Board of Directors 2020-2022
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.
Franklin Weng (Deputy Chairman) 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.
Daniel Armando Rodriguez Volunteer
Daniel works in a high school with technical orientation all day. He lives in Misiones, Argentina (northeast of the country), a small province between Paraguay and Brazil.
Cor Nouws Principal at Nou&Off, marketing at Collabora
Cor Nouws 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.
Lothar Becker (Chairman) Owner of .riess applications
Lothar is known as owner of .riess applications, which was the first partner of Sun for doing migration business with StarOffice/OpenOffice nearly 20 years ago.
You might also know him from his contributions with activities for the national and international ecosystem, developing the certification process for LibreOffice professionals with others, where he nowadays serves as volunteer co-chair of the certification committee.
Emiliano Vavassori Senior system administrator, volunteer
Emiliano is a senior system administrator, employed in a small company based in Bergamo, in the North of Italy, with its core business in providing ICT services for SMB companies.
In the last few years, he was involved in FOSS advocacy also inside schools, founding and leading the LibreSchool Project with a group of friends and colleagues from his LUG.
Board Deputies
Nicolas Christener Adfinis
Nicolas works for Adfinis, a company delivering services (engineering, managed services, development) around free and open source software.
During the last years, Nicolas was a member of the board of CH Open, a non- profit organization driving the adoption of F/OSS in Switzerland. He’s also a member of the organization team of DINAcon, an anually conference dedicated to digital sustainability.
Nicolas helped to organize the LibreOffice Conference in Switzerland; the company he works for hosts some TDF servers’ and lately he was busy helping make the iOS app a reality. He contributed comment translations (de/en) in the code, filled many bugs and convinces users and organizations to use LibreOffice.
Paolo Vecchi Omnis Systems Ltd (UK) and Omnis Cloud Sarl (LU)
Paolo is based in Luxemburg and his two organisations, Omnis Systems Ltd (UK) and Omnis Cloud Sarl (LU), are specialised in the promotion of Open Source and Free Software platforms. During the last years, he wrote many articles promoting Open Source, Free Software and naturally LibreOffice.
Many of you may also know him from FOSDEM and the LibreOffice Conference. Paolo has been a part of the working group that succeed in convincing the UK Government to adopt ODF as their standard file format, convinced the City Council of Reggio Emilia to upgrade to LibreOffice and contributed in writing the Manifesto for Technological Sovereignty with the City Council of Barcelona - just to mention some of the activities.
He is contributing to the LibreOffice project by investing time and resources to work with the private and public sector organisations showing them the social, ethical and economical benefits of replacing proprietary products with Open Source platforms and open standards.