[Sheflug] The Document Foundation announces the members of the Engineering Steering Committee

[Richard Ibbotson <richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: [tdf-announce] The Document Foundation announces the members 
of the Engineering Steering Committee
Date: Monday 23 May 2011, 14:54:51
From: Italo Vignoli <italo.vignoli@xxxxxxxxx>

The Document Foundation announces the members of the Engineering 
Steering Committee.  The body coordinates development activities and 
defines the technology evolution of LibreOffice

The Internet, May 23, 2011 - The Document Foundation presents the 
members of the Engineering Steering Committee, the second body to be 
announced - after the Membership Committee - of those envisioned by 
the foundation bylaws. The ESC has come into being in early 2011, and 
is now officially in place to coordinate all development activities and 
set future technology directions.

The 10 members of the ESC are Andras Timar (localization), Michael 
Meeks and Petr Mladek of Novell, Caolan McNamara and David Tardon of 
RedHat, Bjoern Michaelsen of Canonical, Michael Natterer of Lanedo, 
Rene Engelhard of Debian, and the independent contributors Norbert 
Thiebaud and Rainer Bielefeld (QA). The ESC convenes once a week by 
telephone to discuss the progress of the time-based release schedule 
and coordinate development activities. Their meetings routinely 
include other active, interested developers and topic experts.

The members have been appointed by the Steering Committee, and are 
drawn from key members of the community of developers, which has been 
steadily growing since late September 2010 and is now close to 200 
code hackers, with another 200 people involved in localization and QA. 
"This is a phenomenal success," says Caolan McNamara of RedHat, 
"Especially if you look at the OOo project, where external 
contributors were a small group, and had to deal with significant 
obstacles."

There are around 120 developers hacking LibreOffice code on a regular 
basis; these can be divided in three groups based on their experience: 
20 core developers working on features, fixes, and packaging the 
software; 40 more regular devs working on features, fixes and easy 
hacks; and 60 less-regular devs working on easy hacks and code 
cleaning. In addition, there are around 80 developers who are 
contributing occasionally, or have just started to dig into the code. 
TDF is also grateful for the influx of students who will be paid to 
work full-time over the summer by the Google Summer of Code program.

"The ESC has brought the necessary discipline in the development 
process, which is organized in a completely different way from the past 
at OOo, where there was a single company in charge of the decisions, 
which was at the same time a strength - as it was easy to coordinate - 
and a single point of failure," says André Schnabel, a member of TDF 
Steering Committee. "We have instead built an independent process, 
where corporate sponsors are still valued, but the community is able 
to take the software forward even without the backing of any of these 
companies."

-- 
Italo Vignoli - The Document Foundation
email italo.vignoli@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
phone +39.348.5653829 - VoIP +39.02.320621813
skype italovignoli - italo.vignoli@xxxxxxxxx

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