Board of Directors 2018-2020

Marina Latini

Volunteer

Marina studied Computer Science at the University of Perugia, and is a free software advocate since 2007, promoting free software and open standards. In 2010, she was one of the first Italian members of the LibreOffice community. She has also been an active member of the Fedora Project from 2009 to 2013, and she is an openSUSE advocate since October 2011 and an openSUSE board member from February 2019.

Marina co-founded Associazione LibreItalia and has been involved in several events, migrations and training related to LibreOffice. She worked previously at Studio Storti at migrations and trainings to LibreOffice for the Italian Public Administrations and globally at CIB group as Senior Migrations & Deployments Engineer.

Michael Meeks

VP of Productivity, Collabora

Michael is a Christian and enthusiastic believer in Free software. His long involvement with OpenOffice.org started 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.

Thorsten Behrens

Leader of LibreOffice Team at CIB, OASIS ODF TC Member

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 the build system and platform abstraction libraries, through to 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.

Eike Rathke

Senior Software Engineer at Red Hat, 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 internationalization (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.

Cor Nouws

Principal at Nou&Off, marketing at Collabora

CorNouws is one of the founding members of The Document Foundation. Before starting with LibreOffice, Cor Nouws has contributed for years to OpenOffice.org, among others as the community representative in the Community Council. For LibreOffice, he continues supporting marketing, QA and other areas, as he did before the free-making of OpenOffice.org. His involvement in the free office community is a natural combination with his position as founder of the Dutch consulting firm Nou&Off, leading in training and migrations for LibreOffice, and OpenOffice.org in the past. He is dedicating a part of his time to marketing for Collabora.

Björn Michaelsen

Developer, Volunteer

Bjoern Michaelsen was responsible for packaging LibreOffice on Ubuntu for half an alphabet (from Natty to Zesty). He joined 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. He is currently working on a day job unrelated to LibreOffice.

Franklin Weng

President, Board of Directors of Software Liberty Association Taiwan

Franklin Weng has been involved in the Taiwanese open source community since 1993, and since 2015 he is the President of the Software Liberty Association Taiwan (SLAT). He has been coordinating KDE localization in Chinese since 2006 and is a KDE e.V. member since 2014. He is a TDF member and a LibreOffice Migration Professional and Trainer since 2016. In 2017, he has been co-opted by The Certification Committee and the Certification Review Committee of The Document Foundation.

Board Deputies

Jan Holesovsky

Collabora

Jan Holesovsky has been with LibreOffice from the very beginning, and was with OpenOffice.org previously, now for more than 11 years. He is primarily a developer, but reaches out to the other groups too - he has been translating into Czech, works with designers, and in marketing. He is a regular Google Summer of Code mentor.

Simon Phipps

Principal at Meshed Insights

Simon watched OpenOffice.org go open source at OSCON in 2000 and has been associated with the project in a variety of roles ever since, most notably as the Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystems until 2010. An electronic engineer and programmer by training, he is now the principal of Meshed Insights Ltd, offering management consulting on open source and digital rights issues. He also serves on the board of the UK’s Open Rights Group and was President of the Open Source Initiative from 2012-15. In addition to his role at Sun, in a long technology industry career he has worked on open standards, video conferencing, the introduction of Java and XML at IBM, office productivity workstations at Burroughs and Unisys in the 80s and identity management at ForgeRock. He lives in Southampton in the UK.

Osvaldo Gervasi

Perugia University

Osvaldo Gervasi has been the President of the Open Source Competence Center of Regione Umbria, and in that capacity, he has inspired the LibreUmbria project and co-founded Associazione LibreItalia. He has been involved in the migration projects of Regione Umbria and the Italian Army and is an active member of the Italian Localization Team. He is an Aggregate Professor at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science of the University of Perugia.