El 7/2/22 a las 15:16, Paolo Vecchi escribió:
Hi all,
many of you voted for me as you wanted me to promote and achieve the goals set in my candidacy statement:
https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/2021/msg00279.html
Point 1 is what leads me once again to share with the community my intention to push forward point 3 and 4 so that you can all provide your objective contributions to help me and the rest of the board in doing the right things for TDF and our community.
The following is a summary of the points that support the need and the feasibility of the proposal:
Enable TDF to contribute more code to LibreOffice with in-house developers to address our donors specific needs
As shown by Italo’s slides at FOSDEM again and by others, TDF is not contributing as much as it could
Up to now no strategic decisions have been taken to make TDF a more regular and active code contributor
Members of the ecosystem and others also suggested that we should spend more money in development
Bugs, a11y issues and features can be harder to taken care of by volunteers and are not always addressed by the ecosystem
We need to build up internal skills and development capabilities to speed up innovation
Lack of suppliers diversification, mostly 2 at present, is a suboptimal situation for TDF, LibreOffice and its community
Internal developers can grow to cover areas like mentoring and QA while also helping with new contributors support
TDF needs to expand its internal capacity to deal with publishing in app stores directly and manage variable levels of complexity due to ever changing rules
Some proposed projects could be developed internally instead of outsourcing them, which helps to grow in-house skills and capacity to address our donors needs
Potential App Stores revenues may allow for more developers and to invest in developing other projects
Our development mentor together with the team should propose to the BoD projects for internal development
While internal projects may cover different areas tenders and ESC proposals will be also evaluated to avoid effort duplication
This is not “just” a new project, it’s an essential and strategical move for TDF to grow further in its second decade which widens the horizon for new visions and opportunities to do more and even better things for LibreOffice and our community
Funds are available for at least 2 developers allowing us to start employing them straight away
Next steps: create and publish the job offers for developers and on-board them ASAP
The proposal will be publicly discussed this Friday 11 of February so I’m looking forward to your constructive feedback to make it a better proposal for all.
In the meantime I hope you appreciated my efforts in relation to point 6:
Ciao
Paolo
I believe that the arguments in favor are way more than enough. TDF must set the course and have its own weight within ESC.
In addition, projects that are not attractive to the valuable members of the ecosystem could be divided into smaller parts and dealt with within the foundation itself.
We must avoid reaching an instance similar to LOOL, where one part simply closed the door. In that sense, influence and/or dependence on just two providers is not in the best interest of the foundation itself or the LibreOffice Community.