Hi everyone,
Just a quick note to say that I intend to run again for a seat
on the Board of Directors of The Document Foundation. Self-nomination
feels uncomfortable as a concept, but here goes:
* Who am I ?
I'm Michael Meeks: Christian, Husband, Hacker, 42 years old, I try to
shepherd Collabora Productivity. My day job tries to rapidly grow the
economic ecosystem around LibreOffice for the benefit of all,
including Collabora. That means encouraging more people to pay for
more features, fixes, testing, translation, UX design & other goodness
to go into LibreOffice and to accelerate the virtuous circle of its
growth. This also involves encouraging TDF to leave space for the
ecosystem to flourish, to build a fair and consistent level playing
field for companies, and to celebrate all of our varied contributors
and their contributions.
In common with many, I'm most excited when hacking on the code and
making positive changes there, as well as mentoring and including new
people. Having started poking at the code-base before it was
open-sourced in 2000, I 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, but
primarily as a code contributor, mentor and evangelist.
* Why am I running?
I'd like to continue to offer the benefits of a whole career's worth
of mistakes, blunders, mis-understandings, failures (mostly my own)
and occasional successes (mostly other people's). I can also type at a
reasonable speed, and scribe interactive minutes of calls with
reasonable accuracy, helping to make Board decisions somewhat clearer
in retrospect. 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
open, can-do and relational culture. That means helping to empower
individuals to make friends and get things done while resisting
distrust. It also means keeping TDF as a fun place, that is
distictively different from the ossification, risk aversion and
bureaucracy that grows in many companies. I'm eager to retain those
youthful, fluid and adaptive traits in TDF: always open to new and
better ideas, new participants and new and better ways of doing
things.
Building on that, one of the things I love about LibreOffice is our
diversity of contributors with all manner of different and interesting
backgrounds, experiences and opinions. I'm eager to create space for
people to respectfully build strong relationships with others in the
project, even when they profoundly disagree with those that are
different or think differently to them.
Finally - I'm a believer in Free Software, while being critically
interested in ensuring that TDF remains a great place for companies to
invest and to sell services around improving the software. I'm
committed to making sure the right conditions remain in place to help
companies contribute effectively back to the project and work well
together with volunteers around the common codebase.
Full name: Michael Meeks
Email: michael.meeks@collabora.com
Corporate affiliation: Collabora
* 75 word formal candidacy:
I'd love to serve you again on the board: as a FLOSS advocate, with
passion for LibreOffice, deep TDF board knowledge, lots of generic
business experience: legal, budgeting, interviewing, management, yet
also eager to keep LibreOffice's spirit of fun, fairness and
freedom. I've a long experince of contribution to different FLOSS
communities in various ways, am currently betting the business on
LibreOffice and its success, but also want to help growing our
volunteer participation.
* Happy to answer any questions of course.
Regards,
Michael.