Board of Directors 2012-2014

Florian Effenberger

Chairman of the Board

Florian Effenberger has been a free software volunteer for ten years. He is one of the founders as well as the chairman of The Document Foundation, the charitable entity behind LibreOffice. Next to his activities in marketing and public relations, he is a frequent contributor to a variety of professional magazines worldwide. Additionally, his focus is on planning and running Linux-based infrastructure solutions, especially web and mail servers.

Thorsten Behrens

Deputy Chairman, TDF Founder, Hacker, OASIS ODF TC member, working on the code since 2001

Thorsten was part of the OpenOffice.org project 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 ten 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 a former co-lead of the late graphical system layer project, member of the OASIS ODF technical committee, and technical advisor on the ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34 working group 4.

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 technology for large corporations on migration projects.

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.

Michael Meeks

VP of Productivity, Collabora

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, Novell and SUSE. He has contributed code to many of the components of the suite, and is excited about the future of the code. He now leads Collabora’s Productivity division.

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.

Björn Michaelsen

Developer, LibreOffice Package Maintainer at Ubuntu

Bjoern Michaelsen is a currently employed by Canoncial Ltd. and is responsible for the packaging for LibreOffice on Ubuntu. He joined the company and LibreOffice development in February 2011, coming from Oracle (and before that Sun), where he was working on the same codebase for a few years in the Writer/Framework area. Even since long before that he is an open source enthusiast and did start with minor contributions to a range of open source projects.

Italo Vignoli

TDF founder and former member of TDF Steering Committee, active in the OOo marketing project from 2004 to 2010

Italo Vignoli is partner and president of Quorum PR, a PR agency focused on high-technology and social media. He has over thirty years of experience in marketing and communication of high-tech companies in Italy and at international level. Since 1984, he 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.

Board Deputies

Jesús Corrius

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

Since 2000 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.

Andreas Mantke

Maintainer of the LibreOffice extension and template site infrastructure, Maintainer of OOo / LibO portable

Andreas Mantke made his first experience with free software at the end of the 1990s when he started to use a SuSE Linux distribution. That time he tried out also some of the development packages of OpenOffice.org. In 2002 he joined the Germanophone project at OpenOffice.org and wrote his first howto ‘First Steps in Impress’. He served for about four years as contact person for documentation in that project and wrote some more howtos. He got involved also in some other projects of OpenOffice.org, e.g. documentation and extensions website, and worked with the OpenOffice.org Portable team (later the LibreOffice Portable team). Andreas supported the way to an independent foundation as the home for development of the office suite and its community from the announcement in September 2010 and started working for LibreOffice and The Document Foundation on different areas during his spare time then.