The Document Foundation - The open, transparent and ... · Our philosophy supporting the...

The Document Foundation:The Document Foundation:The open, transparent and meritocratic futureThe open, transparent and meritocratic future

of free office software of free office software

Florian Effenberger @floeffFOSS Backstage, June 14, 2018

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Who's waking me up?!

free software enthusiastfor over fourteen yearsfounding member and executive directorof The Document Foundationalso active in infrastructure and marketing

Terminology

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Double meaningLibreOffice is

1. the leading free office productivity suiteinstalled by millions of users worldwide2. a wonderful worldwide community (“project”)with hundreds of friends and contributors around the globe

The Document Foundation (TDF) as legal entity isa nonprofit ”Stiftung” (foundation) based in Berlin”The objective of the foundation is the promotion and development of office software available for use by anyone free of charge”does not contain a product name on purpose

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Our philosophysupporting the development of both product and communityevents, knowledge sharing, mentoringbuilt on the community’s values and idealsthrough statutes that enforce openness and transparencyindependent from one single sponsor70,000+ individual donations per yearecosystem for contributors and commercial stakeholderscertification, joint development effortslower entry barriers: Easy Hacks, Hackfests, GSoC mentoring, workshopscooperations with other entities: e.g. OASIS, OSI, KDE, GNOME, FSFE, FSF→ ”by the community, for the community“

The Foundation

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Why all this fuss?enduring and stable(“foundations are for eternity“)foundation’s objective can not be changedsafety for community, end-users and the ecosystemacts as ”trustee” for trademarks and domainshandles donations and manages budgetsis not part of the commercial ecosystem itselfguarantees rights for all participants

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How we are structured

Board of Trustees (“Members”)currently 193 individuals working on foundation’s goals - approved for one year, once per quarter -

active in community for 3 months, 6 more planned, donations do not qualify

Board of Directorsfoundation’s legal representative

7 members and 3 deputies, term of 2 yearsfrom around the globe, currently: Italy, UK,

Germany, Netherlands, Taiwan, Czech Republic

M’Commitee5+4 members

term of 2 yearsmax. 10% of members

election of board

organizeselections

election of committeeapproval/revocation

Adv’Boardorgs & companies,

not formal body of TDF

gives advice

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The Advisory BoardAdvisory Board supports and advises Board of Directorscompanies and organizations (no individuals) with

either direct connection to LibreOfficeor long experience with FLOSS

based on sponsorshipcurrently 16 membersone meeting with the board per quarternon-confidential slides shared with our trustees afterwards

Public by default

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In the statutes“one-third rule” to prevent conflict of interestopenness and transparency

all board meetings are publichttps://wiki.documentfoundation.org/TDF/BoD_Meetingsall decisions of the bodies are publichttps://wiki.documentfoundation.org/TDF/BoD_Decisionsthe accounting is publichttps://wiki.documentfoundation.org/TDF/Ledgersthe board’s mailing list is publicprivate decisions are made public as soonas the confidentiality is resolved

The present

LibreOffice

Source: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/File:Wallpaper-LibreOffice-2-1920px.png Author: Paulojose

leading free office suite for Windows, Linux and macOSavailable in more than 100 languages (“digital participation”)time-based releases: two major releases per year, bugfixes ~6 weekstwo versions (as of now 6.0 and 5.4) maintained, plus Android ViewerLibreOffice 6.1 ~Jul: usability features, online improvements, icon sets

LibreOffice Online

https://hub.docker.com/r/libreoffice/online/

runs natively in the browserintegrates with storage & authcollaborative editingsame rendering of documents as desktop versionDocker container available

Document Liberation Project

filter for legacy and proprietary formatsremoves vendor lock-ingives users access again to their dataprovides a path towards the Open Document Formatmade by volunteers during LibreOffice developmentlibrary now used in many other open source projectsin line with TDF’s mission and FLOSS ideals

Our annual report

jointly written with the community in EN+DEturned our legal obligation into a benefitoverview on foundation, community,project, software, events, budgetEnglish version:https://tdf.io/ar2016lowGerman version:https://tdf.io/bericht20162017 report available around late Q2written and approved, currently being layouted

The future

YYOOUU DDEECCIIDDEE!!

What’s going on?

new Membership Committee - election during summer -accessibility improvements - just published -https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2018/05/07/welcome-gla11y-the-user-interface-accessibility-checker/

a new help system - since LibreOffice 6.0 -https://help.libreoffice.orgLibreOffice Conference in Tirana - in September -https://conference.libreoffice.orgHave a proposal? Let us know!https://www.documentfoundation.org/foundation/grant-request/or: board-discuss@documentfoundation.org

A wonderful community of friends

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Join us, it’s fun!

LibOCon 2016 in Brno (picture by Jiří Eischmann)

All text and image content in this document, unless otherwise specified, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. This does not include the LibreOffice name, logo, or icon.

Thank you very much!

Getting in touche-mail: floeff@documentfoundation.orgTwitter: @floeffprivate blog: https://blog.effenberger.org