Home » Foundation » Page 30

Category: Foundation

Announcement elections for the Board of Directors

Cor Nouws, Chairman of TDF’s Membership Committee, announced the following today:

Dear Community,

We hereby officially announce the upcoming elections for the next Board of Directors of The Document Foundation.

As per § 7 II of our statues, [1] the Board’s term lasts two years. The current board started its duty on February 18, 2014. Therefore, the old board remains in charge until the end of February 17, 2016, so the new board will be in charge the day after that, which is February 18, 2016.

As per § 6 III, only members of the Board of Trustees of The Document Foundation, as well as current members of any of its bodies, are eligible to be elected into the Board of Directors, and the election is overseen by the Membership Committee (§ 7 II).

The active electoral right is reserved to those who have been members of the Board of Trustees before this announcement (§ 7 II).

§ 6 III also states that members of the Board of Directors or their deputies may not be members of the Membership Committee and vice versa. This means that current members of the Membership Committee are eligible to be elected, but given that with the acceptance of their new role they lose their current role in the MC, they would have to step down from the Membership Committee the minute before accepting to become a member of the Board of Directors.

There is one more notable limitation: Per § 8 IV of the statutes, a maximum of 1/3 members of the Board of Directors is allowed to work on an employment basis for the same company, organization, entities, affiliates or subdivisions.

Nomination of candidates fulfilling the above requirements, as well as self nomination is welcome. In total, at least seven Board of Directors members are required, and given there are enough candidates, up to three deputies can be elected (§ 7 II).

Re-election of current members of the Board of Directors is explicitly permitted (§ 7 II).

Please send nominations and self-nominations via e-mail to elections@documentfoundation.org (which reaches the Membership Committee in private) and also (!) to board-discuss@documentfoundation.org (which is a public mailing list). We kindly ask nominees who would like to stand for elections to provide a 75 words statement on their candidacy as continuous text (so no bullet lists or multiple paragraphs). In addition, please also provide your full name, e-mail address and your corporate affiliation, if any.

Discussions with the candidates and questions to them as well as questions about the elections should take place on the public board-discuss@documentfoundation.org mailing list. For details on how to use the mailing list, see http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/

Eligible voters will receive further details via e-mail prior to the start of elections, including a summary of the candidates, details on how to access the voting system, and instructions on how to independently verify the vote count. Please ensure the Membership Committee has your recent and correct e-mail address on file. For questions, you can reach the Membership Committee in private at elections@documentfoundation.org

Following the time line set forth in § 7 II, requiring a 45 day advance notice, we hereby announce the following time line for the elections:

  1. 2015-10-19: announcement of the elections (this e-mail); and start of the nomination phase
  2. 2015-11-26, 24:00 CET/UTC+1: end of the nomination phase (one week before the election starts, as per § 7 II)
  3. 2015-12-04, 00:00 CET/UTC+1: official start of the elections (at least 45 days after #1, as per § 7 II)
  4. 2015-12-11, 24:00 CET/UTC+1: end of the elections
  5. 2015-12-12: announcement of the preliminary results
  6. 2015-12-14, 00:00 CET/UTC+1: start of the challenging phase
  7. 2015-12-18, 24:00 CET/UTC+1: end of the challenging phase
  8. afterwards: official announcement of the final results

Be advised that the newly elected Board of Directors will only be in charge beginning from February 18, 2016. The current Board of Directors will however include them in the decision making process, to easen up the transition.

Challenges to this announcement with respect to the deadlines outlined have to happen no later than seven (7) days after this announcement, via e-mail to elections@documentfoundation.org (which reaches the Membership Committee in private).

Challenges to the preliminary results of the election have to happen until the deadline set forth above, via e-mail to elections@documentfoundation.org (which reaches the Membership Committee in private).

On behalf of the Membership Committee,

Cor Nouws

[1] http://www.documentfoundation.org/satzung.pdf (binding version) and http://www.documentfoundation.org/statutes.pdf (non-binding translation)

Behind the scenes at TDF: Openness, transparency and projects

by Florian Effenberger, Executive Director of TDF

Florian Effenberger

With the second quarter being over, the longest day of the year having passed by, and summer vacation time coming up for many of us, it’s time to look back what happened at TDF the first six months of the year. With many projects, activities and developments going on, time has passed by once again at lightning speed, and I want to highlight a few of the things that happened, enabled by our invaluable volunteer contributions, our generous donors, and our wonderful and amazing community, end-users and adopters. In my capacity as Executive Director, I mostly shed a light on the administrative bits of the foundation running, and my staff colleagues will give an overview on their respective areas of working later on.

One of the most noteworthy things for sure is the publication of our annual report, which for the first time since TDF’s existance has been published in English and in German at the same time, a model we want to follow also for the upcoming years. The English version has been polished up by a designer, and will also serve as printed brochure for upcoming events and meetings.

Likewise, we have begun publishing the accounting ledgers to the general public, to give you an overview on how we spend donors money and what projects we invest in. Accompanied by that is the publication of the board reports on the various area of our project.

Staff-wise, I am very happy that since spring of 2015, Italo Vignoli has been contracted by TDF for marketing and PR, a role he has been filling on a volunteer basis for some time already. Supported by a future marketing intern, Italo will work on press releases in joint cooperation with the community, regular marketing calls and a TDF merchandising online store.

A lot of other projects have been prepared behind the scenes, like our tenders on MozTrap and on LibreOffice UX, where we’re working hard on making them a success just like last year’s Android tender.

Community-Meeting in Essen
Community-Meeting in Essen

On the foundation side, we now have 204 members and even more contributors around the globe. Being a Bavarian, one thing that makes me particulary proud is of course that we welcomed the city of Munich in our Advisory Board early this year.

There’s a lot of things cooking at TDF, and the second half of the year will be at least as exciting as the first one. With the LibreOffice Conference coming up in Denmark, the certification program growing strong and our grant request page online for community proposals, I’m more than excited to see what projects, ideas and new things come up at TDF the next weeks and months.

One of my personal tasks for the rest of the year is to engage stronger again in my native language community. We recently had an exciting community meeting at Linuxhotel in Essen, where we also had a chance to exchange thoughts and views with the Italian community, represented by Italo Vignoli. The German community has traditionally been a strong one, so 18 people in total found their way to the meeting. With the setup of regular German community phone conferences, including one dedicated call for the marketing of LibreOffice 5.0, we will work on getting more contributors in and engage in local marketing of LibreOffice – the best free office suite and one incredibly exciting community!

Publication of TDF Ledgers

TDF has begun publishing the accounting ledgers to the general public. As part of the foundation’s transparency and openness principles, TDF is committed to publishing the accounting ledgers on a regular basis from now on.

Accounting is done by a professional accountant, and the resulting ledgers are slightly anonymized and translated. The style of the ledgers is defined by our tax/accounting requirements and changes are possible only on a limited basis.

You can find TDF Ledgers at https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/TDF/Ledgers.

TDF is grateful to all donors and volunteers for the ongoing donations, support and contributions, which make TDF what it is today and contribute greatly to the ongoing success of the LibreOffice community!

Read about The Document Foundation achievements in 2014: download the Annual Report!

TDF ReportThe Document Foundation (TDF) is proud to announce its 2014 Annual Report, which can be downloaded from the following link: http://tdf.io/report2014 (3.2 MB PDF). The version with HD images can be downloaded from http://tdf.io/report2014hq (15.9 MB PDF).

TDF Annual Report starts with a Review of 2014, with highlights about TDF and LibreOffice, and a summary of financials and budget.

Community, Projects & Events covers the LibreOffice Conference 2014 in Bern, Certification, Website and QA, Hackfests in Brussels, Gran Canaria, Paris, Boston and Tolouse, Native-Language Projects, Infrastructure, Documentation, Marketing and Design.

Software, Development & Code reports about the activities of the Engineering Steering Committee, LibreOffice Development, the Document Liberation Project and LibreOffice on Android.

The last section focuses on People, starting with Top Contributors, followed by TDF Staff, the Board of Directors and the Membership Committee, the Board of Trustees, or the body of TDF Members, and the Advisory Board.

To allow the widest distribution of the document, this is released with a CC BY 3.0 DE License, unless otherwise noted, to TDF Members and free software advocates worldwide.

[The German version of TDF Annual Report is available from http://tdf.io/bericht2014].

Behind the scenes at TDF: Localization and Native-Language Projects

Sophie Gautier has been a member of the OpenOffice.org project since its beginning, and then a founding member of The Document Foundation and LibreOffice. She is extremely active in the Francophone and international community, and is a staff member of The Document Foundation. She takes care of the French translation of LibreOffice (interface and help), is a member of LibreOffice certification committee and is a leading member of the quality assurance project.

2015 is more than ever a year packed with exciting projects and ideas around LibreOffice and The Document Foundation, so we want to continue our behind-the-scenes series, to share achievements with our community and our generous donours, to whom we’d like to express our sincerest gratitude and thanks for their incredible and wonderful support and their invaluable contributions!

The localization team has been very busy translating for the 4.4.x version, a lot of dialogues have been modified, so thousands of strings were touched, moved and need to be translated and validated again.

The L10N team had an important discussion on the workflow and the current workload due to changes on the sources, whether they are needed or purely cosmetic, which resulted in several decisions. The first is that the teams willing to work on master will have a new Pootle project reflecting the changes done there. It will be merged once a month and the template will be updated in Pootle accordingly. This allows us to check the strings much earlier and revert eventually unneeded changes. The teams wishing to work at the branch levels will still be able to do so.

To be able to reach out to developers more quickly and get a better communication between the teams, I attend and report the L10N activities and needs to the Engineering Steering Committee, by attending the weekly calls. For example, the request to have a mechanism that handles the localization of the templates will be provided for 4.5 and strings will be uploaded on Pootle.

The migration to the new Pootle version is going on. We are closely working with the Pootle team to get this done smoothly and to have the whole set of features the L10N team needs. The Deckard addendum will be the next step.

A cross work between the documentation and translation projects has been brought up by Milos Sramek from the Slovak community. They have developed a whole workflow to translate the user guides and to maintain them. After some tests in different languages, we have decided to use it for the whole project and document it on the wiki. This is handled via the OmegaT Project feature and we use the LibreOffice GitHub repository to manage revisions in the .ODT file, which turned out to be really time saving and reducing errors – even if the first work is important, it allows afterwards to only handle modifications needed by new LibreOffice versions. If you are willing to use this workflow for your own translation projects, even if it’s another LibreOffice writing, don’t hesitate to contact us either on the documentation or the L10N list.

Some new languages added to Pootle during the first quarter are: Guarani, Nahualt, Tigrinya, Pashto and a new contributor who will work on Tatar, which was stalled for the moment. Welcome to all of them, keep up the good work, guys!

It is a bit early, but let’s already talk about what L10N and NLPs wanted to discuss during the LibreOffice Conference. I am very happy to see that we will have a large group representing the teams this year! 🙂 If you are active in the L10N or NLPs groups and wish to attend, don’t hesitate to come back to me via e-mail and have a look also at the conference website. We will have workshops, discussions and presentations sharing our experiences, difficulties, tips & tricks, but the most importan,t we will be altogether in the same room 🙂 If you can’t attend, don’t feel sad, we will try to organize a hangout and an IRC chat as well.

TDF has also been a supporter of the Document Freedom Day, an event that will be followed by several groups all over the world. I’ll report about it next quarter. The Brazilian team has launched the 15th edition of its magazine. The Japanese team is, as always, organizing several events, trainings and mentoring during this quarter. Don’t forget to have a look at our calendar to follow the activities and perhaps meet a team exhibiting near your place.

The Document Foundation: the third anniversary

The Document Foundation has been incorporated on February 17, 2012. Today is the third anniversary, and this video is a testimonial of the activity of many members of the fantastic LibreOffice community in representation of thousands of volunteers and hundreds of developers. Thanks everyone for the wonderful journey.

Please confirm that you want to play a YouTube video. By accepting, you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party.

YouTube privacy policy

If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh.

Press Releases

The Document Foundation Releases LibreOffice 26.2.1 with Contributions from Community and Ecosystem Partners

Videos describing new features available on YouTube and PeerTube Berlin, 26 February 2026 – The Document Foundation today announced the…

Open Document Format

LibreOffice for Education: Regaining Digital Sovereignty

Every year, millions of students open a laptop and log into Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, surrendering their digital sovereignty…