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By the community, for the community: TDF to base community-driven foundation in Berlin, Germany

Openness, meritocracy and transparency anchored in cornerstones of an enduring entity
Successful vendor-neutral development model to provide the best free office suite

Berlin, February 1st, 2012 – The Document Foundation (TDF) today announces that it will base its community-driven entity in Berlin, in the legal form of a German Stiftung. This kind of structure is recognized worldwide as a legally stable, safe and long term entity, providing the ideal cornerstone for the long term growth of the community and its software.

“For the first time in 12 years, the development of the free office suite finally takes place within an entity that not only perfectly fits the values and ideals of the worldwide community, but also has this very same community driving it. The future home of the best free office suite is built and shaped by everyone who decides to participate and join. And the best is: Everyone can contribute and is invited to do so, to further strenghten the free office ecosystem”, says Florian Effenberger, Chairman of the Board at TDF.

Charles-H. Schulz, one of the founders and a member of the Board of Directors, adds: “Berlin is the icon of reunification and unity, and as such is the ideal home of our global community, aggregated around the objective of creating the best free office suite ever. We expect to be legally established during the next weeks, as soon as the last details of the formal process have been finished.”

“After many months of work in close cooperation with the authorities, we were able to keep the spirit of the community bylaws, and incorporate them into legally binding statutes, that ensure the promises that TDF has made in its manifesto”, says Michael (Mike) Schinagl, a Berlin-based lawyer and contributor to various free software projects, who has been driving the legal aspects of the foundation set-up from the very beginning.

In addition, TDF currently publically discusses ways for local entities to join and participate, and operative entities are currently being created to carry on special projects.

Founder of the Stiftung will be the German nonprofit association Freies Office Deutschland e.V., formerly OpenOffice.org Deutschland e.V., that so far acted as interim legal entity. “We congratulate the community for having achieved this key step, and are proud of having played a key role in setting up The Document Foundation. Our association is looking forward to working closely with the new entity and acting as a gateway between TDF and private as well as enterprise users”, says Thomas Krumbein, Chairman of the Board at Freies Office Deutschland e.V.

The LibreOffice project welcomes donations at http://www.libreoffice.org/get-involved/donate/

The website of TDF can be found at http://www.documentfoundation.org
The best free office suite, LibreOffice, has its website at http://www.libreoffice.org
Freies Office Deutschland e.V. host their German homepage at http://www.frodev.org

Note to editors: A “Stiftung” is a German Foundation established with an endowment and supervised by state authorities. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_%28non-profit%29#Germany for more details.

About The Document Foundation

The Document Foundation is an open, independent, self-governing, meritocratic organization, which builds on ten years of dedicated work by the OpenOffice.org Community. TDF was created in the belief that the culture born of an independent foundation brings out the best in corporate and volunteer contributors, and will deliver the best free office suite. TDF is open to any individual who agrees with its core values and contributes to its activities, and warmly welcomes corporate participation, e.g. by sponsoring individuals to work as equals alongside other contributors in the community. As of February 1, 2012, TDF has 146 members and over a thousand volunteers and contributors worldwide.

Media Contacts

Florian Effenberger (based near Munich, Germany, UTC+1)
Phone: +49 8341 99660880 – Mobile: +49 151 14424108
E-mail: floeff@documentfoundation.org – Skype: floeff

Olivier Hallot (based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, UTC-3)
Mobile: +55 21 88228812 – E-mail: olivier.hallot@documentfoundation.org

Charles-H. Schulz (based in Paris, France, UTC+1)
Mobile: +33 6 98655424 – E-mail: charles.schulz@documentfoundation.org

Italo Vignoli (based in Milan, Italy, UTC+1)
SIP Phone: +39 02 320621813 – Mobile: +39 348 5653829
E-mail: italo.vignoli@documentfoundation.org – Skype: italovignoli
GTalk: italo.vignoli@gmail.com

public BoD phone conferences every 2nd Wednesday

I am happy to announce, that the TDF BoD calls will take place every 2nd Wednesday at 1600 UTC, starting on November 16th, 2011, and are scheduled to run for one hour. Most calls will be public, but according to our Bylaws, there might be private calls as well. Their contents will be, in accordance with our Bylaws, be made public as soon as and when possible.

For every other week, i.e. on those Wednesdays when no calls are scheduled, we reserve the time slot for ad-hoc calls if they are needed. For urgent matters, ad-hoc calls can of course take place also on other days.

As usual, for the public calls, we welcome questions and comments from the audience, everyone who dials in can speak directly.

In order to help running the calls, please add your agenda items in advance to the public wiki, where also the dial-in details can be found. The appropriate page is:

http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/TDF/BoD_Meetings

Looking forward to hearing you soon!

Status quo on the Foundation, October 2011

It has been a while since I have blogged about the Foundation status, but the Steering Committee have been very active on this topic in the meantime. Now that we are handing over to the new Board of Directors, it is good to document where we have reached.

First, we are delighted that the elections of the first BoD are now official. As promised, the Steering Committee has ceased its existence, and the TDF members voted on the new BoD in an open, transparent and meritocratic way. Gratifyingly, the Members have elected the core of the former Steering Committee onto the Board and I’m thus able to use “we” interchangeably in this report! The next election to take place will be the one of the Membership Committee, so expect an official announcement on that soon.

On to the status of incorporation. As previously planned, we approached three German federal states, and got very valuable feedback from them. One of our three candidates showed very strong support and is most likely to be the final location for The Document Foundation. We don’t want to pre-empt any result and therefore will not communicate the state’s name in public, but the secret will hopefully be revealed very soon.

We have included many improvements into the legally binding statutes, based on extensive input from many sources. We are right now in the process of translating the German legalese into English, so our new Board of Directors can make a final review. Based on the Board’s decision, we will hand over the documents to the authorities and hope for a positive reply. As soon as we receive that, the legal setup of the Foundation will be started and we will finally be incorporated.

We’d like to take the chance to respond to some questions on the process of legally establishing our entity. It has indeed taken much longer than we had initially expected, and we have to admit that our estimation on the necessary timeframe was wrong. However, the whole lengthy process has been educational and has led to a much more considered outcome. Together with the community, we have worked extensively on bylaws we wanted to have reflected in the legal entity of the Foundation.

In contrast to the the former model of having a single corporate sponsor – and different to what many other legal vehicles could provide – the Foundation we are creating guarantees endurance, safety and stability for the whole community, both for end-users and for private as well as corporate contributors. It also gives the community very strong rights. While previously – legally speaking – any community rules were arbitrary, the rights given to community members in this new model are not only binding, but legally enforceable by every single member.

Again: The rights we promised will be legally binding and enforceable by our members. There are not many – if any at all – communities giving such strong rights to their members.  Creating such an intentionally durable and strong structure from the beginning is uncommon and we found that this has been something innovative and new for our advisors as well as the authorities, which has led to the slow progress we’ve encountered.

We invested lots of time to express fundamental and legally binding rights for our community and that task has admittedly proved enormous. But the time invested so far is justified by the goals we wanted to achieve from day one – an open, transparent and meritocratic organization, independent from any corporate sponsor and designed specifically for the purposes of The Document Foundation rather than borrowed from elsewhere. We are sure spending this time has been very much worth it.

Document Foundation Board 2011: Final Results

Simon Phipps posted this today to the announcement mailing list:

“Having received no objections to the preliminary election results I posted on October 20th within the period described in the election rules, it is now my pleasure to declare the results of the 2011 Board elections for The Document Foundation.

I declare the following Members of The Document Foundation duly elected as Board Members:

  • Thorsten Behrens
  • Florian Effenberger
  • Olivier Hallot
  • Michael Meeks
  • Caolán McNamara
  • Charles-H Schulz
  • Italo Vignoli

I declare the following Members of The Document Foundation duly elected as Deputies:

  • Jesús Corrius
  • Andreas Mantke
  • Bjoern Michaelsen

Full election materials can be found at https://elections.documentfoundation.org/2011/

Thanks for the opportunity to contribute to The Document Foundation in this way, and congratulations to the Board members on their election.”

Document Foundation Board 2011: Preliminary Results

The election results have been processed using OpenSTV by multiple members of the Membership Committee, and I am now confident that we have a result ready for review pending confirmation next week. Full election materials can be found at https://elections.documentfoundation.org/2011/

PRELIMINARY RESULTS
Candidates are sorted here in their order of overall preference after all preferences have been considered according to the Meek STV with Droop-Dynamic-Fractional threshold method. The first seven preferences will be elected as Board members after confirmation; the remaining three will be elected as Deputies.

Board Members:

  • Florian Effenberger
  • Thorsten Behrens
  • Michael Meeks
  • Caolán McNamara
  • Italo Vignoli
  • Olivier Hallot
  • Charles-H Schulz

DEPUTIES:

  • Bjoern Michaelsen
  • Andreas Mantke
  • Jesús Corrius

CONFIRMATION PERIOD:
The detailed results of running OpenSTV can be found at https://elections.documentfoundation.org/results.php?election_id=1 and a list of all votes cast can be found at https://elections.documentfoundation.org/votes.php?election_id=1

You can run the calculation yourself using OpenSTV from http://www.openstv.org/;  the machine-readable votes are at https://elections.documentfoundation.org/blt.php?election_id=1 and the preference ordering is achieved by sorting according to keep factor in the final round of calculation.

Any eligible voter may challenge the preliminary results by e-mailing elections@documentfoundation.org prior to 2011-10-26 at 23:59 UTC with a detailed explanation of their challenge. The decision of the Membership Committee as to any challenge shall be final. Once any challenges have been resolved, the Membership Committee shall announce the final results.

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