Hi everyone, Let me try to provide a simpler proposal that combines several ideas from the thread and focuses on clarifying the management aspect. Hopefully as an E-mail it is easier to interact with the content.
* Rationale A selection of points from Paolo's discussion on the list: * As shown by Italo's slides at FOSDEM again and by others, TDF is not contributing code as much as it could * Members of the ecosystem and others also suggested that we should spend more money to grow development * certain topics such Target Areas as accessibility and RTL/CTL can be harder to taken care of by volunteers without help, and are not always addressed by the ecosystem * We need to build up skills and development capabilities to speed up innovation and diversify the LibreOffice community. * So I propose: * Hire a Targeted Developer, with primary focus on mentoring Why is it important to major on mentoring: TDF has an educational mission -and- we want to grow and diversify our volunteer community. Training existing and new contributors in specific areas can accelerate our mission, grow capability in these Target Areas, while also addressing functional gaps in LibreOffice. It is also expected that while the mentor is unable to actively contribute to public and professional education for whatever reason (eg. absence of volunteers) that they will be researching and increasing their experience by contributing to new ways to advance the free software and standards in their particular Target Areas. In addition to direct mentoring they can document related code, publish and speak at related conferences in these spaces and educate the public on the relevance, capabilities and mission of LibreOffice to encourage cooperation with other organizations that pursue, at least partially, the same goals. * Selecting Target Areas The process of selecting Target Areas to apply additional development resource to is one that is potentially highly contentious. It is vital that we have a clear, transparent and capable process to do this. It is important that TDF stewards its limited resources well, and does not invest in areas that are already well resourced, or to crowd out 3rd party funding. So: * Any TDF member can identify a suitable high-level Target Area such as RTL, complex-text, or accessibility. * The ESC will rank such areas as an addendum to the existing budget ranking process, and exceptionally during bootstrapping. The full ranking and votes will be published * The Board (who bear the ultimate decision) will select suitable areas for Targeted Developer(s). Such mentors to be in addition to existing generalised mentors. * Day to day management Targeted Developer(s) (as normal dev-mentors) shall attend the ESC call, and report on their progress weekly in the normal way. To maximise benefit to LibreOffice ESC members can privately disclose any live / credible overlaps with their work in sub-areas without having to disclose full details of potential or pending business in this area. Such specific sub-areas will be avoided for a time. The Executive Director shall direct day to day management for the Targeted Developers to ensure they effectively focus on the Target Areas. * Bootstrapping The ESC should be encouraged to identify and rank some suitable Target Areas rapidly. This shall allow the Board to agree them, and a hiring process with skills targeted at these areas to commence post haste. TDF should start with hiring a single Targeted Developer initially, with the option to expand this to two if multiple suitable candidates present at the interview stage - and evaluate the process after a year. It is expected that it will be hard to find a senior developer with all the needed skills from the day one. The tendering group inside the Board should tender for a suitable amount of mentoring hours from several senior certified developers, to help to get the newly hired Targeted Developer(s) up-to-speed. -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot -- 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