Questions To MC Candidates

Hi,

Hello Andreas,

I have two first questions to the candidates:

first of all, let me say thanks for dedicating your time to the Project and for asking these questions.

a) regarding the mission of the MC (§ 12 of the statutes) have you
already participated in board calls during the last two years as
external (non-member)?

After the end of my term as board member (February 19th 2020) I had the chance to join the public part of the board calls only two times. Unfortunately the call was conflicting with other calls related to my daily job. For staying updated on what is going on at TDF I'm reading the public minutes, the information shared on this list and on the internal member list.
If I'll be elected I'll adjust my calendar trying to keep the board call slot available for having the chance to directly attend the public part of the board calls.

b) What is your personal take on a 'cooling down' periode between being
a member of leading bodies of the foundation, regarding the first
sentence in the statutes § 12?

Our statutes don't require a "cooling period" before joining one of the governing bodies.
I agree with Dennis that an elected member of the MC should remain in charge until the end of the term, avoiding to step-down after having the confirmation of being elected in the Board of Directors.
I can see in this "habit" several negative effects like:
a) the Board of Trustees elected that member for fulfilling the duties of the Membership Committee for a two years term;

b) leaving the MC role for jumping in the controlled body could lead to a conflict being that person the "controller" and than the "controlled";

c) leaving the Membership Committee for joining the other body will reduce the number of available MC members taking care of the important responsibility the MC has.

Please, let me know if this clarifies your questions.

Have a nice evening,
Marina

Hi,

I have two first questions to the candidates:

Thank you for asking and thus giving the opportunity to express our opinions.

a) regarding the mission of the MC (§ 12 of the statutes) have you
already participated in board calls during the last two years as
external (non-member)?

I did, now and then, but my daily job doesn’t leave me so much spare time, particularly during the day, as I haven’t a fixed place / office to work, but most of the time I go all day round to my clients. And that’s why I’ve never ran for BoD.

b) What is your personal take on a ‘cooling down’ periode between being
a member of leading bodies of the foundation, regarding the first
sentence in the statutes § 12?

The “diving” or jumping from MC to BoD is something I’ve never liked too much. In particular that led several times MC to run out of deputies, and for this reason I asked and obtained to have 4 of them in MC, which could look like a big number, compared to the number of full members (5), but facts demonstrated that I was right.

I perceived this behaviour in the past as a kind of betrayal against the members who voted to have a member in charge for that role for the whole 2 years of a term, but lately I understood that at the end MC is also a way to get more in contact with TDF’s core government and to learn how things work in it, so it’s almost natural to serve in MC and then go to BoD. Obviously it would be much better to complete a term and then wait for next BoD elections, giving also the opportunity to “cool down”, lowering the risk of an uncomfortable situation where the “controllers” (MC) may have to weigh and decide about or against a person who used to be among them.

Moreover a cool down period helps to have a better objective and distant perspective on TDF, but still having a deeper experience to understand and judge, from my point of view. On the other hand everyone is free to resign whenever they want from MC.
Let’s say that this is an interesting point that could be put on a To Do List to be discussed by the BoD as part of a possible bylaw, which could include some more points.

I hope to have replied in a satisfactory way, but I’m obviously available for more possible clarifications.

Gabriele Ponzo

Hi Andreas,

Thank you for your question.

a) regarding the mission of the MC (§ 12 of the statutes) have you
already participated in board calls during the last two years as
external (non-member)?

I participated in it about two times. I usually read the minutes later.

b) What is your personal take on a 'cooling down' periode between being
a member of leading bodies of the foundation, regarding the first
sentence in the statutes § 12?

In my opinion, there is no need to change the current rules, unless
MC has been suffering from a shortage of members for some time.

If the shortage of MC members due to resignation is a problem, I think
it is better to increase the capacity of MC.
Because resignations occur for a variety of reasons, not just for
running for elections in BoD.

Best regards,
Shinji

Hi all,

a short résumé:

a) there are 13 candidates for the MC elections and only 8 are
able/willing to answer two short questions.
   
Many thanks to all of this eight candidates to take your time and give
your personal view!

b) TDF currently has 221 members and none of them asked any question to
the candidates!

That's something to think long and hard about. What does this mean to
the democratic culture of the foundation. It was created to get the
members / contributors a voice and a say.

Regards,
Andreas

This is something we have a bit of a problem of in the Arch Linux community as well when a community member applies to become a Trusted User (i.e. a packager in the [community] repository). Existing TUs vet the applicant's package quality and fitness. Sometimes barely any discussion comes during the two-week discussion period. I am guilty of letting this slide as well. We have not really solved the problem past the occasional reminder of our duties. I think this problem is more generally one of doing thankless, "minor" - yet important - work in volunteer communities.

I do not pretend to know how to solve this for everyone. Personally, I find that an occasional reminder of my duties in my occupied post keeps the easily-forgotton tasks somewhat near the front of my brain.

I would be happy to discuss general topics with all my friends, such as our opinions of TDF's strengths and weaknesses to encourage a healthy stir of the pot. But I encourage community members to ask questions or voice their opinion!

Voters possibly already know the candidates well enough that questions don't add any value to an already-formulated opinion.

Hi Andreas,

b) TDF currently has 221 members and none of them asked any question to
the candidates!

That's something to think long and hard about. What does this mean to
the democratic culture of the foundation. It was created to get the
members / contributors a voice and a say.

  Fair enough =) good point - here are a few questions I came up with.
Please note - it is trivial to ask more questions in a few minutes than
can be answered in a lifetime - but here are a few things I'd love to know
from each candidate:

  What is the right list for that ? board-discuss I hope.

* many MC members say they want to expand the membership.
  Given that LibreOffice is rather static in terms of its
  number of those involved in development: coding, UX,
  translation, documentation etc.

  + how do you plan to gain lots of new contributors ?

  + Do you think we expand the membership by accpting
    more marginal contributions for membership cf.
    https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/TDF/Membership_Role#Contributing

  + what effect do you expect that to have on the project ?

* If you've stood before, approximately how many people have
  you encouraged to apply for membership ?

* How many applications have you voted against ?

* Do you believe we should have a half-way house / badge
  between membership and non-membership that encourages
  a person, and gives the a path via more contribution to
  achieve full membership ?

* When there are no concrete metrics (such as translated strings,
  code commits, wiki changes, ask comments, etc.) available to
  decide on a person's contribution; what is best practice for
  MC members vouching for their friends' contributions, and how
  should other MC members validate that ?

* To what degree should the MC's decisions & discussion
  be transparent (ie. publicly available) ?

* How do you believe we can improve the existing election
  system - assuming the statutes can be tweaked ?
  + I'm interested in where we have the situation that
    being too popular can stop you being able to
    engage at all as a deputy - as we saw with
    Miklos/Jona in the last MC election, and Kendy
    in the last Board election.

  Thanks for any answers =)

    Michael.

Hi Andreas,

b) TDF currently has 221 members and none of them asked any question to
the candidates!

That's something to think long and hard about. What does this mean to
the democratic culture of the foundation. It was created to get the
members / contributors a voice and a say.

  Fair enough =) good point - here are a few questions I came up with.
Please note - it is trivial to ask more questions in a few minutes than
can be answered in a lifetime - but here are a few things I'd love to know
from each candidate:

  What is the right list for that ? board-discuss I hope.

* many MC members say they want to expand the membership.
  Given that LibreOffice is rather static in terms of its
  number of those involved in development: coding, UX,
  translation, documentation etc.

  + how do you plan to gain lots of new contributors ?

Don't need to be 'a lot'

  + Do you think we expand the membership by accpting
    more marginal contributions for membership cf.
    https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/TDF/Membership_Role#Contributing

What's the 'more marginal contributions' meaning?

  + what effect do you expect that to have on the project ?

* If you've stood before, approximately how many people have
  you encouraged to apply for membership ?

* How many applications have you voted against ?

* Do you believe we should have a half-way house / badge
  between membership and non-membership that encourages
  a person, and gives the a path via more contribution to
  achieve full membership ?

* When there are no concrete metrics (such as translated strings,
  code commits, wiki changes, ask comments, etc.) available to
  decide on a person's contribution; what is best practice for
  MC members vouching for their friends' contributions, and how
  should other MC members validate that ?

* To what degree should the MC's decisions & discussion
  be transparent (ie. publicly available) ?

Any relation to MC Open Letter?

* How do you believe we can improve the existing election
  system - assuming the statutes can be tweaked ?
  + I'm interested in where we have the situation that
    being too popular can stop you being able to
    engage at all as a deputy - as we saw with
    Miklos/Jona in the last MC election, and Kendy
    in the last Board election.

'Too popular'? What about that tiny little issue callled affiliation?

I was not aware you were a candidate, Daniel. Did I miss your nomination?

S.

First of all, it is a public list.
On the other hand, not being a candidate disqualifies me from asking questions?

Did you mean that Daniel has no rights to speak out his question? If so, In what rules say only candidates can reply questions to MC candidates?

If no, then why did you ask such a question?

F

Simon Phipps 於 2020/9/4 下午9:47 寫道:

I was not aware you were a candidate, Daniel. Did I miss your nomination?

S.

On Fri, Sep 4, 2020 at 2:29 PM Daniel Armando Rodriguez <drodriguez@documentfoundation.org> wrote:

El 2020-09-04 08:17, Michael Meeks escribió:

Hi Andreas,

On 03/09/2020 19:59, Andreas Mantke wrote:

b) TDF currently has 221 members and none of them asked any question
to
the candidates!

That’s something to think long and hard about. What does this mean to
the democratic culture of the foundation. It was created to get the
members / contributors a voice and a say.

Fair enough =) good point - here are a few questions I came up with.
Please note - it is trivial to ask more questions in a few minutes than
can be answered in a lifetime - but here are a few things I’d love to
know
from each candidate:

What is the right list for that ? board-discuss I hope.

  • many MC members say they want to expand the membership.
    Given that LibreOffice is rather static in terms of its
    number of those involved in development: coding, UX,
    translation, documentation etc.
  • how do you plan to gain lots of new contributors ?

Don’t need to be ‘a lot’

What’s the ‘more marginal contributions’ meaning?

  • what effect do you expect that to have on the project ?
  • If you’ve stood before, approximately how many people have
    you encouraged to apply for membership ?

  • How many applications have you voted against ?

  • Do you believe we should have a half-way house / badge
    between membership and non-membership that encourages
    a person, and gives the a path via more contribution to
    achieve full membership ?

  • When there are no concrete metrics (such as translated strings,
    code commits, wiki changes, ask comments, etc.) available to
    decide on a person’s contribution; what is best practice for
    MC members vouching for their friends’ contributions, and how
    should other MC members validate that ?

  • To what degree should the MC’s decisions & discussion
    be transparent (ie. publicly available) ?

Any relation to MC Open Letter?

  • How do you believe we can improve the existing election
    system - assuming the statutes can be tweaked ?
  • I’m interested in where we have the situation that
    being too popular can stop you being able to
    engage at all as a deputy - as we saw with
    Miklos/Jona in the last MC election, and Kendy
    in the last Board election.

‘Too popular’? What about that tiny little issue callled affiliation?


DAR

Hi Franklin.

Daniel appeared to be responding negatively to Michael’s question rather than asking any of his own. I see no reason why Board members need to argue between themselves on this thread when you’ve plenty of scope for that on your secret lists.

Best regards,

Simon

On Fri, Sep 4, 2020 at 3:09 PM Franklin Weng <franklin@slat.org> wrote:

Did you mean that Daniel has no rights to speak out his question? If so, In what rules say only candidates can reply questions to MC candidates?

If no, then why did you ask such a question?

F

Simon Phipps 於 2020/9/4 下午9:47 寫道:

I was not aware you were a candidate, Daniel. Did I miss your nomination?

S.

On Fri, Sep 4, 2020 at 2:29 PM Daniel Armando Rodriguez <drodriguez@documentfoundation.org> wrote:

El 2020-09-04 08:17, Michael Meeks escribió:

Hi Andreas,

On 03/09/2020 19:59, Andreas Mantke wrote:

b) TDF currently has 221 members and none of them asked any question
to
the candidates!

That’s something to think long and hard about. What does this mean to
the democratic culture of the foundation. It was created to get the
members / contributors a voice and a say.

Fair enough =) good point - here are a few questions I came up with.
Please note - it is trivial to ask more questions in a few minutes than
can be answered in a lifetime - but here are a few things I’d love to
know
from each candidate:

What is the right list for that ? board-discuss I hope.

  • many MC members say they want to expand the membership.
    Given that LibreOffice is rather static in terms of its
    number of those involved in development: coding, UX,
    translation, documentation etc.
  • how do you plan to gain lots of new contributors ?

Don’t need to be ‘a lot’

What’s the ‘more marginal contributions’ meaning?

  • what effect do you expect that to have on the project ?
  • If you’ve stood before, approximately how many people have
    you encouraged to apply for membership ?

  • How many applications have you voted against ?

  • Do you believe we should have a half-way house / badge
    between membership and non-membership that encourages
    a person, and gives the a path via more contribution to
    achieve full membership ?

  • When there are no concrete metrics (such as translated strings,
    code commits, wiki changes, ask comments, etc.) available to
    decide on a person’s contribution; what is best practice for
    MC members vouching for their friends’ contributions, and how
    should other MC members validate that ?

  • To what degree should the MC’s decisions & discussion
    be transparent (ie. publicly available) ?

Any relation to MC Open Letter?

  • How do you believe we can improve the existing election
    system - assuming the statutes can be tweaked ?
  • I’m interested in where we have the situation that
    being too popular can stop you being able to
    engage at all as a deputy - as we saw with
    Miklos/Jona in the last MC election, and Kendy
    in the last Board election.

‘Too popular’? What about that tiny little issue callled affiliation?


DAR

-- 
Franklin Weng
中華民國軟體自由協會常務理事
文件基金會(LibreOffice 法人代表)認證 LibreOffice 導入專家、訓練專家
文件基金會(LibreOffice 法人代表)董事會副主席、認證委員會委員

Maybe, but you still don’t answer my question. In what rules forbid Daniel to do this?

BTW, If I would reply Michael’s question mail I would be negative too, because I don’t like his way to ask such questions, just like I don’t like the way you ask Daniel either.

F.

Simon Phipps 於 2020/9/4 下午10:12 寫道:

Hi Franklin.

Daniel appeared to be responding negatively to Michael’s question rather than asking any of his own. I see no reason why Board members need to argue between themselves on this thread when you’ve plenty of scope for that on your secret lists.

Best regards,

Simon

On Fri, Sep 4, 2020 at 3:09 PM Franklin Weng <franklin@slat.org> wrote:

Did you mean that Daniel has no rights to speak out his question? If so, In what rules say only candidates can reply questions to MC candidates?

If no, then why did you ask such a question?

F

Simon Phipps 於 2020/9/4 下午9:47 寫道:

I was not aware you were a candidate, Daniel. Did I miss your nomination?

S.

On Fri, Sep 4, 2020 at 2:29 PM Daniel Armando Rodriguez <drodriguez@documentfoundation.org> wrote:

El 2020-09-04 08:17, Michael Meeks escribió:

Hi Andreas,

On 03/09/2020 19:59, Andreas Mantke wrote:

b) TDF currently has 221 members and none of them asked any question
to
the candidates!

That’s something to think long and hard about. What does this mean to
the democratic culture of the foundation. It was created to get the
members / contributors a voice and a say.

Fair enough =) good point - here are a few questions I came up with.
Please note - it is trivial to ask more questions in a few minutes than
can be answered in a lifetime - but here are a few things I’d love to
know
from each candidate:

What is the right list for that ? board-discuss I hope.

  • many MC members say they want to expand the membership.
    Given that LibreOffice is rather static in terms of its
    number of those involved in development: coding, UX,
    translation, documentation etc.
  • how do you plan to gain lots of new contributors ?

Don’t need to be ‘a lot’

What’s the ‘more marginal contributions’ meaning?

  • what effect do you expect that to have on the project ?
  • If you’ve stood before, approximately how many people have
    you encouraged to apply for membership ?

  • How many applications have you voted against ?

  • Do you believe we should have a half-way house / badge
    between membership and non-membership that encourages
    a person, and gives the a path via more contribution to
    achieve full membership ?

  • When there are no concrete metrics (such as translated strings,
    code commits, wiki changes, ask comments, etc.) available to
    decide on a person’s contribution; what is best practice for
    MC members vouching for their friends’ contributions, and how
    should other MC members validate that ?

  • To what degree should the MC’s decisions & discussion
    be transparent (ie. publicly available) ?

Any relation to MC Open Letter?

  • How do you believe we can improve the existing election
    system - assuming the statutes can be tweaked ?
  • I’m interested in where we have the situation that
    being too popular can stop you being able to
    engage at all as a deputy - as we saw with
    Miklos/Jona in the last MC election, and Kendy
    in the last Board election.

‘Too popular’? What about that tiny little issue callled affiliation?


DAR

-- 
Franklin Weng
中華民國軟體自由協會常務理事
文件基金會(LibreOffice 法人代表)認證 LibreOffice 導入專家、訓練專家
文件基金會(LibreOffice 法人代表)董事會副主席、認證委員會委員

Simon Phipps

Office: +1 (415) 683-7660 or +44 (238) 098 7027
Signal/Mobile: +44 774 776 2816

Hi Daniel,

* many MC members say they want to expand the membership.
  Given that LibreOffice is rather static in terms of its
  number of those involved in development: coding, UX,
  translation, documentation etc.

+ how do you plan to gain lots of new contributors ?

...

+ Do you think we expand the membership by accepting
      more marginal contributions for membership cf.
     
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/TDF/Membership_Role#Contributing

What's the 'more marginal contributions' meaning?

  Ah - perhaps I should be more clear:

     + "Do you think we should expand the membership by
  accepting much smaller contributions for membership"

       Sorry for that. The essence of the question is simple - if you
want to grow the membership there are at least these two approaches:

  + encourage more people to contribute more to meet
    the criteria
or
  + lower the criteria for membership

  Hence my question - in each case - I'd love more detail on people's
suggested approach.

* How do you believe we can improve the existing election
  system - assuming the statutes can be tweaked ?
    + I'm interested in where we have the situation that
      being too popular can stop you being able to
      engage at all as a deputy - as we saw with
      Miklos/Jona in the last MC election, and Kendy
      in the last Board election.

'Too popular'? What about that tiny little issue called affiliation?

  Sure, so do you have a question about that ? either way I'm curious
about MC member's views of an electoral system whereby (given the
current CoI rules) discouraging people from voting for you is a good
tactic to get elected :wink: and/or that if/as/when people are bumped by
these rules that it's not possible to appoint the next most popular
person in the ranking etc.

  I would hope that:

"* How do you believe we can improve the existing election
   system - assuming the statutes can be tweaked ?"

  Is a legitimate question for the MC candidates ?

  ATB,

    Michael.

       Sorry for that. The essence of the question is simple - if you
want to grow the membership there are at least these two approaches:

  + encourage more people to contribute more to meet
    the criteria
or
  + lower the criteria for membership

There is a third solution: convince more contributors to apply for
membership, as many of them do not even know that it is possible to
become TDF members by contributing to LibreOffice.

For instance, we have over 4K people registered on weblate, or 20 times
as many TDF members. Of course, many of them would not qualify as their
contribution is marginal, but many would.

I think that a solution to this issue is to reach out to native language
communities, especially outside Europe, where the relationship with the
core group is less strong.

  I would hope that:

"* How do you believe we can improve the existing election
   system - assuming the statutes can be tweaked ?"

  Is a legitimate question for the MC candidates ?

I think the question is legitimate if you take away the last portion:
"assuming the statutes can be tweaked". I do not see how the statutes
can be tweaked, but I think that they can be applied with some added
flexibility ("flexible" is different from "tweaked").

Hi *,

to comment on one aspect here for the moment:

Italo Vignoli wrote:

I think the question is legitimate if you take away the last portion:
"assuming the statutes can be tweaked". I do not see how the statutes
can be tweaked, but I think that they can be applied with some added
flexibility ("flexible" is different from "tweaked").

The statutes _can_ be modified, but the bar for that is relatively
high (for good reasons), plus the changes must not modify the original
intends and purposes:

- § 14 (1): The Board of Directors can make changes to the Articles of
  Association provided that the changes do not affect the foundation’s
  goals and do not substantially alter the original design of the
  foundation or facilitate the fulfillment of the foundation’s goals.

- and any change has to be ratified (in essence cross-checked to
  fulfil the above requirements) by the foundation authorities

All the best,

-- Thorsten

Hi Mike and Andreas,

I just joined the board-discuss couple days ago, so not much know about previous topics (even it can read on archive)

Pada tanggal Jum, 4 Sep 2020 pukul 18.18 Michael Meeks <michael.meeks@collabora.com> menulis:

Hi Andreas,

b) TDF currently has 221 members and none of them asked any question to
the candidates!

That’s something to think long and hard about. What does this mean to
the democratic culture of the foundation. It was created to get the
members / contributors a voice and a say.

Fair enough =) good point - here are a few questions I came up with.
Please note - it is trivial to ask more questions in a few minutes than
can be answered in a lifetime - but here are a few things I’d love to know
from each candidate:

What is the right list for that ? board-discuss I hope.

Some people probably do not read this mailing list too much (like me, sorry). The newer generation below me dislike mailing lists.

  • many MC members say they want to expand the membership.
    Given that LibreOffice is rather static in terms of its
    number of those involved in development: coding, UX,
    translation, documentation etc.
  • how do you plan to gain lots of new contributors ?

In my experience, here what I do:

  • active in community, if you can’t active physically because of busy with daily job, you can donate/support their activity, in Indonesian community, we often have some challenge to community and there is a prize for the winner. you can donate the prize if you feel busy and can’t help much.
  • give a good example and impression how we use libreoffice and how to contribute in the easiest way to the community.
  • have good manners to newcomers, sometimes arrogant also needed but still, we must help newcomers.
  • create a conference. I (with help of the community) often create open source conferences. Of course we have held a libreoffice indonesia conference before with more than 500 audience. This year’s conference failed because covid-19
  • exhibition booth. be happy and set up booths in as many exhibitions as possible. you will have a lot of questions and answers at that booth.
  • create a workshop about libreoffice, it can be user (how to use) workshop, translation, and QA.
  • Gave a talk in university or any organization.

And we lack (never happen at least in Indonesia) about coding/UX workshops for libreoffice.

Please explain more about the term “marginal”.

  • what effect do you expect that to have on the project ?

Anything, in my case, local community have:

  • If you’ve stood before, approximately how many people have
    you encouraged to apply for membership ?

I can’t remember it, but I do encourage several people who are active in the community (from Indonesia and Malaysia).

  • How many applications have you voted against ?

Many, especially if I know the applicant. Mostly I know in person if they are from SouthEast Asia.

  • Do you believe we should have a half-way house / badge
    between membership and non-membership that encourages
    a person, and gives the a path via more contribution to
    achieve full membership ?

I have no idea about this. But I often have questions from students “what would be the benefit if we become a member?”

  • When there are no concrete metrics (such as translated strings,
    code commits, wiki changes, ask comments, etc.) available to
    decide on a person’s contribution; what is best practice for
    MC members vouching for their friends’ contributions, and how
    should other MC members validate that ?

In my case, I will validate if I know the person. If no, I ask another MC to verify it. If still nobody knows, then one of MC will send them an email asking more questions.

  • To what degree should the MC’s decisions & discussion
    be transparent (ie. publicly available) ?

It can be transparent if there’s good tools. Some discussions are in MC telegram groups. IMHO it doesnt need to be totally transparent, of course there’s reporting. But people can ask. Probably need to discuss more about “the transparent thing”?

  • How do you believe we can improve the existing election
    system - assuming the statutes can be tweaked ?
  • I’m interested in where we have the situation that
    being too popular can stop you being able to
    engage at all as a deputy - as we saw with
    Miklos/Jona in the last MC election, and Kendy
    in the last Board election.

Thanks for any answers =)

Michael.

I can’t answer this since I don’t know about this issue. But it should be no problem. Being popular is a gift.

Thanks,
Haris

IMO, this should be the first solution that we should explore. I
completely agree with Italo that we should reach out to those whom we
see regularly on any of the project's volunteer teams and see if we
could not assist them in becoming members and, in so doing, build more
of a loyal family of members. Most people think a member has to put out
hours of work per week to become a member or maintain one's membership.
We should do more reaching out internally and promote internally.

Marc

Hi Andreas,

Hi,

I have two first questions to the candidates:

a) regarding the mission of the MC (§ 12 of the statutes) have you
already participated in board calls during the last two years as
external (non-member)?

Yes, a few times. But I usually skim through the minutes, and read the interesting (to me, as a member of BoT & MC) parts in detail.

b) What is your personal take on a 'cooling down' periode between being
a member of leading bodies of the foundation, regarding the first
sentence in the statutes § 12?

Didn't think about it specifically before, but after checking the statutes again based on your question, and reading through some of the replies, Uwe's take makes sense to me.

Regards,
Muhammet

Hi Andreas & all,

Hi Uwe, all,

Hi Andreas

(...)

b) What is your personal take on a 'cooling down' periode between being
a member of leading bodies of the foundation, regarding the first
sentence in the statutes § 12?

This seems only of interest in case a member of the BoD wants to get a member of the MC to prevent or influence a pending lawsuit against himself.
It is surely desirable to have prevented such a possibility by our statues - but nothing is perfect. And some kind of self-commitment will not prevent such a case.
On the other hand the time schedule of the board and mc elections is a bit cumbersome for such an operation.

Maybe a look into the second sentence of § 12 is also of interest here.
The MC initiate and supervise the board elections.

a) Could lead to a conflict of interest?

It is hard to say 'never' to such things with many aspects, but I can't think of a general case right now. One needs to resign from the MC before nominating for the BoD elections, and he/she is out of the MC loop immediately. And it is no longer possible to have an effect on the election process any more.

b) Is not showing solidarity (if MC membership is canceled or
suspended), because more work on less shoulder?

It depends. In terms of the number of the MC members, role of the resigning member etc. But I wouldn't expect it to have any significant effect on the process of the BoD elections. It is mostly an automated/technical process.

Regards,
Muhammet

Hello Michael,

</snip>

* many MC members say they want to expand the membership.
  Given that LibreOffice is rather static in terms of its
  number of those involved in development: coding, UX,
  translation, documentation etc.

  + how do you plan to gain lots of new contributors ?

  + Do you think we expand the membership by accpting
    more marginal contributions for membership cf.
    https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/TDF/Membership_Role#Contributing

  + what effect do you expect that to have on the project ?

contributors who are willing to help users in Ask, on mailing lists,
usenet and other forums and this over all languages.

We do also have other projects (e.g. ODFToolkit) who are mostly loosely
connected to the TDF.

I talked to many different contributors and mostly they simply do not
know that there is something like a membership and also do not have any
interest in another mail address and ask what are their gains in getting
into the club.

* If you've stood before, approximately how many people have
  you encouraged to apply for membership ?

I'm not sure. I asked many and I'm still trying to convince more
contributors although my success-rate should be improved. :-/

* How many applications have you voted against ?

I guess this question is only for the existing membership committee.
I have no statistics, but in the end it is something between "one or two
hands". Some contributors for example were corner-cases since a few
years or some which we couldn't verify by all good faith.

* Do you believe we should have a half-way house / badge
  between membership and non-membership that encourages
  a person, and gives the a path via more contribution to
  achieve full membership ?

We need badges! There needs more "gamification", although I do not like
the "hat hunt" for the next badge (hence one reason why I quite
Wikipedia). If our OpenBadget system is in place: yes, we should also
add a badge for being a member.

But the main "problem" is that many contributors are "only" subscribed
to some mailing lists and helping users won't see badges nor know
anything of membership. We have to - at least - inform these contributors.

* When there are no concrete metrics (such as translated strings,
  code commits, wiki changes, ask comments, etc.) available to
  decide on a person's contribution; what is best practice for
  MC members vouching for their friends' contributions, and how
  should other MC members validate that ?

That depends. I do not believe that we have any problems in accepting or
declining applications. We do have a problem to get contributors to the
application form! There might be some *seldom* corner-cases where we
have to believe or need some third-party answer as we are having
problems to verify the contributions.

Especially for the last case it is important to have as much as possible
diversity within the mc to know at least who to ask, which was not easy
in the past as Asian contributors were missing.

* To what degree should the MC's decisions & discussion
  be transparent (ie. publicly available) ?

Most internal discussions are about improving the tools or about
concrete applications. The discussion about applications should NOT be
public. Discussions about how the tools should or could be improved
(e.g. dashboard) can be opened without any problems.

* How do you believe we can improve the existing election
  system - assuming the statutes can be tweaked ?

I'm not really sure, if we do need any improvement. At least I do not
have any suggestion as I do not believe that we do have any problem
within the statues.

  + I'm interested in where we have the situation that
    being too popular can stop you being able to
    engage at all as a deputy - as we saw with
    Miklos/Jona in the last MC election, and Kendy
    in the last Board election.

As mentioned in some other response, we do have a problem with COI like
in the mentioned cases.I do have a problem with MC members stepping down
for getting voted to the BoD, but to answer your question: simply
getting more people running for the MC will statistical reduce the
possibility of getting into such problems. Luckily this year many
candidates run for MC and thus our members have a real choice!
@everybody: please use your tokens and vote!

  Thanks for any answers =)

Thanks for your questions.

    Michael.

Best regards,

Dennis Roczek