Candidacy for a BoD seat -- Michael Meeks

Hi guys,

Just a quick note to say that I intend to run again for a seat on the
Board of Directors of The Document Foundation.

Who am I ?

I'm Michael Meeks: Christian, Husband, Hacker, 36 years old,
affiliated with Collabora. My day job is to try to rapidly grow the
economic ecosystem around LibreOffice for the benefit of all
including Collabora. I also love to hack on the code where I can, and
to mentor and include new hackers.

I started poking at the code-base before it was open-sourced in 2000,
and have served with the team creating LibreOffice from the very
beginning in various technical and non-technical roles: inside the
Engineering Steering Committee, as a Board member, and primarily as a
code contributor and evangelist.

Why am I running?

I'd like to offer whatever benefits a whole career's worth of
experience of mistakes, blunders, failures (mostly my own) and
occasional successes (mostly other people's) can bring to the daily
life of running TDF. I've also had the privilege of being involved in
the creation, hiring, management & bootstrapping of several teams of
both paid and unpaid developers over the years - which is perhaps
useful as TDF continues to grow and invest.

I also believe it is critical for us to continue to safeguard our
can-do and relational culture, empowering individuals to make friends
and get things done while resisting un-necessary process creep as we
grow. One of my priorities is working to ensure that we remain a fluid
and adaptive organisation, always open to new and better ideas, new
participants and new and better ways of doing things.

Finally - I'm a believer in Free Software; while I am critically
interested in ensuring that TDF remains a great place for companies to
invest and sell services around the software I'm committed to ensuring
that the right conditions remain in place for companies to contribute
effectively back to the project and work well together with volunteers
around the common codebase.

Happy to answer any questions of course.