 Yeah, I don't know about the numbers, but just the places that we are, it grew every time and I think the It's also just That you expect so much more and take so much more for granted It's really dangerous actually if you if you just grew along with the project and you don't realize The realize the changes that have been on the way One of things for example at foster and we have this this issue where we discussed I think where do we go for dinner and Essentially realize that just to go somewhere with everyone. It's not gonna going to work in in Brussels and It used to work in the beginning and I said, well, why don't you we go somewhere and well at some point you grow to sizes that that you realize that you have to take Well to organize things differently and to To really take care to do things more decentralized because if you Centralize things well at some point it doesn't scale because you end up with with just the tiny board Trying to keep track of everything around it and not being able to because What do you really want is that people just feel empowered to do stuff that's them themselves and The longer the distances are the harder this gets I'm from Hamburg, which is like the city that was already the city of star office Before it was open office before it was Libre office. So there are a lot of people already there and I Was I always had like an information advantage in that way once I joined the project I'm late to this compared to others like Ike who's been like there even more from the start so I'm I'm not even Strictly speaking the founder of Libre office because I I was the son at that point in time. So I Joined like yeah, half a year later but Since I've been in Hamburg, I I've seen quite a bit of the beginning there and But this is exactly the things that we we need to change to Get more visibility and transparency to people outside and that we are only just people and there's nothing like That that we don't want to talk to someone. This is really not what it is. It's mostly that I Think there's roughly a number of 150 people that you can keep like Connections to and remember and keep friendships with and beyond that it's it you just keep Losing track and it's really hard to just be on the same personal level because we're so successful right now so We grew too fast. We were we were just too successful. I'm sorry Well, and there were lots of things you only think about things that weren't going well because you learned from them So we learned a lot but Yeah, I think Like I said, what one of the things is really that you have to remember always that there are mistakes and that it's that you're not have that you can't take everything for granted so So that you have to be willing to to learn and to adapt because things change and the market Changed or the project changed and the environment changed and the the people who are interested in the project changes and all these things are like moving and you can stick to just Something because it was right the right thing to do at a certain point in time. You always have to reevaluate Was the right thing for the current situation and maybe or even for for the future Even if you if you're just working for the current situation, you're already behind Again, I like I said I care deeply about the people so and I think LibreOffice is a project that one of the major advantages is not not so much the technical stuff that we can offer but the The project and the way it is done and the way what you can do with it as a project and not as a product so It's very much about an experience like being in this project and feeling that you can do change and then that you can Yeah, make a change in the pro project and with that outside of the project but Not so much like it's a given thing that is lying there and then we just ticker on a branded Icon and that's it. It's it's something to be involved in really And and I think this is something we constantly have to work on to improve Because the There's this arc we have to this river we have to cross unlike other projects and Ideally we want I think I would like the project to be like the Linux kernel was in the band in the beginning in the early days and it got off so easy in Portation marks because it was used exactly by the people who could contribute it was Cis administrators seeing oh, this is something I can use and then they improved it because they had a problem and It's different for LibreOffice because our users are very far apart from from the typical C++ hacker these days, so there's a huge huge river to cross and we need to bridge this and We're doing this like we started with just developers and was and the the old early days it was like we had like Italo was on board from the start doing marketing but In the beginning it was mostly just like getting something To build and that's it. We had no real coordinated QA or something So then we built QA which got us a little bit closer to the users and So on so we need to take these steps to bridge this whole divide and get Get really a good connection and look at the whole pipeline and where's the weakest point to get Communication flowing like communication flowing in one direction and the product essentially in the other one Which is in total Like I said, I don't care too much about the product because the product is just one thing in the whole in The whole project, which is this whole pipeline moving things in both directions Essentially, this means that we are a lot closer together. I mean the eye Marketing for Linux, but they are not marketing Linux per se They're marketing like a company doing a distribution and things like that. So This this is very separated because I think in Linux the This this is already like a self-contained thing that that mostly works for itself. They're there At least they had been and there are quite a few still Distributions of Linux that were very small self-contained and had almost no marketing And they just like you don't see much from them, but they Existed all the time. So then it's very different For us and maybe Also, this is the other thing Our developers are not really power users of the product Not at all so You often come across the situation where someone says oh if this bug with this feature and the developer says Is working on this area of code and has never really realized this feature exists And what it should do and what is the use case it's for so Just because it's such a huge product so Just because of the hugeness of the the product We also need non developers to actually tell developers what is the real use case and What's what's being done with the project? with the product outside of the hands of a developer who might take his Minutes of a meeting and that's about it Yeah, the question there is do you see it as a product or as a project and I Think the companies that are in our ecosystem They are free to see this as a product and they have a clear customer Or client release relationship with with people there that are paying them for a level three support and stuff like that It's not exactly the same with us as TDF being an NGO We we want to make the world a better place to put it in the most simple terms You can read the details in the statues, but But in in general We are not there to to serve one specific user. Yeah, we are there to serve Well to make this thing better as a whole and this is not about an individual user and So the question is what does it help the project as a whole and again, then it's like It doesn't get people interested in the project and do we get more people maybe to contribute if we and This might very well be and user experience improvement because I mean the for example one of the easiest ways to get people involved or Interested about a project is to like talk about styles and the colors of buttons and stuff. So you might use that actually to to generate interest and get someone involved in the project and then carry on and see once once they're in there Someone who used to be a simple user and like a customer gets involved and gets more becomes more than that and sees Okay, this is the problem and but in the discussion realizes. Oh, there are conflicting goals and How do we? How can this be solved in in a way that serves like all the interested parties? because in many cases It's not like There is simply a back to fix and the work to do But it's like they are conflicting goals and there are two ways to resolve something You have to decide which which one is actually the one the row to take and Well The default action is actually do is decide so if someone says I'm doing this Then you have to have real good reasons to say but I want this done because it's better. So The default is always to go where there's actually movement and solving solution, but sometimes you You end up with conflicts that are harder in that You have like well One is one example is is like zombie bugs that always come back and Typical is for example layout in in the text application and writer and you have and rendering issue where Like a table is not rendered on the first page, but on the second or is moved back and Just to make an example someone complains oh I've got this table on them on the next slide not like in this other application and someone fixes that and The tables then as it is in the other application and then somewhere else comes along with another document and and that used to be fine until this fix was in which Solved it for one document, but it broke it for another and then you they have two cases and this is now Artificial example, but it's it's a little bit more complex than reality But often you have like cases where you can say say okay We can do this document right or that document then you have to judge Which is more common and which is is the The more generic case and That's that's one of the reasons why I Have high respect for qa team because they always have to do decisions like that In the beginning when we started LibreOffice We ever one invested a lot of their free time and also the companies that's that that started with the LibreOffice Invested or did a lot of front-up investment and had lots of them also had the strategic interest in in the project getting started and This changed a bit We are now We are now having companies in the ecosystem But many of them have very direct goals towards customers and to serve problems for them and In a way because we're so successful everyone assumes that LibreOffice will just carry on on its own and we're having hackfest events and Where we essentially just go together and get together and start with a lot of Just go together and get together and solve problems on the product in the beginning. There were so many problems that we had no We had no issues like solving hard and urgent problems right there and Since well, for example, we have a lot of TDF staff now The urgent problems are taken care of to a large part by by employees or contractors of TDF and We are left with With like the product issues for example and it's still important to do these Hackfest and to get new people involved and show how to get started on this, but The developers for example like I said work for companies that have their very own goals and just going there on their free time Leads to them maybe being stuck with some Something burning down like right now in in their company. They they're not being able to like take care of the the foundations issue or the projects issue at that point in time, so the idea is to maybe hire these people as consultants and Have them exactly for this time frame so that they can spend the whole time really for the project without interruptions from their day business and because this is their day business then and work together with some of from the community who wants to learn about the project and how to be a developer and Yeah, essentially grow maybe into a developer or someone who can contribute in a better way to LibreOffice and Right now this is very developer centric, but the idea really is to to have this in a way that You can really see and learn from this and maybe if you are not a developer you can also just watch What developers do to understand? What the actual work is and maybe see Yeah, I mean this is an opportunity and in comparison to other products You never see how this is being done and he can really just Go there be there and see like how is how the sausage machine really works in the inside and Might make some weird decisions sometimes developers do sometimes make more understandable