Kategorie: Allgemein

Online-Meetings Without Energy and Participation?

It is easy to post a date for an online meeting (e.g. a public phone call). But such a meeting will most likely not take place, if the one, who invited, didn’t put himself/herself one vor more topics on the agenda. It is similar to offline meetings. You wouldn’t invite for such a meeting without an agenda. And you wouldn’t expect that the one, who invited, will not attend and lead the meeting, would you?

Thus some rules oft thumb:

  • Invite for online meetings you’ll attend yourself
  • Invite with a preliminary agenda
  • Put names (not only other people) behind the topics in the agenda
  • Prepare yourself about each topic, at least to take over the moderation
  • Get in direct contact with people you want/need to attend your meeting and convince them to come.

Four Weeks Enough Time To Publish A Short Email?

The statutes of a foundation states that at a maximum one third of the members of each body are ‚employed‘ by the same firm, organization, entity or one of its affiliate organizations. The candidates for the board elections had to declare their affiliation therefore in front of the elections.

Because this statements are very important for the composition of the board it’s necessary that every member of the board inform the foundation members and the public in the same way, once this affiliation changes later. The first statement usually was made in an email to a foundation mailing list. Thus the change needs also an email to the same list (and maybe to other foundation communication channels of the fundation).

And the information had to be send out by the person concerned very timely, which means in this case immediately.  Are about four weeks for a short email notice immediately? In my opinion this is not the case.

A member of the leading body of a foundation, which has the goal of transparency and openness, should be able to write an email with such a short information latest the next day after the change in the affiliation. If she or he failed to do this should think about his workload and take responsibility for her or his behavior.

Commendation Without Exact Knowledge?

It’s always no good idea to thank someone without the exact knowledge about the real work he or she had done and the exact period he or she were on duty. Such a commendation – especially in a published report or in a public speech looks to the one who get it the opposite, because it reflects that it is not worth the time to collect and check the correct data.

I read such commendation about my work on the LibreOffice extensions and templates website in the annual report of The Document Foundation today. I invested a lot of my spare time to work as a pure volunteer for the foundation and on the website for about eight years (I worked for about sixteen years inside the community of the free office software project).

Communicate Agenda Late And Get No Guests

<satire mode>
It’s always interesting to see the communication strategy (?) of a board. Don’t publish an agenda of a public meeting to early (only the evening before the event) to certainly avoid to get people from the public into your (public) board call.

The next communication step should be to complain about the lack of participation from the public.
</satire mode>

If the communication of a board follows this road it has not to wonder about a lack of participation from the public. The public wouldn’t feel invited.

Search Implementation On A Website – Difficult?

If you run a new website there is most often a small amount of content at its start. But later the content is growing and users may get an issue to find the content they are looking for. That’s the time when a good build in live search is needed latest.

But it would be the best solution to have such live search already implemented before you go live with your website. And if you expect your website to grow fast you need a very capable live search.

I created such a website together with a service provider for the LibreOffice extensions and templates repository. The site is build on Plone with some add-ons. The Plone Content Management System (CMS/DMS) already provides a build in fast live search. The search is already running by default. There is no need for another implementation of a live search or search function except possibly very big or special environments. But for such cases there are add-ons available in the Plone add-on repository to get e.g. Apache Solr integrated within your Plone installation.

The Document Foundation – No Review Of LibreOffice Extensions

I saw today that someone has published extensions on the LibreOffice extensions website that had been submitted to the review queue. But after a quick look on this newly published LibreOffice extensions it was clear that they never had been reviewed by The Document Foundation or a volunteer of the project. It seemed only an administrator of the website pushed a button without any look on the content he published.

Because the LibreOffice extensions website runs on ressource of The Document Foundation and is under the control of the foundation such a ‚workflow‘ is very dangerous for this entity. I wouldn’t expect such an behavior from an entity that declares itself one of the biggest and best world wide open source projects.

Plone Only For Large Scale And For Big Company?

I read in the minutes from a board meeting of The Document Foundation (TDF) the belief ‚plone is a CMS for large scale & for a big company etc.‘ and ‚there perhaps suitable‘. This seemed to be a lonesome view from the leading body of this entity and not generally shared.

If you take a look at the website https://plone.com you will find there a list of recent Plone launches for organizations and companies. This organizations / companies and the Plone launches are very divers and from small to big sizes, e.g.:

And I found another interesting site for volunteers, that is created with Plone and its new technics: https://vhs-ehrenamtsportal.de/

Thus the view of the TDF board proofs wrong.

The organizations and companies which launched and use Plone site benefit from the excellent stability of this Content Management System (CMS) (information about Plone security could be found at: https://plone.org/security).

Complaining About A Bus Factor

I learned from work inside an open source project during the last years that many people are not willing to really support you, while you are doing the work. They show nearly no interest in your volunteer work up to the point when something didn’t went smoothly. During the periode everything went smoothly you won’t get an acclamation. But in the opposite you will see a lot of people always pointing on you. And maybe they pick on you. I got this experience. And there were nobody inside the project who stopped this.

At some point leading members of the project spoke about my volunteer work in public without discussing requests and issues first with the one who did the work (me). That was the last straw.

I stopped my contribution to the project immediately. I wanted to preserve my nerves and spent my spare time in a different way after 16 years.

There is no need to complain on a bus factor, if you are the source of it.

And I read that the project will spent more donation money on the creation of a new framework and administration. It seemed the current one was to cheap because of my contributions (volunteer time). Lesson learned: only expensive things seemed to be invaluable ;-(

Why Not Mind One’s Own Business?

There were a new graphic published on the blog that points on the International Women’s Day. The author gave hints how to forge a more gender-balanced world

I had a look at the structure of the organization behind this blog entry and maybe it would be a good idea to start within the own organization. There is / are:

  • only one woman among nine men in its board,
  • only one woman among four men in the membership committee,
  • only one woman among six male staff members,
  • only two women among twenty two male members of the Engeneering Steering Committee,
  • only two women among fifty three male certified developers.