TDF announces the Engineering Steering Committee

The Document Foundation announces the members of the Engineering Steering Committee

The body coordinates development activities and defines the technology evolution of LibreOffice

The Internet, May 23, 2011 - The Document Foundation presents the members of the Engineering
Steering Committee, the second body to be announced - after the Membership Committee - of those
envisioned by the foundation bylaws. The ESC has come into being in early 2011, and is now
officially in place to coordinate all development activities and set future technology directions.

The 10 members of the ESC are Andras Timar (localization), Michael Meeks and Petr Mladek of Novell,
Caolan McNamara and David Tardon of RedHat, Bjoern Michaelsen of Canonical, Michael Natterer of
Lanedo, Rene Engelhard of Debian, and the independent contributors Norbert Thiebaud and Rainer
Bielefeld (QA). The ESC convenes once a week by telephone to discuss the progress of the time-based
release schedule and coordinate development activities. Their meetings routinely include other
active, interested developers and topic experts.

The members have been appointed by the Steering Committee, and are drawn from key members of the
community of developers, which has been steadily growing since late September 2010 and is now close
to 200 code hackers, with another 200 people involved in localization and QA. "This is a phenomenal
success," says Caolan McNamara of RedHat, "Especially if you look at the OOo project, where
external contributors were a small group, and had to deal with significant obstacles."

There are around 120 developers hacking LibreOffice code on a regular basis; these can be divided
in three groups based on their experience: 20 core developers working on features, fixes, and
packaging the software; 40 more regular devs working on features, fixes and easy hacks; and 60
less-regular devs working on easy hacks and code cleaning. In addition, there are around 80
developers who are contributing occasionally, or have just started to dig into the code. TDF is
also grateful for the influx of students who will be paid to work full-time over the summer by the
Google Summer of Code program.

"The ESC has brought the necessary discipline in the development process, which is organized in a
completely different way from the past at OOo, where there was a single company in charge of the
decisions, which was at the same time a strength - as it was easy to coordinate - and a single
point of failure," says André Schnabel, a member of TDF Steering Committee. "We have instead built
an independent process, where corporate sponsors are still valued, but the community is able to
take the software forward even without the backing of any of these companies."

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Italo Vignoli - The Document Foundation
mob +39 348 5653829 - skype italovignoli
italo.vignoli@documentfoundation.org