital stock, ~5k for TM application, 3k lawyer fees, 5k conference spending - bottom line 30k EUR
- SPI: 12k at least
- legally: German association needs to pay the money - if there's an SC vote, and the assoc gets a formal invoice -> no prob
- called for vote:
  - met with unanimous approval among all participants
problem with the German association
- donation level is currently ~zero
- plan was to have national, local non-profits - how to make the split between them and TDF?
- Florian: request - until we have a policy for local NGO, we add a donation button to the _German_ download/extension pages, so that money again goes to the German donation as well
- Chris: fears confusion, suggests one button, and split the donations
- Florian: that's a problem legal-wise, not clear where the money is bound
- seems to be a bit pressing, FroDeV is running out of money
- decision on that postponed to Wednesday, all SC members, please think of alternatives

Minutes 2011-09-07

Voice recording (MP3): File:Talkyoo-537138-2011-09-07-1654503.mp3

Participants (SC members or SC deputies): André, Charles, Christoph, Florian, Italo, Michael, Olivier, Thorsten

Agenda:

Who is taking notes? (recurring item)
Foundation status update
Hackfest report
BoD elections
API documentation is now online
LibOCon 2012 CfP
LibOCon status update
Extension website status update

Discussion

1. Who is taking notes? (recurring item) --> Christoph

2. Foundation status update

Official procedure
- all the foundation documents are ready (statutes, certificates, budget) --> sent to lawyer
- contract signed between him and "us"
- approaching the authorities is up to the lawyer at the moment
- we'll ask for status update regularly --> currently nothing to do for us
BOD vs. SC Question by Italo
- as soon as elections are done --> BoD will replace SC, but BoD won't legally represent TDF without foundation
- will have impact on time of duty: time between elections until foundation (a few months probably), plus one year
- foundation will get founded by "Freies Office Deutschland e.V." and they will take care of naming the BoD voted by the members

3. Hackfest report

Link to wiki page Hackfest 2011, Munich
personal impression by Thorsten:
- amazing number of people (30 ... 35)
- everywhere people were hacking and debating --> even new guys started hacking on the code
- similar event might be possible next year in Munich (because the hosts liked it as well)
list of achievements available
official summary still pending (with nice pictures, saying thank you to the sponsors City of Munich and DBI) --> Thorsten will ask Bubli
information by Italo: Offer ti have a hackfest in Bolzano (Italy) in November 2011, but he'll ask to shift that to spring 2012 due to concurrent events

4. BoD elections

Schedule in blog posting
Status details:
- membership committee processed all open membership applications (until the given due date) --> current membership list already considers that, mail by Sophie about new members is missing yet
- "announce candidacy" is open
Informal question who will run BoD elections: Italo, Thorsten, Michael, Andras, Florian, (plus one unnamed person)
Thorsten is working on the election system, technically it is working
mailing list for the BoD elections --> alias elections (at) documentfoundation.org is forwarded to membership committee
Simon requested/proposed mailing list for all members --> decision: start with a closed list, ask the members whether it should be kept closed (which means no public archives)
mail services for the individual members
- mailing forwarders for members are interrupted due to vacation, but sponsoring will be available
- fully featured mailboxes would be possible on request

5. API documentation is now online

outcome of the Hackfest 2011 --> see http://api.libreoffice.org/
has been derived automatically, but is not automatically updated, updates to be started manually

6. LibOCon 2012 CfP --> Discussion will be pushed to next meeting, added to next SC agenda

7. LibOCon status update

2011 CfP:
- Christian and Michael worked on that
- finished, but currently only a spreadsheet is available --> needs to be published on the website
Funding questions by Italo and Olivier: Charles ...
- funding is not really problematic at the moment
- reimbursement needs to be confirmed
Funding question by Michael: for journalists, it would need a "pay in advance" instead of having reimbursement

8. Extension website status update

very good progress --> thanks to Andreas Mantke
once it works reasonable fine --> internal link from within LibreOffice will be forwarded to Extension website

9. Additional Topics

André: Decision on "Ian Lynch requests the use of the LibreOffice logo without TDF subline" (see mail by André): Everybody agreed that the LibreOffice trademark policy covers that. This is no official SC vote because of legal reasons.
André: The question "explicit SC votes on trademark uses" will be discussed in another SC meeting --> added to next SC agenda

Next SC meeting is 2011-09-17

Minutes 2011-09-03

Skipped due the concurrent event Hackfest, Munich.

Minutes 2011-08-24

Voice recording (MP3): File:Talkyoo-537138-2011-08-24-1635589.mp3

Minutes 2011-08-20

Voice recording (MP3): File:Talkyoo-537138-2011-08-20-1630038.mp3

Participants

Charles, Florian, Italo, Olivier, Sophie, Thorsten

BoD Elections

TB is tweaking the voting software which should be ready soon, in order to start the process: gather candidates, allow some time for candidates to present themselves, and start the voting process in early October.

GSoC

TB suggests to route GSoC money through SPI, to spend the $2000 TDF gets for mentor travel, and spend the remaining $3000 for inviting students to Paris. The proposal has been approved by the Steering Committee with six +1 votes.

Foundation

Contract for the lawyer is ready, and the process is ready to start during the next couple of weeks. One of the german federal states has shown a strong political support, and this will prolly make the process quicker. It is impossible, though, to forecast the length of the process.

Minutes 2011-08-06

Voice recording (MP3): (none)

Attending

SC-Members and deputies: André, Thorsten, Christoph

non-SC members: Drew

Action Items

who is taking notes?
Christoph
Review Agenda
- no new topics on the agenda, listed items had been discussed in previous meeting
- no urgent items / questions by the attendees
AI "Discussion about our trademark policy and logo policy"
- proposal has been sent to the sc-discuss mailing list by Florian
AI "Acceptability of screenshots taken under Windows..."
- proposal has been sent to the sc-discuss mailing list by Florian, slightly extended proposal by Christoph

No quorum reachable --> call has been adjourned, voting on the mentioned AIs on the sc-discuss mailing list

Minutes 2011-07-27

Voice recording (MP3): File:Talkyoo-537138-2011-07-27-1599143.mp3

Attending:

SC-Members and deputies: Sophie, Italo, Thorsten, André, Michael, Leif

non-SC members: -

who is taking notes?
André
review Agenda
- we have no new topics on the agenda, listed items had been discussed in previous meeting,
- AIs on Logo and TM policy as well as windows screenshots are in work
- André will send the latest budget draft to SC members (supposed to be sent to German authorities)
Thorsten suggests to review prio 0 work items
- "Define legal entity" is in progress, currently slow due to vacation time in Germany
- "define (and document) workflows for development and QA" is in progress.
  - Some discussion at the German QA weekend, where some restricitions of the freedesktop bugzilla have been identified. Rainer Bielefeld is now bugzilla admin for LibreOffice what should ease some of the problems
  - In general QA is working and processes are established but we need to check if we have good (enogh) documentation. André will check.
Update on BoD elections
- elections need to be shifted, as we missed the formal announcement
- Simon Phipps will help with elections as "election secretary". This has been approved by SC and is documented but should be announced to the community. Thorsten will take care.
other topics
1. Leif mentioned that there are still discussions about our support for MS XML file formats which should be addressed by a formal statement
  - we already have a OOXM Q&A page for that
2. Italo asks for git commit statistics from last three months
  - Michael will provide raw data to Italo

Minutes 2011-07-23

Voice recording (MP3): File:Talkyoo-537138-2011-07-23-1593455.mp3

1. Update on Foundation: Vacation time in Germany, so things might progress slowly now. Anyway, the general judgement is that the foundation proposal is good, although the membership concept is considered innovative and this makes it difficult to foresee the timing for the response of the authorities. Our lawyer will be back from vacation in early August, and he will immediately file the document to the authorities. Estimated timing for feedback is September, although we don't have enough information to be more accurate than that.

2. Elections: Michael and Friedrich have been working on the software. We don't see any reason for not sticking to the approved schedule.

3. Advisory Board: Olivier will write a letter to several companies to attract them to TDF Advisory Board, going through SPI for invoicing and settlement. Charles will help with the letter.

4. Logo: Discussion about the need of having a logo for entities different from TDF official sources, in order to distinguish it from the official logo with the tagline. There is indeed a grey area when a TDF team or member is working on a project targeted to the development of the project, the brand or the software, which is not an official project. In this case, common sense should be used, based on the principle that the person requesting a permit to use the logo is well know at TDF level. As far as local groups requesting the use of TDF logo, the situation should be negotiated on a per case basis. Therefore, there is no need to change the policy, with the exception of an additional sentence that explains how to behave correctly when the policy is not covering exactly the specific case. Florian will be drafting a sentence to summarize the position.

5. Screenshot Issue: David Nelson has proposed a different wording for clearing the situation about using screeshots not only taken on Linux but also on Windows and MacOS. Agreement on starting a thread on the mailing list to approve the proposed wording, with the objective of facilitating new contributors without forcing them to install Linux or buy a Mac. Florian will be drafting the message to start the thread.

Minutes 2011-07-13

Attending: SC members and deputies: Sophie, Charles, André, Florian, Italo; non-SC members: David Nelson, Simon Phipps, Drew Jensen
Voice recording (MP3): File:Talkyoo-537138-2011-07-13-1580437.mp3

Who is taking notes
Charles
1. decision making process with teams and SC:
The SC members have clarified that the community work is done based on the principle of subsidiarity: teams make decisions in their own areas of competency. Whenever there's a conflict in a decision making process or there's a legal question it should be taken to the SC/BoD.
1. Screenshots on Windows:
It is noted that several members of the SC acknowledge the existence of a legal risk to display screenshots of LibreOffice on Windows, but the risk is deemed low, therefore, while screenshots on GNU/Linux should be the default ones, screenshots on Windows are also possible. A formal vote by the SC will validate this decision.

Minutes 2011-07-09

Voice recording (MP3): File:Talkyoo-537138-2011-07-09-1574994.mp3

Attending:

SC-Members and deputies: Sophie, Charles, Andre, Florian, Italo, Olivier, Michael (as Thorsten's deputy)

non-SC members: Mike

who is taking notes?
André
approve BOD elections schedule
- Schedule has been approved by all attending SC-members in consensus
- MC will take care about the process and prepare elections
how to document SC/BOD decisions
- André suggested that each formal decision of the SC (and in future BoD) should be recorded at a dedicated wiki-page.
- André will start this page and record today's decisions there
- Suggestions was approved with consensus from all attending SC-members
other urgent issues
- Christoph told about the request for a decsions on windows screenshots (see sttering discuss mailing list)
- as there seems to be an outcome at the documentation team, Christoph will take care that a summary of this is sent to the sc-discuss list. SC will then discuss this in the next meeting (Wed. 11/07/13)
foundation status updates
- Update from Florian about current status of statutes:
  - an almost stable draft for the legal statutes has been provided to the SC members
  - as the draft is currently in German, Thorsten provided a diff between our bylaws and the statutes to the SC members(most diffs are just for formal legal reasons, some are controversal and in conflict with current bylaws - see below)
  - draft is not public jet, as we have recommendations to discuss the draft with German authorities first
  - the statutes should be sent to the German authorities after review by the SC (this is to get a first answer, not the official act of establishen the foundation yet)
  - we have the ideas of meritocracy and membership in the statutes. So allmost all the rights and duties of the communty members from the bylaws are then legally binding.
- We need to share more information about the BoD member's duties and work before we start with the BoD elections. Florian will blog about this duties and possible legal implications, given his experience as board member at the German FrODeV association an SC-member.
- there are three controversal changes in the statutes (compared to our bylaws)
1. the Chair Person has been removed
  - a "Chair Person" or "President" who represents the foundation is in conflict with German law and had to be removed
  - the supervisory function of the CP (The Chairperson can intervene in dispute resolution and can take part in overseeing the process for nominations and elections of candidates for the BoD.) has been moved to the MC. The MC takes over the roles of the president, for impeachment / solemn address. The MC represents the foundation in court, against the board. The MC members are voted in by the members directly.
2. the number of BoD members was reduced to 5
  - a number of 9 Board members (plus 9 deputies) was considered to high, given the current number of TDF members. It was seen as risc, that the foundation would become incapable of acting, if some BoD members and deputies become inactive for a certain time frame.
3. time of service for BoD members was extended to 2 years
  - this was for practical reasons and reduce admistrative work (election process takes >2 months and involves several people and we additional have elections for the MC)
- after discussion the issues deeply, SC members came to following decisions:
  - The Chair Person will not be mentioned in the statutes and will be removed from the Bylaws. Instead we will have a Chair person of the MC who takes the role of the CH.
  - The BoD will have 7 members. The BoD will have additional 3 deputy members who will replace a leaving BoD member. All 10 members will be elected at the same time for one year. Those with highest number of votes will become BoD mebers, others will become deputies.
  - both desicisions were taken with consensus
- other tasks and information
  - the budged draft needs to be reviewd / changed. André will take care.
  - for the formal act of establishing the foundation we need a list of actual members of TDF, BoD and MC (this needs to include postal address). MC (Andre) will take care to collect this information.
  - although we have recommendation not to publish the statutes right now, we should do this before we call for BoD member applications. Florian / André will take car to publish the statutes 1st of August

Minutes 2011-06-29

Voice recording (MP3): File:Talkyoo-537138-2011-06-29-1560845.mp3

Minutes 2011-06-25

Voice recording (MP3): File:Talkyoo-537138-2011-06-25-1554803.mp3

Attending: Thorsten, Charles, Chris, Andre, Florian, Italo, Olivier, Sophie

Foundation status update
- struggling with setting up, legal statutes still not done, still waiting for final version, might run into the situation, that we need to find someone new to work on them - but we cannot afford further delay. Got promised current draft by Tuesday, no idea how far along they are, we should invest money to further that, no idea how much (between 1-2k EUR), Thomas says: might not make sense at all - head association - pay someone, or if that does not make sense, have one of the SC people excempt from other duties & work on that full time (to brief another lawyer). Thorsten, Flo, Andre or Thomas.
- Vote: approve money for legal process (few thousand EUR). Capped at 3k. Andre: lower amount of money, can be spent on the next 2 weeks. Majority is for option one (recoding as approved: 3k EUR max).
- appoint someone to work on this: three things, getting the statutes, getting in touch with the head association, summing this up, make recommendation (either do it ourselves, or contract a lawyer). Proposal: Florian, Andre & Thorsten team up. By Friday have a decision.
- Florian, Andre & Thorsten approved by unanimous consent.
Budget:
- Floeff: we're pretty much self sustaining, donations cover current costs. Charles volunteers to help Thorsten with drafting a proposal budget plan
Letter of intent: consensus to send it out as-is. Flo will send it out by next week
Certification status update:
- feedback so far is positive, a few disagreements on articles that are out; but maybe due to insufficient explanations (the document is a draft currently). we have to make clear, this is not about end user certification (and we don't even think about end user certs). a lot of money available in the EU, for end user certification. they call it life long learning - this is completely different from a certification that asserts a business. the ECDL is already in place, we can find local agreements with the organisations providing ECDL - but that's all we can do. we'll never go into end user certification. Users should be supported by the community
- we probably need to make it more public as it is at the moment. we'll prolly have an article about that in italy. feeling was very positive. the journalist thinks this could be a new business model for FLOSS
- general notion: we have time, there's no pressure. Italo solicits feedback from the developer community - seems not many of them read the steering list.
new agenda item from Charles: working with local NGOs:
- drafting agreements, committees, etc. : there'll be a need to start talking with several NGOs we're working with us: e.g. Frodev, la mouette, plio, softcatala. we need to talk to them what they want, la mouette has a list of questions & answers. things like logo, representations, acting on our behalf, revenue sharing etc etc. That needs to be taking care of, we'd need to have that setup by September / October. At the conference, make a number of statements about this.
- Floeff: finds the distinction between association & foundation - who's allowed to use the brand, sharing revenue - very important, wearing his FroDeV hat.
- Charles will work with Davide, Sophie and Andre on a proposal
- Andre further suggests that maybe certification and working with NGOs can be combined.
Update on Work items:
- Andre removed things that were done, consolidated them etc.
- he will send updated list today.
- important work items still open:
  - setting up entity
  - discussion about copyright assignment (official position)
new agenda item from Andre: question from steering discuss - should the membership committee publish the list of newly accepted members?
- left to the MC to decide.
new agenda item - Danishka from Sri Lanka asks for permission to use trademark
- postpone decision to the next meeting

Minutes 2011-06-15

Attending: Andre, Charles, Italo, Thorsten

No updates on the foundation.
No quorum reached after 15 minutes, adjourned call therefore.

AI Andre: TDF workitems - Andre will go through them over the weekend, maybe find someone from the community to work on it

AI Thorsten: come up with a budget plan, mail out to public list
AI Thorsten: 24 hours before next SC call, poke people in advance. Make sure deputies also know, in case a member sends regrets.

Minutes 2011-05-22

Attending: Sophie, Charles, Olivier, Thorsten

No quorum reached, no news on Work Items. Meeting adjourned.

Minutes 2011-05-12

Voice recording (MP3): File:Talkyoo-537138-2011-05-12-1492250.mp3

Attending: Florian, Thorsten, Andre, Italo

who is taking notes? (recurring item)
Review TDF Work Items status (recurring item)
- noone found time yet
Quick summary from last marketing confcall
- build a better network of the marketeers - who's in charge, who can speak, who can present at conferences - make it all more effective
- announcement model of the future
Foundation status update
- discussion with one German federarl state - very interesting, offering support in terms of cheap rooms, political support etc
- problem: noone on-site from the core members
- city of munich - talked to them, offering to establish in Bavaria then - waiting for feedback, and whether/how they would help
- clear up details at LinuxTag, where many people are available in person
Status on 3.4, beta5 and new announcement model
- decided to have beta5 instead of rc1, builds made available to testers before announcement, currently syncing mirrors, hopefully done tonight/tomorrow morning
- needed to explain time-based releases, quality, and reasons - there were geographies where people were rather critical about the current status
- announcement to l10n, projects
- italo will then announce on the announce list, and blog about it - also explaining the development process
- also explain the target users of all of our releases - who should use what, e.g. a beta, an rc, a .0 version etc.
- we need to be transparent, explain the process - which is different from OOo, and must be - it's different, but not worse.
- Italo/Thorsten will sync on the announcement time
Pootle server migration (again)
- migrated away from the brazil server
- vm-solution - some performance issues
- offer to use fsf-hu vm
- rimas working on migration
- hopefully better/faster than the interim solution
Situation in Brazil
- domain will point to the official documentation website by tomorrow. Main website: pending
- need more info on what *is* going on currently in brazil
- TDF: let's stay out of the line of fire
- all assets (trademark, domains) should be managed by TDF - to keep them independent from individuals
- complaints about membership committee - problem was, that there was no clear verification possible, for the contribution
- encourage people to contribute through official TDF channels - makes it much easier to verify contribution for membership applications

Attending: Sophie, Thorsten, Italo, Florian, Andre, Michael (for Caolan)

italo adds item: how to communicate beta1-like issues?
- we need to be quicker in reacting
- if we don't react, people start making things up, that we may have no professional dev process etc.
- we've been too slow with explaining the beta1 problems, also because of the oracle announcement, must be quicker in the future
- explain the development process we've chosen
- many people, especially the non-developers, that were in the OOo process, tend to think that this process was the only one around - we *must* communicate that better. Our process has been a deliberate choice, not an uneducated, unprofessional decision
- Action item: put something out, with pictures, to explain LibO release process
- Michael: dev interviews still ongoing, Cor still on it, another thing, do summarize the development progress - take the script-generated input from Petr, but make something human- readable out of it
- AI Italo/Michael, Andre volunteers to help
german translation of the bylaws
- needs swift action
- Andre volunteers to review
- AI Andre/Thorsten review it
- Andre suggests not to re-translate it, just a "diff" of the changes
- Florian: the current German bylaws are the final version - but not enough for being the statutes. Need amendments therefore.
- Statutes and Bylaws not the same - will reflect the spirit of the bylaws
- not everything in the bylaws will fit in the statutes
- missing: legaly-checked mission statements of the foundation (since that cannot be changed)
- waiting for feedback, which federal state would suit best
- deadline: translation approved by next Monday, or next call latest
membership committee update
- membership process started, with great success
- approved Thorsten as deputy of Fridrich on the membership committee
- Andre: currently only collecting what's coming in. next, setup first call & process the applications. Start with easy cases, known people first. Also easy for people who put absolutely no information. For the cases that need to be discussed, we'll ask their endorsers. Hopefully we should be able to get that sorted out in ~2 weeks
- Andre: missing a few mails, not so much in favor of automating too much here - probs with spam filter
- Andre: asks for a shared imap folder for the membership team. Florian will look into it

Minutes 2011-04-15

Voice recording (MP3): File:Talkyoo-537138-2011-04-15-1453642.mp3

Minutes 2011-04-06

Voice recording (MP3): File:Talkyoo-537138-2011-04-06-1438151.mp3

Minutes 2011-03-26

Attending:: Italo, Charles, Sophie, Olivier

listing a list of things we need money for (aside the foundation's incorporation itself): infrastructure, marketing, etc.
- This should allow us to come up with a fixed expense on a yearly basis.
- We should create a wiki page to draft such a budget.
- this should be done before Easter.
given the low attendance and the absence of any audience the call was rather quicly adjourned.

Minutes 2011-03-16

Voice recording (MP3): File:Talkyoo-537138-2011-03-16-1403977.mp3

Attending: Florian, Charles, Thorsten, Sophie, Christoph, Andre

frequency of future SC calls weekly? inbetween by email maybe, saves time.
- proposal: have bi- or three-weekly calls, rest by email
- charles: wants the weekly calls although there maybe probs for people to attend, especially in the evenings, they have deputies. the amount of things to discuss and decide has not become less, so probably not a good idea to reduce number of calls
foundation update:
- Florian: yesterday received access to donation account, total amount of donation is ~87k EUR!
- FSF accepts direct credit card payment, Florian is asking them how they do that, b/c PayPal is not liked by so many people, and direct money order to Germany is rather tedious/expensive
- exploring options to get EU funding, once foundation is setup
- companies have asked for a BoD seat in exchange for money
- BoD seats cannot be bought
- but: individual members of that company can of course get elected to the BoD
- companies are interested in advisory board seats, those should come with an appropriate level of annual fees / sponsoring
- current legal process: going for Germany
- lawyer is investigating bylaws. first translation ready, some issues in the original bylaws may need tweaking
- final translation expected by next week, along with a decision on which German state to pick
- with the final translation, we will go to the appriate state entity
- maybe go to several, and take the one who answers first, and/or require the least changes in the bylaws
- with the state approval, we need the BoD member names, then go to a notary, and have the foundation established
- in the wiki, the work-in-progress German translation is here: CommunityBylaws/de
- ETA for establishing the foundation: May, hopefully
membership committee update:
- Andre: waiting for the silverstripe site
- need to implement the webform -> erich christian did something
- needs moving over to the live side
- hopefully done on the weekend, announce readyness early next week
- sophie not available for about one week, in the next few weeks
- Cor will act as Sophie's substitute, he's ok, will ask SC to approve, if necessary
- Florian: Thomas says, as soon as we have the bylaws, we'll go to a notary & do the foundation, in the founding process, we already need the names of the people to represent the foundation. but for this board members to have, we first need members (because they vote for the board members)
TDF main page content migrated to silverstripe (done, but not live yet)
download numbers
- needs clarification whether langpack downloads are also counted as a LibO download -> need to check back with Peter beforehand, to not inflate the numbers
- blocks on Peter currently
TM policy
- no major issues
- basic question: does it create confusion with the TDF tm / tagline (vs. the icon policy)?
- Florian proposes to make a small text change to clarify this
- Charles: question is, does the TM policy saying everything? what do we do wrt. the TDF as a specific trademark? do we need special-casing here?
- Florian: the TDF as tagline indicates that the software comes from TDF, we want to limit usage of that
- Charles: add one or two paragraphs that are specific to the TDF as a trademark
- Charles: when you look into TM and logo policy, there was a disrepancy initially, but we harmonized it
- Charles: essentially everything we say in the TM policy applies, if you make non-substantial changes to the software, you can still use the TDF tagline, but otherwise, e.g. for tshirts, etc, only the TDF is allowed to use it
- Reason: if you go to tradeshows, we don't want to have people we don't know, sell/show stuff with the TDF logo on it. if we don't have this limitation, everybody can impersonate us. what we want to allow, though, is basically unmodified software distributions
- Florian: set LibO logo free for fair use
- TDF tagline: only when it originates from TDF
- agreement: reserve use of TDF. Only LibO is ok for fair use. That means, bin the permission to use TDF tagline for basically unmodified software
- Florian: legal issue, if we establish the TM policy, we can not say these are TMs of the TDF, and at least one TM is not yet obtained, and list the German assoc as the owner. Therefore, the TM policy needs (temporary) amendments
online office as a stategic option
- Charles: request from the SC, in the light of the recent events, the changing landscape, maybe potential appeal for sponsors, request the SC to take a stand on the online version of LibO, to consider that as a strategic option
- Chris: wondering, whether to use a variation of the existing LibreOffice, or have some lightweight, independent solution, will it need installation, or run in a browser / smartphone just like that?
- Charles: completely online based, can be used by smartphones
- Voting by email, no quorum today
handling of mails to info@tdf
- skipped
work items
- skipped
Chris adds this new item
- his company has an internal conference CfP, like to explain how communities see opensource, in contrast to companies, likely similar to Michael's talk
- Andre asks for the feedback to be communicated
- Chris will at least be able to convey the feeling, if not the slides and comments

Minutes 2011-02-28

Voice recording (MP3): File:Talkyoo-537138-2011-02-28-1376237.mp3
Attending: Sophie, Florian, Michael, Thorsten, Charles, Italo Attending non SC Members: Christoph Noack, David Nelson

Foundation : everything's being worked on, we have both the community

bylaws being translated and then being adapted for the german foundation. We're also studying in detail the exact sort of foundation and its location.

Membership committee : we're only expecting the

membership request form to be put online (should be ready next week). MC is important for the setting of the foundation itself, elections of the BoD of the foundations, etc...

Regional websites : mailing lists are enough . For additional, region

based websites, we need a proposal (on the wiki, etc.) written by David Nelson

Store for LibreOffice : we want to have an overview of options and

revenue splits among various online stores.

Minutes 2011-02-15

Voice recording (MP3): not available

Attending: Florian, Michael Meeks, Charles, Thorsten, Christoph Noack, André

Who is taking notes? (recurring item)

André

Status on Membership Committee

wiki page needs to be updated (finalization of workflow, how to request membership …)
André to work on this during the week, once this is done, he will ask Florian to setup the mailing lists
before we start do accept applications we need to announce this formally (as written in the bylaws). Should be done via TDF blog, and announce/developer/l10n mailinglists

Problems with the wiki

developers need to have easy access to the wiki to quickly get some work done
as the wiki received a lot of spam recently, there is no self-registration available at the moment (not good to start quickly as new developer)
this needs to ba analyzed at a technical level, florian asked Manuel to help but no answer so far.

Status of ESC announcement

we agreed do formally announce the ESC rather soon, but this cannot be done because we hav no membership process yet.

Status update on foundation

OOoDeV has set up dedicated bank and paypal accounts to collect TDF related donations
currently we have a surplus of ~3K EUR
Florian started to work on website and press release and wants to announce the funding challenge tomorrow
business-related information is still missing
we hav a volunteer currently working on legal stuff (translating bylaws to German, adopt for German law)
Thomas Krumbein already in contact with foundation administration at state of Hessen, they can review the statutes and comment if these are ok with German law
we were also offered help to find the best fitting state (Bundesland) for foundation set-up in Germany
General remark: The legal statutes are not the same as the community bylaws. There will be changes for legal reasons – some points might turn out quite tricky.
SC is aware of this and sees no problem with modifications, but the spirit of the bylaws must be kept
Current (short term) ToDo's:
- review press release
- look at the website and review (it's not complete yet)
quick comments on website during the meeting :
- - we need to have the “donate”-link directly at the home page
  - we need to describe why a user should donate from a user's POV (she needs to understand in 5 seconds why to donate)
  - we should link from our download page to the donation challenge
remark on tax deduction: this might be possible in Europe (not only in Germany). Donators need to check with local tax office
benefit for corporate side? Should we grant more power to donators (currently they are supposed to give advice only)
- we do not want to have some “buy in power”
- but we should acknowledge donators (first donators giving a larger amount e.g. 20k EUR) by e.g.
  - mentioning somewhere in LibO UI (e.g. Credits page)
  - give them a seat “for free at the first year” at the advicory board
  - we should have a sponsors list at the challenge site
  - all this needs to be done carefully, as might affect tax deductions (we must not “sell” something to get donations)
other legal comments:
- Brussels is eager to help us with an European Foundation
- for legal reasons we should have OOoDeV as the only (legal) founder
- there might be a problem to formalize “merit”, a to loose definition might have bad impact on the stability of the BoD's decisions (e.g. bring in 500 new members right before an election)

Minutes 2011-01-27

Voice recording (MP3): File:Talkyoo-537138-2011-01-27-1318351.mp3

Minutes 2011-01-21

Voice recording (MP3): File:Talkyoo-537138-2011-01-21-1307264.mp3

Attending: Sophie, Olivier, André, Florian, Michael (as Thorsten's deputy), Charles, Italo Attending non SC-Members: Christoph Noack, David Nelson, Daniel Stoni

Who is taking notes? (recurring item)

André

move past call notes to TDF/Steering Committee Meetings 2010?

just a proposal to clean up page content
proposal accepted, but we use sub-pages per quarter

short update on 3.3 release (Thorsten, Florian)

RC4 has been announced, we do not expect changes anymore
we did not get the new icons in (risk for short-time inclusion was to high)
marketing team is preparing for the release (co-ordination via mailing lists)
Sophie will trigger native-lang teams
Michael and Italo will start to brief some journalists

short update Membership Committee status (André, Sophie)

internal discussion on workflow (Sophie, Andre, Friedrich) has been started
first suggestion for a workflow may be available next week, start the process in two weeks
general idea is to keep the process simple, start with some basics and enhance while going

side note: credits page should be enhanced

upcoming events

FOSDEM, Brussels
- we have our own dev room
- program still needs to be pushed to the FOSDEM site, Michael will take care
- Novell might have some money to sponsor some gadets (shirts?) for FOSDEM
- Note for those who want to join FOSDEM but do not have a hotel yet: ask the dev-room organizers, there might be some place to stay for a night
CeBIT, Hannover
- will be organized by the German team. Details are not fully clear yet, but we will have a stand with several members there
Linux Open Administration Days, Antwerp
- we have an open request for a talk about LibO deployments (how admins can do this) at LOAD. If someone can do this task, ping Florian

connecting external services to TDF domain (see David's request; André)

general idea is - if people are requesting a tool and going to work with this and some os willing to provide this tooling, we should support the efforts. But the tooling and process should be documented and we need some backup for data and service, so that we can (somehow) guarantee the service independent from single person's offers (if needed)
Florian and David will discuss the details on alfresco hosting (backup, access for Florian and Christian to the server ...) off-list. As soon as there is some agreement, the domain can be used for alfresco. (expected next week)

status update on the TM Policy & Use of the logo questions (Charles)

all OK so far, draft has been published, we have some (basic) legal review and comments at the mailing list
we might need a product logo without "The Document Foundation" tag line.

ToDo for Christoph: trigger creation of free version of the loge (without TDF tag line)

during discussion the question came up, if the Document Logo is connected to TDF or LibO
- gut feeling says, it should belong to TDF, bu currently it is more connected to LibO (as we have a combined product logo)
- Design team should work on a "pure" logo. If the design reaches draft status, this should be presented to the SC for consideration and approval (but this has no top-priority)

skipped items

extension and template repository (Florian)
certficiation meeting in Berlin (Florian)
Foundation updates (Florian)
renaming and moving the mailing lists (Florian)

Review TDF Work Items status

André is going to review and update some items during the weekend

Minutes 2011-01-13

Voice recording (MP3): File:Talkyoo-537138-2011-01-13-1292638.mp3

Attending: Sophie, André, Caolan, Charles, Christoph, Florian, Michael, Olivier, Thorsten, David Nelson

Who is taking notes?

André

Trademark policy (Michael Meeks)

Question was raised if we shall publish the (so far internal) TM-policy draft and if we need legal review for it.
consensus on publishing the draft (as close to final, asking for important modification request) at steering-discuss mailing list and ask for legal advice
todo for Charles: publish current TM-policy draft at steering-discuss mailing list
todo for Charles, Michael, Caolan: seek for legal advice and get the draft reviewed

Forming the membership committee (Michael Meeks)

Michael's point is, that TDF-membership can be processed in parallel of establishing the legal entity, but we need people to do the actual work (means work as a membership committee )
discussion about the composition of the MC. It should consist of 3 to 5 people from each part of the community (e.g. developer, SC, ESC, others)
consensus on establishing the MC now with initially three people. More people can be appointent later, if necessary. Membership process should be documented by the MC, while it starts working.
decision: initial Membership Committee will be established as of now. Initial MC members are Sophie Gautier, Fridrich Strba, André Schnabel

Situation regarding the Community Bylaws

question from David, how (and when) we are going to implement the community bylaws
as a first step we introduce the MC right now
the ESC will be formally announced soon (it already exists as informal team)
other items from the bylaws will be implemented step-by-step

Future management of the libreoffice.org website

Discussion on David's request to get some sort of official manager or secretary role for website management. SC members rather had a small team of responsible people to cover more aspects of website development and to prevent single point of failure scenarios. This team should act as some kind of catalyst, guiding people by giving advice instead of taking control, so that people are encouraged to join the website team.
decision: SC appoints a team of 4 people that will be responsible for managing the website for a trial period of two months
this team consists of:
- David Nelson (for textual content)
- Christoph Noack (for user experience)
- Ivan Miskovic (for design)
- Christian Lohmaier (for infrastructure)
During the trail period, the team is asked to draft a (e.g.) wiki page how the community can contribute.

SC also made statement regarding the discussions on Drupal:

At the moment we work with Silverstripe for our production website and efforts should be focused on it. We may reconsider this, but all decisions regarding Drupal will be delayed for at least 6 months. The discussion about implementing Drupal must not hinder the work on our current production website.

Communication about the OOXML export feature

some people requested to remove the OOXML (export) feature, as this might help MS to pronote and establish their file format and the implementation might be influenced by the MS-Novell-contract
SC's answer on this request is (in short) that
- we will ship OOOXML export feature (it is not our policy to reject code contributions)
- we might offer a way to disable / remove this feature later (after 3.3 release)
todo for Charles: draft a FAQ regarding this question

Reviewing TDF Work Items status (added by Christoph)

request by Christoph to review and update the Work Items after 3.3 release, so that the community is informed, where we currently stand
to make SC members aware, this review will be set as recurring item to the SC call agenda.

other items during discussion

current download statistics for RC3 should be provided
there was the request for official TDF-mail accounts during discussion. For the moment the @documentfoundation.org mail alias is reserved for SC members. We are going to provide @libreoffice.org after the MC started to work and the membership process is in place.
Info: we have a Fosdem dev-room (as announced at the official TDF blog)
a serious bug has been reported for OOo today, which also found it's way into LibO RC3. Developers are aware and taking care of it.

Minutes 2011-12-14

Minutes 2011-11-30

Minutes 2011-11-16

Minutes 2011-10-29

Meeting minutes of the Steering Committee

Minutes 2011-10-19

Minutes 2011-10-05

Minutes 2011-10-01

Minutes 2011-09-21

Minutes 2011-09-17

Minutes 2011-09-07

Minutes 2011-09-03

Minutes 2011-08-24

Minutes 2011-08-20

Minutes 2011-08-06

Minutes 2011-07-27

Minutes 2011-07-23

Minutes 2011-07-13

Minutes 2011-07-09

Minutes 2011-06-29

Minutes 2011-06-25

Minutes 2011-06-15

Minutes 2011-05-22

Minutes 2011-05-12

Minutes 2011-05-06

Minutes 2011-04-30

Minutes 2011-04-21

Minutes 2011-04-15

Minutes 2011-04-06

Minutes 2011-03-26

Minutes 2011-03-16

Minutes 2011-02-28

Minutes 2011-02-15

Minutes 2011-01-27

Minutes 2011-01-21

Minutes 2011-01-13