Hi all,
Having spent over a decade on the ESC and had the great privilege
of minuting and trying to organize most of its meetings over its first
many years - I would like to offer some words of profound thanks both to
past, existing, and future members as I step down.
I think it is worth reflecting that the ESC is (to my mind) one of
the best-functioning and most collegial bodies of TDF. While other
bodies have intermittently consumed themselves with in-fighting and
personal attacks - the ESC has continued to be a place where developers
(including of course QA, design, l10n, docs, hackers etc.) respect each
other's contribution, and good intentions. They listen carefully to
input from everyone. The ESC has forged deeply enduring consensus on
many hundreds of emotive topics - with remarkably few (under a handful)
of actual contested votes. That enduring culture of excellence should be
an inspiration.
Meanwhile the team represented there has delivered some frankly
outstanding engineering: rehabilitating a decrepit code-base into an
exciting technological platform for people to build on, and deliver
great new functionality on top of it.
I read the page of present and past luminaries:
https://www.documentfoundation.org/governance/engineering-steering-committee/
and I see a list of friends, any of whom are welcome to drop in and
stay any time they are passing Cambridge UK, and all of whom I'd enjoy
time catching up with around the details of whatever it is they are
doing these days.
If the ESC is so great - why am I leaving? It's obvious. For many
reasons my contributions to LibreOffice are largely outside the core
code these days, and I believe it is vital that the ESC represents the
people -actually-doing-the-work- Indeed I think this essence: called
"meritocracy" in our statutes (or do-ers decide) is (to my mind) what
has protected the ESC all of these years, and long may it do so. It is
also why I have not ranked any proposals in the ESC for some years.
Meritocracy means that people can have arbitrarily exotic ideas
around priorities, product features etc. and demand them passionately -
but at the end of the day: "show me the code".
As an aside - we've been blessed as a project with a rather clear
set of goal-posts, and always less resource than we'd like - making
technical infighting an expensive luxury. We've also been blessed by
great language skills - making it possible to have first telephone calls
and then Jitsi calls - to hear each other as human beings - instead of
the norm of E-mail flame-wars on contentious topics.
In my experience of quite a large number of FLOSS projects, and
even of big-corporate management - the level of goodness and unanimity
in the ESC has been unusually encouraging - fun people indeed.
I'd like to thank the leavers in order of appearance: Lionel for
his invaluable contributions to base, Andras for his long history of
tooling, build, license maintenance & translation work, Olivier for
bringing documentation to life in an impressive way, Sophie for her care
for the l10n community and Bubli for her excellent contributions all
over the code-base (which defy easy explanation =) Thank you all for
your advice and oversight on the ESC. I really hope you'll all continue
contributing - and of course ESC meetings continue to be open to
everyone (even me) I hope. We even traditionally let anyone that turns
up regularly and contributes positively to rank ideas for funding -
though I won't be taking that up myself.
I wish all the very best to the new members - may you weigh
carefully the responsibility to listen to others, to treat them and
their views with respect and keep creating innovative technical
solutions to problems.
For those staying the course - I salute you and your contribution
too! In some ways I wish I had a role that let me stick around and work
alongside you =) it's bitter-sweet.
I trust the new ESC will do a great job; these look to me like the
right people, in the right place to make sensible decisions. Please
ignore anyone telling you that your voice should not be heard, or that
there is something wrong with you or your contribution that disqualifies
you.
And finally - I've heard people portray the ESC as some sort of
power-broking command and control body. That makes it easy to blame for
anything that doesn't get done in the project. Amusingly - for those
that ever bothered to attend an ESC meeting - something I'd encourage
people to do.
We need to keep explaining the reality: that the ESC can at best
only try to gently persuade even its own members nevermind the rest of
the community to do something sensible. Its influence is built on the
tradition of mutual goodwill and respect I outlined - this is a fragile
thing, and well worth preserving.
May God bless you in your mission & may all your key-strokes fall
in
