Preliminary budget for 2022

Hello,

find below a summary of the preliminary budget that the Board of Directors agreed on 2022-03-28. It is now made public in accordance with our statutes.

Recurring: 901.444,52 €

   Salaries and compensations 694.840,88 €
   Accounting and legal advice 32.603,64 €
   Running cost & discretionary spending 25.000,00 €
   Trainings 5.000,00 €
   Infrastructure 74.000,00 €
   LibOCon & FOSDEM 30.000,00 €
   Community projects 20.000,00 €
   Marketing budget 20.000,00 €

Pending projects (as of January 1):
cf. https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Budget2021

   Various tenders 414.053,54 €
    Streamline tendering process
    Text layout
    Cleanup & further improve ODF conformance
    Rolling Release: Finish MAR-based autoupdater for Windows
    C++ accessibility tests
    MC request: Improvements on the Membership Committee tooling
    Improve the accessibility checker for PDF/UA
    Support for Editing and Creation of SmartArt
    Convert Impress slideshow to drawinglayer primitives
    Writer tables: support cell margins (next to cell padding)

   Campus programme for student ambassadors 12.000,00 €
   MC request: TDF welcome kit for the members 2.000,00 €
   statutory auditor/chartered accountant 5.000,00 €

New projects:
cf. https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Budget2022

   Various tenders 400.000 €
    [ESC] Bitmaps in vcl: Merge RGB and A layer into one
    [ESC] Stabilize cross-page table layouting
    [ESC] Text runs of RTL scripts (e.g. Arabic, Hebrew, Persian) from imported PDF are reversed, PDFIProcessor::mirrorString not behaving
    [ESC] Font subsetter for font embedding
    [ESC] Bitmaps in vcl: Use a native format/depth
    [ESC] ODT export nondeterminism
    [ESC] Remove/Replace usages of XOR-Paint
    [ESC] Table Styles improvements
    [ESC] Fix accessibility issues
    [ESC] Unify Writer and Draw Images
    [ESC] Decouple master slide and layouts
    [ESC] Multi-color gradient
    [ESC] Look-ahead styleref field for Writer
    [ESC] GraphicFilter clean-up
    [ESC] UNO API changes subscription/feedback channel
    [ESC] Regular scan-build reports like we do with CppCheck
    [ESC] Normalized spell checking
    [ESC] Missing ODF Features: Concentric gradient fill of custom-shapes
    [ESC] Bridge the gap between drawinglayer and VCL
    [ESC] XLSX Aggressive Competitors tracker: gridlines for 3d line charts

   Various contracts and tenders 100.600 €
    Contract Weblate to sort out issues pointed out by the l10n community
    Hire 1 x New QA analyst
    part-time web technology expert
    Update & translate LibreLogo manual, complete LibreLogo unit tests
    Decidim startup

   [MC] Carbon compensation 3.750,00 €
   2-4% budget to FLOSS software as devprojects or support (incl. 2021 leftover) 27.265 €

Florian

Can you tell is the voting details please?

Thanks

Simon

Hi Simon, all,

Simon Phipps wrote:

Can you tell is the voting details please?

The vote on the budget was unanimous, among the board members present.

Best,

-- Thorsten

Hi Thorsten, all,

I’m not Simon, but I’m curious why your answer contains no information about the participants of this private part of the meeting. Maybe this is not a top secret thing and you could add this information here.

Regards,
Andreas

Hello Andreas, Hello Simon,

I'm not Simon, but I'm curious why your answer contains no information about the participants of this private part of the meeting. Maybe this is not a top secret thing and you could add this information here.

here's the list of participants:

Session chair: Thorsten Behrens
Keeper of the minutes: Florian Effenberger

In the meeting:
     Board Members - Thorsten, Cor, Laszlo, Kendy, Paolo, Emiliano
     Board Deputy Members - Ayhan, Gabor, Gabriel
     Team - Florian

Representation: Gabor for Caolan

The Board of Directors at time of the call consists of 7 seat holders without deputies. In order to be quorate, the call needs to have 1/2 of the Board of Directors members, which gives 4. A total of 7 Board of Directors members are attending or represented in the call.

The board waives all formal statutory requirements, or requirements in the foundations articles, or other requirements regarding form and invitation, time limits, and for the topics discussed in this meeting.

The meeting is quorate and invitation happened in time. From now on, motions can be passed with the agreement of a simple majority of those remaining present. The majority threshold is currently 4.

Florian

Super, thanks for adding that header to the minutes - it helps enormously with understanding who is involved in decisions! Would it be possible to get this information with every secret item that is made public from now on please?

Cheers

Simon

On Fri, Apr 1, 2022 at 10:04 AM Florian Effenberger <floeff@documentfoundation.org> wrote:

Hello Andreas, Hello Simon,

Andreas Mantke wrote on 01.04.22 at 09:52:

I’m not Simon, but I’m curious why your answer contains no information
about the participants of this private part of the meeting. Maybe this
is not a top secret thing and you could add this information here.

here’s the list of participants:

Session chair: Thorsten Behrens
Keeper of the minutes: Florian Effenberger

In the meeting:
Board Members - Thorsten, Cor, Laszlo, Kendy, Paolo, Emiliano
Board Deputy Members - Ayhan, Gabor, Gabriel
Team - Florian

Representation: Gabor for Caolan

The Board of Directors at time of the call consists of 7 seat holders
without deputies. In order to be quorate, the call needs to have 1/2 of
the Board of Directors members, which gives 4. A total of 7 Board of
Directors members are attending or represented in the call.

The board waives all formal statutory requirements, or requirements in
the foundations articles, or other requirements regarding form and
invitation, time limits, and for the topics discussed in this meeting.

The meeting is quorate and invitation happened in time. From now on,
motions can be passed with the agreement of a simple majority of those
remaining present. The majority threshold is currently 4.

Florian


Florian Effenberger, Executive Director (Geschäftsführer)
Tel: +49 30 5557992-50 | Mail: floeff@documentfoundation.org
The Document Foundation, Kurfürstendamm 188, 10707 Berlin, DE
Gemeinnützige rechtsfähige Stiftung des bürgerlichen Rechts
Legal details: https://www.documentfoundation.org/imprint


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Hi Simon,

as you may know I do fully agree that there should be much more transparency and that there is no need to keep private who voted on what except in some very rare cases.

It’s probably no secret that I’m not happy at all about the whole budgeting process.
I voted on the general idea of the budget but not to confirm the specific items as I agree we need to define a budget I think the methods used to get stuff in the ranking has room for improvement.

I find it very odd that the same people that propose tenders are also in the board voting for them in the budget and then they end up bidding for them.
This is something that we should change very quickly and this should affect the current budget down the line even if we approve a rough idea of spending.

I would also say that the project nad tenders approved for the budget 2022 should be published in full, with relative costing, so that all can see how much we plan to spend on each items allowing the community to let us know if they agree with those items and costing.

I tried to find the spreadsheet with the votes from the members of the ESC to see how the ranking has been done but it seems like it’s a “secret”, as you like to say, as it hasn’t yet been shared with the board.

The costing issue seems to be recognised by the commercial contributors represented in the ESC which finds it too expensive to provide detailed quotes for the tenders they’ll bid on so it seems like we have a budget that doesn’t really represent reality:

https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice/2021-November/088035.html

I also think it’s a bit unfair that only 2 commercial contributors are fully aware of the expected cost of a tender, as they proposed it, while potential external bidders that have no representatives in the ESC or the board won’t know what to expect in terms of reward for their efforts. So or we make those very rough idea of costing available to all or we use the in-house developers to give us an rough ideas of what we should spend, I guess as rough as the one we are getting from the commercial contributors, and we don’t disclose the budgeted cost for each item to members of the ESC/Board.

To conclude I welcome your call for more transparency and please do ask for more if things are not clear.

Ciao

Paolo

On 01/04/2022 11:30, Simon Phipps wrote:

Super, thanks for adding that header to the minutes - it helps enormously with understanding who is involved in decisions! Would it be possible to get this information with every secret item that is made public from now on please?

Cheers

Simon

On Fri, Apr 1, 2022 at 10:04 AM Florian Effenberger <floeff@documentfoundation.org> wrote:

Hello Andreas, Hello Simon,

Andreas Mantke wrote on 01.04.22 at 09:52:

I’m not Simon, but I’m curious why your answer contains no information
about the participants of this private part of the meeting. Maybe this
is not a top secret thing and you could add this information here.

here’s the list of participants:

Session chair: Thorsten Behrens
Keeper of the minutes: Florian Effenberger

In the meeting:
Board Members - Thorsten, Cor, Laszlo, Kendy, Paolo, Emiliano
Board Deputy Members - Ayhan, Gabor, Gabriel
Team - Florian

Representation: Gabor for Caolan

The Board of Directors at time of the call consists of 7 seat holders
without deputies. In order to be quorate, the call needs to have 1/2 of
the Board of Directors members, which gives 4. A total of 7 Board of
Directors members are attending or represented in the call.

The board waives all formal statutory requirements, or requirements in
the foundations articles, or other requirements regarding form and
invitation, time limits, and for the topics discussed in this meeting.

The meeting is quorate and invitation happened in time. From now on,
motions can be passed with the agreement of a simple majority of those
remaining present. The majority threshold is currently 4.

Florian


Florian Effenberger, Executive Director (Geschäftsführer)
Tel: +49 30 5557992-50 | Mail: floeff@documentfoundation.org
The Document Foundation, Kurfürstendamm 188, 10707 Berlin, DE
Gemeinnützige rechtsfähige Stiftung des bürgerlichen Rechts
Legal details: https://www.documentfoundation.org/imprint


To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscribe@documentfoundation.org
Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/
Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette
List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/
Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy

Simon Phipps

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