Board of Directors 2014-2016

Thorsten Behrens

Chairman of the Board, 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.

Eliane Domingos de Sousa

Deputy Chairwoman of the board

Entrepreneur, partner of EDX Informatica and EDX Coworking, elected member of the Board of Directors and Vice Chairman of the Document Foundation since 2014. Active volunteer member of the Brazilian LibreOffice Community, Brazilian LibreOffice Magazine editor and designer, member of the Rio de Janeiro chapter of FOSS community, editor of SempreUpdate blog, LibreOffice Brazil blog, iMasters blog, manager of the Brazilian LibreOffice National Meeting and the lectures cycle of FOSS for SINDPD-RJ.

Joel Madero

Member

Joel Madero began using open source software in 2004 during his first year at the University of California, Irvine, where he received degrees in Quantitative Economics and Political Science. Joel joined The Document Foundation (TDF) in 2011 as a computer hobbyist, mostly contributing to the quality assurance (QA) side of the project. During the last two years, Joel has focused on encouraging users to become more involved as contributors, as he is a firm believer that every user has the ability to contribute in making LibreOffice better for everyone. Joel represented QA on the ESC call for a year, helped organize bi-weekly QA calls, has had the chance to commit a few patches, and is actively trying to grow awareness of TDF in the United States Joel currently resides in San Diego, CA with his wife and is attaining his law degree.

Andreas Mantke

Volunteer

Andreas Mantke made his first experience with free software at the end of the 1990s when he started to use Linux and tried out some of the development packages of OpenOffice.org a bit later. He joined the free office suite project in 2002 and wrote some howto for the software. He got involved in different areas of the project, e.g. documentation and extensions website, and worked with the Portable team. Andreas supported the way to an independent foundation as the home for development of the office suite and its community and started working for LibreOffice and The Document Foundation on different areas since September 2010. He surfed as a (deputy) member on the Board of Directors at the Document Foundation since its establishment in February 2012. He worked for the infrastructure team of the foundation and attends many events on behalf of the foundation and LibreOffice.

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.

Fridrich Štrba

Developer, Trained Monkey, GSoC Mentor

Fridrich is a Christian and enthusiastic participant in Free Software. He has worked with the LibreOffice code-base for many years improving many aspects of file filters, starting with the Wordperfect filter. After making that a beautiful thing, he moved onto security issues and filters for other formats such as Wordperfect Graphics, Works, Visio, CorelDraw and more. He works for SUSE, and in his spare time maintains different import filters within LibreOffice. He also excels at mentoring, nurturing and including new programmers in the project.

Board Deputies

Eike Rathke

Senior Software Engineer at Red Hat, Inc. Developer, hacker, transpositionizer

Eike is a StarOffice/OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice hacker since the early days at Star Division, later Sun Microsystems, one other company and now Red Hat, Inc. He was also a member of the OASIS technical committee for the Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF) and an editor of the OpenFormula part (aka ODFF) of the ODF standard. His main areas of expertise are the Calc spreadsheet core, formula compiler and interpreter, number formatter/scanner, the i18n framework and locale data. Eike is an ardent supporter of Free Software and the idea that unlike religion spreading knowledge is the only possible rescue of mankind.

Norbert Thiebaud

Norbert joined the project with his first code contribution literally one day after we announced it on Sept. 28th, 2010, and has since been working as a volunteer on things as diverse as build system, code cleanups, git & gerrit, foundation statutes and membership management software.