Kategorie: Freie Software

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.

New Release Of tdf.templateuploadcenter

I worked on some further improvements of the Plone addon tdf.templateuploadcenter. A site administrator is able to edit the allowed image and template file extensions. Thus I wrote a new validator for this file extensions. I created a field to inform contributors about the currently allowed file extensions (with dynamic content).

The add-on provides not only projects with releases but also small projects where the template files are uploaded to the small project content type directly.

Today I made a new release of this Plone add-on, which drives the current LibreOffice templates website. The Plone add-on and its release are published as Free Software under the GPL-2 (General Public License version 2): https://pypi.org/project/tdf.templateuploadcenter/

Published An Release Of The New Plone Add-On

I worked on a new Plone add-on during the last two month. This add-on provide an environment to upload and manage office template projects and files. I finished my work on a first alpha release of this add-on, which is named ‚collective.templates‘. It is hosted in the Github repository of the Plone community: https://github.com/collective/collective.templates .

The add-on is compatible with Plone 5.2 and runs on Python 2.7 as well as on Python 3.6 and newer.

I published a first alpha release of this new Plone add-on on the ‚Cheeseshop‘: https://pypi.org/project/collective.templates/ .

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.

Last Day Of TDF-Membership

I decided to not renew my application for a membership of The Document Foundation some weeks ago. I did this because leading members of the foundation communicated badly about my volunteer work for the foundation and LibreOffice during the last eight years and nobody from the board of the foundation stopped this. For this reason I stopped my contributions to The Document Foundation in last October.

I got also the feeling that some leading people of the foundation are not able to communicate openly and that it often works like a closed group with mostly interests in LibreOffice business (and income from it). The latter was not my main objective.

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).

Working On The Code Of A New Plone Add-On

I worked on a new Plone add-on during the last weeks. I created this add-on within a Python 3 environment. It runs within a Plone 5.2 instance. During the coding of the new add-on I run into an issue in connection with Zope 4 and filed a bug report.

The code of my new Plone add-on need some further testing and further coding. The add-on provides an environment to upload templates and publish them.

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.