The Document Foundation is the non-profit entity that coordinates the LibreOffice project and community. In 2024 we had with elections for the foundation’s Membership Committee, along with regular Advisory Board calls, and support for other projects and activities
(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2024 – we’ll post the full version here soon.)
Election of new Membership Committee (MC)
The mission of the Membership Committee is to administer membership applications and renewals following the criteria defined in the Foundation’s Statutes. Members of the MC are directly elected by community members every two years, and serve for a two-year term. The Board of Directors consists of five members and three deputies.
On July 15, Eliane Domingos – chairperson in the Board of Directors at TDF – announced the election for the next MC, and asked for nominations and self-nominations. On August 27, she then announced that the nomination phase had ended, and that voting would run from 3 – 9 September. Around this time there were also three live “town-hall” Q+A meetings with the candidates, so that community members could ask questions and discuss the responses. We made video recordings from the second and third meetings, and here they are (also available on PeerTube here and here):
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On September 12, Eliane announced the preliminary results, along with a “challenge” phase for people to check their votes and contest the results. And on September 27, TDF announced the final results, with full MC members being Gustavo Buzzatti Pacheco, Stéphane Guillou, Balázs Varga, Pranam Kumarbhai Lashkari and Jona Azizaj; and deputy members being Shinji Enoki, Andreas Mantke and Marco Marinello.
TDF would like to say thank you to all past and new members of the MC for their service to the community, and to all candidates for running. Congratulations to the newly elected MC members and their deputies.
Advisory Board members and meetings
The Document Foundation relies on its Advisory Board Members in order to receive advice and support. The Advisory Board’s primary function is to represent The Document Foundation’s supporters and to provide the Board of Directors with advice, guidance and proposals. Current members are Adfinis, allotropia software GmbH, Collabora, GNOME, CAGE Technologies Inc, City of Munich (Landeshaupstadt München), Open Source Business Alliance (OSBA), Software in the Public Interest (SPI), KDE e.V., and the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE).
Throughout the year, TDF had regular calls with representatives of the Advisory Board. Staff and Board members at TDF provided updates on the foundation, LibreOffice software and community, and described plans and activities for the future. Advisory Board members were invited to provide valuable feedback on TDF’s work, and various ideas and proposals were discussed during the calls. TDF would like to express its thanks to all of the members for their help and support.
New team member
In summer 2024, we welcomed Jonathan Clark to the TDF team as a new developer. Jonathan is initially working on improving LibreOffice’s writing script support, especially for RTL (right-to-left), CTL (complex text layout) and CJK (Chinese-Japanese-Korean) languages. This will help to make LibreOffice more accessible and usable for hundreds of millions of people around the globe.
When asked why he decided to apply for the position at TDF, Jonathan said:
I want to help people use open source software to work and create in their own language. There are other reasons, too: I’m a long-time user, interested in linguistics, and my background seemed like a good fit for the role. But the most important thing to me that I can believe in the mission.
Highlights of activities
Throughout the year, TDF supported – and provided information about – various milestones, campaigns and events, via this blog and our social media channels. For instance, in January we announced the ODF Toolkit 0.12.0 release. Big changes included a new ODF 1.3 mimetype “Text master template”, while the API for Text Selection was completely refactored. In addition, there were many fixes to improve reliability and security.
In early March, we announced that the new Board of Directors at TDF had started its term, while later in the month we celebrated Document Freedom Day, a yearly event which raises awareness of how open standards and open document formats provide us with the freedom to read and write as we wish.
Also in March, we wrote on our blog how the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) had found that the European Commission had breached several provisions of Regulation (EU) 2018/1725, the EU data protection law for EU institutions, in its use of Microsoft 365, including those relating to the transfer of personal data outside the EU and the European Economic Area (EEA). The EDPS is imposing corrective measures on the Commission.
On a related topic, in September we supported a campaign to bring back Free Software funding, asking people to give their feedback to the European Commission, following a cut in important funds for FOSS.
