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From: Thorsten Behrens on 23 Jun 2010 19:10
Dear OOo community, Chris,

many thanks for this opportunity to briefly introduce myself, my
visions and plans to all of you. I've talked to many of you already,
in the 9 years since I'm involved with OpenOffice.org, on the mailing
lists, on irc, or in person - at some conference, or over a beer.

So I'll keep the bio part short, most of you will know it already,
it's in fact a copy from the previous election round. I work on OOo
since 2001, first for Sun, now sponsored by Novell. I'm a computer
scientist by education, and a free software enthusiast by heart. I
have two kids, and live close to Hamburg in Germany.

My blog is here: http://blog.thebehrens.net/
And my (mostly incoherent) dents are there: http://identi.ca/thb

Since communities are built by people, and people like to socialize,
you'll find me on irc channels like #dev.openoffice.org,
#education.openoffice.org and #go-oo (all freenode.net). I'm thorsten
there, and it's a great way to get to know all the OOo people from
across the world you can't meet at your local water cooler.

Now to your questions, Chris:
> * Is there enough spare time for the work in the council?
>
In short - yes. I'm paid to work on OOo, and I'll make council tasks a
priority.

> * Do you have any special areas of interest/ideas?
>
Besides working on the OOo code base (in areas like gui toolkit,
applications, build system & filters), I also focus on testability &
code quality. I work with the relevant standardization committees for
office file formats, I do QA (of childworkspaces, and recently also on
file formats and standards), and I'm actually passionate about
connecting OOo with other free software projects, always trying to
share code, infrastructure, and overall philosophical underpinnings.

Events like FOSDEM or LGM are excellent opportunities to connect
with other projects, and I make it a priority to attend there.

Other than that, I find it very rewarding to mentor people for doing
OOo hacking, and have used lots of occasions to do so (like GSoC, new
hires, and of course education project students). I'm personally
convinced that getting pupils and students in touch with FLOSS is the
biggest single opportunity we're facing.

> * What is your idea by the work/tasks of the council?
>
Well, our wiki is a great resource, so the ultimative answer is of
course there: http://council.openoffice.org/#council and
http://council.openoffice.org/councilcharter12.html - thanks Eike for
the links. :)

To paraphrase, the council is largely a place where arbitration
happens, in terms of overall project interests, conflicts, and
funds. The charter carefully avoids the phrase "leadership", and for
very good reasons - we're a diverse community, many of us work on this
project on a partial or full volunteer basis - nobody can give us
orders what to do. The council is thus most successful, if it is able
to create shared vision, provide guidance where needed, arbitrate
conflicts, and otherwise not interfere with what's working nicely.

In a healthy community, the community council will be (almost)
invisible - and that's my vision for the council as an institution. I
had the opportunity to work on more than one aspect of this great
project, and for more than one contributing company - something that
really makes me value the diversity within the community, and
something that helps me value different opinions. Making OOo a
rewarding place to be for the broadest possible set of contributors
would therefore be my vision for the community. Lastly, the overall
project vision - I'm pretty sure OOo is at a crossroads now, and
there's a bunch of exciting trails to blaze, as much as there are
interesting leads to follow. The good news is, the world lives on
gazillions of office documents. The challenge is, how to render and
interact with them, on as many devices as possible, and for as many
people as possible.

Looking forward,

-- Thorsten

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