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History

Founding Steering Committee

TDF founders

When The Document Foundation was announced in September 2010, we started with a team of long-term contributors to OpenOffice.org. As we wanted to discuss the best approach for the project’s governance in a transparent, collaborative and inclusive way, we set up an interim Steering Committee to be replaced by the elected Board of Directors within one year.

The Mission of the founders

The Document Foundation has the mission of facilitating evolution of the LibreOffice Community into a new, open, independent, and meritocratic organization. An independent foundation properly reflects the values of our contributors, users, and supporters, allowing a more effective, efficient, and transparent community. TDF will protect past investments by building on the achievements of the first decade with OpenOffice.org, will encourage wide participation within the community, and will coordinate activities across the community.

The founding team members

Here is a list of those deeply involved in the creation of The Document Foundation (in alphabetical order).

Caolán McNamara

Former Writer Project co-lead and member of the OpenOffice.org Engineering Steering Committee

Caolán is a Senior Software Engineer at Red Hat, Inc, and has over 10 years experience in developing OpenOffice.org. Starting 2000 in Hamburg as an employee of Sun Microsystems developing StarOffice before its subsequent release under the LGPL as OpenOffice.org later that year. From 2000 to 2005 Caolán specialized in improving the the binary MSWord import/export filters, building on his prior experience developing libwv, libwmf and other free software projects to parse Microsoft binary file formats. From 2005 to present Caolán has been employed full-time by Red Hat, Inc. to maintain, improve and enhance OpenOffice.org, typically focusing on GNOME desktop integration, font and glyph replacement, Indic text layout, linguistic components, tooling to improve overall code quality, debugging the type of problems no one wants to touch, while retaining an interest in MSOffice compatibility.

Thorsten Behrens

Former GSL Project co-lead, OASIS ODF TC / ECMA TC45 / ISO SC34 WG4 participant

Thorsten was part of OpenOffice.org almost from the start, when he joined the then-Sun Microsystems development team back in early 2001. He’s a computer scientist by education, and a Free Software enthusiast by heart, a geek from early childhood - and someone who was lucky enough to turn a hobby into an occupation. During his now nine years of tenure in the project, he’s spent most of his time hacking the code, in areas ranging from build system, platform abstraction libraries, Impress and Writer. Thorsten is currently co-lead of the graphical system layer project, member of the OASIS ODF technical committee, the ECMA TC45, and technical advisor on the ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34 working group 4. He’s sponsored by Novell to work full-time on OpenOffice.org.

Jesús Corrius

Former OpenOffice.org Catalan Native Lang Project Leader, Former OpenOffice.org Catalan L10N Project Leader

Since 2000 he has been the Catalan Native Lang Project Leader / L10N of OpenOffice.org and started to produce full builds of the suite in Catalan language downloaded over the years by millions of people. In 2007 he was the main contact and responsible of the OpenOffice.org Conference 2007 in Barcelona (Spain) organized by Softcatalà. In 2009 successfully completed a Google Summer of Code (GSOC) project, mentored by Fridrich Strba, about cross-compiling the office suit. Born near Barcelona in 1979, Jesús Corrius holds a degree in Computer Science and another in Audiovisual Communication. He’s a professional C++, Python software developer and teaches Advanced Software Development in the Free Software Master at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC). He’s a member of Softcatalà, and NGO dedicated to promote the use of the Catalan language in IT.

Florian Effenberger

Board of Directors Freies Office Deutschland e.V., Former OpenOffice.org Marketing Project Lead and German MarCon

Florian Effenberger has been an open source evangelist for many years. He is founding member and part of the Steering Committee at The Document Foundation. He has previously been active in the OpenOffice.org project for seven years, most recently as Marketing Project Lead. Florian has ten years’ experience in designing enterprise and educational computer networks, including software deployment based on free software. He is also a frequent contributor to a variety of professional magazines worldwide on topics such as free software, open standards and legal matters.

Rene Engelhard

Debian Maintainer, OpenOffice.org tools maintainer

Rene has been a long term contributor to the OpenOffice.org project, and Debian Packager of OpenOffice.org, and many associated packages since 2002. He is a key contributor to the Engineering Steering Committee, and member of the German project. He is an expert on the build system, and maintains close scrutiny of both build, tooling, emerging Linux portability problems as well as licensing compliance.

Sophie Gautier

Francophone project co-lead, Former OpenOffice.org Project Lead Education Project, Former OpenOffice.org Community Council Member for Native Lang projects category

She has been deeply involved in the OpenOffice.org Community since its very beginning in 2000. First she participated in the Documentation Project, then was the lead of the French-speaking project from 2002 to 2007, then the co-lead in 2009 until now. She represented the Native Language Confederation at the Community Council since its launch until last year. Now she is managing the French localization of the OOo product and satellite sites and participating in QA, Documentation, User Support and Marketing. In her daily job, she worked as an OpenOffice.org consultant and trainer on her own first, then for the Linagora Group from 2006 to 2010 and she’s currently unemployed.

Olivier Hallot

Senior LibreOffice consultant, main LibreOffice translator for Brazilian Portuguese

Graduated Electronic Engineer in 1982, MSc in Digital Signal Processing in 1985 and MBA in Oil & Gas industry in 2001. He initiated his career as Associate Researcher for digital signal processing in the IBM Scientific Center in Brasilia, Brazil, for the Oil & Gas industry in seismic data processing and high performance computing. Later he moved to marketing and sales for the same industry all over Latin America. In 1998 he joined Oracle Brazil in sales for the Oil & Gas industry and later as Alliance relationship manager for large hardware manufacturers as well as with the Oracle Academic Initiative. Since 2002 and on his own, he participated actively in FLOSS projects notably in OpenOffice.org as Community Council member and as one of the translators for Brazilian Portuguese. He is now senior consultant in LibreOffice.org technology for large corporations on migration projects.

Jan Holešovský

KDE.openoffice.org formal lead (not active any more)

Jan, as a Free Software enthusiast, was aware of OpenOffice.org from the moment it was open-sourced, but his real involvement and contribution started in 2003. First as a volunteer, then as a Novell employee, he did lots of integration work between OpenOffice.org and KDE3, and became the KDE.OpenOffice.org project lead. Later he focused on x86-64 porting, and significantly helped to make OpenOffice.org a good citizen on that platform. He was also involved in filter work, and build and source code management problems. From 2009, he leads the Novell OpenOffice.org team. Before he joined OpenOffice.org, he graduated from the Charles University, and worked as a YaST2 developer during the studies. His first experience with developing office software dates back to 1998-9 when he programmed the drawing part of KTTV, a Linux word processor and a vector drawing program for lecture notes.

David Emmerich Jourdain

BrOffice co-founder

David Emmerich Jourdain is participating in various free software projects since 1998 and is a founding member of the NGO BrOffice.Org. He started a university research project in 2003, to develop a Linux distribution to support the migration of MS-Windows users, which was called Famelix GNU/Linux, now known as BRLix. David brings a welcomed perspective gained from these wider FOSS activities within Brazil to the LibreOffice community. He is currently busy developing code for the kernel, to help Brazilian manufacturers of desktops and notebooks, who want to sell computers with preinstalled Linux.

Thomas Krumbein

Marketing Contact German Project, Chairman Freies Office Deutschland e.V.

Thomas Krumbein joined the OpenOffice.org project in 2001. As business-consultant he helps enterprises to swich over to open-source software since more then ten years. He is part of the German marketing project and is one of the initiator of the non-profit Freies Office Deutschland e.V., where he is still the chairman. He is also a frequent contributor to a variety of professional magazines, author of several OpenOffice.org related books and active involved in major migration projects. Specialized in custom adjustments and improvements using script languages he is one of the experts of UNO API in Germany.

Leif Lyngby Lodahl

Project Lead Danish native lang project, OpenOffice.org Community Council Deputy (Native Lang Representative)

He worked for more than ten years in financial business. In 1998 he moved to IT as project manager and in 2000 became a consultant working with Lotus Software. He worked with IBM Lotus for ten years as project manager and with teaching developers and end users. Since may 2009 he has been working full time with open source software - primarily OpenOffice.org.

Michael Meeks

Novell / Linux Desktop Architect

Michael is a Christian and enthusiastic believer in Free software. His long involvement with OpenOffice.org starts before it was open sourced, working with Sun to see how best to integrate it into the Linux Desktop. OpenOffice.org replaced his previous passion: the gnumeric spreadsheet and its interoperability. Michael has lead, and helped to grow OpenOffice.org investment through Ximian, to Novell. He has contributed code to many of the components of the suite, and is excited about the future of the code. In other roles, he has contributed to MeeGo, GNOME, CORBA, Nautilus, Evolution and accessibility, amongst many other interesting things. Before all this, he enjoyed working for Quantel gaining expertise in real time software and high performance custom hardware for real time Audio / Video editing and playback.

Christoph Noack

Former OpenOffice.org User Experience Team Co-Lead, Former OpenOffice.org Community Council Member (Product Development Representative)

Christoph Noack made his first experiences with one of the predecessors of OpenOffice.org in the ages of DOS. Since that time, he got a strong supporter of both the software and the idea of open-source in general. He is happy to represent the community thanks to his election to serve as one of the Product Development Representatives in the OpenOffice.org Community Council. Christoph is also the Co-Lead of the User Experience team that aims to make OpenOffice.org a great piece of software for all the different users. Within that team, he actively contributed to several feature developments to improve the overall usability of the software. And also in his day job, he works in the field of Human-Machine interaction, but this case he works for a German consumer goods company.

Cor Nouws

Former OpenOffice.org Community Council member

Cor Nouws is an active member of the OpenOffice.org community since 2004, involved mainly in testing, localisation and marketing. He also maintains some extensions on the OpenOffice.org repository and is one of the Marcons for the Dutch speaking Native Language community. He was chosen as community representative for the Community Council in 2008. Cor Nouws is founder of the Dutch based firm Nou&Off, offering training and migrations, extensions and consultancy for OpenOffice.org.

Peter Pöml

MirrorBrain Developer

As specialist for downloads and content delivery, Peter came to the OpenOffice.org community in 2009 to help modernize the mirror distribution network. He introduced MirrorBrain, a content distribution software that is also used by the FSF, openSUSE, Sugar Labs and other organizations. With the Document Foundation he has been involved in building the new mirror network from the start. Despite his background of a degree as a medical doctor he has been working full-time with many open source communities since the year 2000, in particular in the Linux and Apache world.

Jacqueline Rahemipour

Co-Lead de.openoffice.org, Board of Directors Freies Office Deutschland e.V.

Jacqueline Rahemipour is Co-Lead of the germanophone OpenOffice.org project since 2005 and member of the management board and founding member of the non-profit organisation Freies Office Deutschland e.V. Her main working areas are quality assurance, marketing and localisation. In her daily job she works as an OpenOffice.org consultant and trainer. She published several books and articles on the topic of OpenOffice.org.

André Schnabel

Coordinator of German localization, former Project Lead QA Project, former Community Council Member for accepted projects category

André is involved in the OpenOffice.org project since 2001. Being a software developer in his professional live he focused his voluntary work for OpenOffice.org on user support, documentation and quality assurance. He has been Co-Lead of the Germanophone project as well as project lead of the Quality Assurance project and member of the Community Council for several years. Today he is maintaining the German localization and working on a translation process based on open standards. André is also founding member and chairman of the advisory board of the German non-profit Freies Office Deutschland e.V.

Charles-H. Schulz

Former OpenOffice.org NLC Lead and OpenOffice.org Community Council Member (Lang Representative)

Charles-H. Schulz (The “H” letter standing for his second name “Henri”) is a French technologist, Free Software and Open Standards advocate. As a long time contributor to the OpenOffice.org project he helped grow its community from a few mostly european communities to over a hundred communities and teams of various sizes. In the end of 2009 he was elected to the Community Council of the OpenOffice.org project. He is currently the lead of the Native-Language Confederation and a member of the Community Council. He also contributed to the development and adoption of the OpenDocument Format standard through the company he co-founded, Ars Aperta. Member of several international organizations he helped to create the Digital Standards Group and is part of the OASIS standards consortium, of which he is now one of the directors.

Daniel Stoni

founding member and chairman of the board of OpenOffice.org Switzerland Association, administrator for the Swiss Ubuntu LoCo team

I carry along: ten years of IT experience (infrastructure services) at Credit Suisse plus twelve years as Project Leader and Business Manager at IBM: of Sales, of Software Technical Support, of Project Services. I’m passionate about new technology, have high interest in overall IT efficiency, demonstrated customer insight and ability to coach individuals and teams to success. My particular assets are: insight into local OS market and swiss community work, good overview about OS products.

Italo Vignoli

Italian MarCon, Former President of Associazione PLIO (Italian National Language Project)

Italo Vignoli is former president of PLIO, OpenOffice.org Italian National Language Project, a not for profit association that represents the community of volunteers who promote the free office productivity suite. In everyday life, he is a partner and president of Quorum PR, a public relations agency with a strong bias to the integration of traditional media and social networks. He has almost thirty years of experience in marketing and communication of high-tech companies in Italy and at international level, and is responsible for the social networks practice within the Italian Federation of Public Relations. Since 1984, it is connected to the network with a portable PC and a messaging or e-mail system despite a degree in humanities from the University of Milan, where he has been a researcher on urban geography. He is working as a freelance journalist since 1972, writing about sports, music and IT.

(this page reflects the situation as of late September, 2010)