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.me...@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. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, GM Collabora Productivity Hangout: mejme...@gmail.com, Skype: mmeeks (M) +44 7795 666 147 - timezone usually UK / Europe -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@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