Category: Foundation

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!

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.

Simon Phipps today announced that the nominations for the board elections are now open.

Simon Phipps posted the following today on the announcement mailing list:

Having been asked by the Steering Committee and Membership Committee to act as the Elections Officer for The Document Foundation,  it is my pleasure to announce that we will now conduct  the election of a Board of Directors. This election is following the Bylaws [1] of our Foundation. The term is one year commencing from the date the Foundation is legally established.

There are seven (7) board seats that are to be filled during this election. Three (3) additional deputies are to be selected, so the total of slots to be filled by election is ten (10).

Members of The Document Foundation as of 2011-09-02 are eligible to vote in the elections. Anyone who has made a contribution to The Document Foundation can apply for membership by completing an application [2]. To vote, your membership also needs to be valid at least until the end of the elections (2011-10-26).

Any eligible voter is also eligible to be elected to the Board of Directors. To announce your candidacy, send a message to steering-discuss@documentfoundation.org with your full name, e-mail, corporate affiliation (if any), and a description of your reasons for wanting to serve as a director. Candidacies must be announced prior to 2011-09-30, 23:59 UTC.

All candidates should also send a summary of their candicacy announcement to elections@documentfoundation.org – a compilation of the summaries will be mailed to all registered voters several days prior to the elections. Summaries should be no more than 75 words of continuous text (so no bullet lists or multiple paragraphs) and must be received by the nomination deadline given above.

All discussion related to the elections should be held on discuss@documentfoundation.org where Members are invited to ask questions to one or all candidates. Instructions explaining how to vote will be sent via e-mail to all eligible voters by 2011-10-07.

The 10 candidates voted for most as counted by a single transferable vote system [3] will be elected, except that no more than two individuals affiliated with any one corporation may be elected. Should more than two of the top ten vote-getters be affiliated with the same company, only the two with the most votes will be considered elected.

In the event of a tie for the final seat on the board or the final deputy slot, the Membership Committee will schedule run-off elections as soon as possible. The Membership Committee will announce preliminary results as soon as possible after the elections close, along with instructions on how to access the votes archive and how to independently verify the vote count.

Any eligible voter may challenge the preliminary results by e-mailing elections@documentfoundation.org prior to 2011-10-26. The published 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.

Any questions regarding these procedures should be directed to the Membership Committee by e-mail to  elections@documentfoundation.org . The committee shall have the power to make any necessary changes or clarifications to these rules at any point during the elections.

[1]  http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/CommunityBylaws
[2]  http://www.documentfoundation.org/foundation/application-for-tdf-community-membership/
[3]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Transferable_Vote

Election Timeline (all deadlines are 23:59 UTC)

2011-08-23: Announcement of elections
2011-09-02: Freeze of membership applications, list of candidates opens.
2011-10-01: Last day to announce candidacies, submit summary statements.
2011-10-03: Final list of candidates is published.
2011-10-07: Instructions mailed to eligible voters, voting begins.
2011-10-17: Voting closes.
2011-10-20: Preliminary results are announced.
2011-10-26: Last day to challenge preliminary results.
2011-10-27: Announcement of final results

This is a landmark in the history of The Document Foundation and I encourage all Members to participate fully.