Florian Effenberger
Florian has been a free and open source enthusiast since 2004. He works for The Document Foundation, the nonprofit behind LibreOffice and previously volunteered in marketing and infrastructure. As a student, he designed educational computer systems for schools, including software deployment based on free software and was a frequent contributor to a variety of professional magazines worldwide on topics such as free software, open standards and legal matters. A proud uncle, he loves to spend time with the family and occasionally blogs about various topics, including community building, free and open source software and computer networks. Based around Munich, he helped to create the local open source meetings and shaped the tasty idea of open source cooking.
Sessions
LibreOffice is developed, tested, documented, translated and marketed by countless contributors from around the world and used by millions of users around the globe. This community of creators and users is backed by a non-profit foundation which not only publishes the software, but also acts as a trustee: It gives the community its legal personality, is the guardian of trademarks and domains, and also manages donations as well as assets. The community makes the software what it is today: the leading free and open source office suite, available free of charge to personal, business and governmental users. True to the motto “by the community, for the community” the foundation was made possible by numerous donors from all over the world who raised the necessary capital in just eight days as part of a public fundraising campaign. In this talk Florian not only explains the legal setup of The Document Foundation and how its statutes enshrine values and ideals like openness, transparency and meritocracy. He also explains how it was designed to combine the conservative elements of a foundation with the modern approach of an open source project and shares a “lessons learned“ from the past 14 years to explain the challenges a growing FLOSS project can face.
Many activities these days, be it sports, social work, arts or free and open source software, are organized in some sort of community. If backed by a respective organization, this not only helps with setting up a structure, but also puts statutes and rules in place that set forth the values and ideals all contributors should share. Inside these communities, there can be various roles. Some of them are formalized, like the board of directors or the supervisory board, others are within dynamically grown groups that can change frequently. Either of those are ideally composed of experienced and enthusiastic community members who take leadership and responsibility.
Based on my experience from the last two and a half decades, I’d like to point out common problems when working in an international free and open source community, share mistakes I’ve made and tell how you can hopefully avoid them.