Document Foundation appoints Engineering Steering Committee

With around 120 developers now working on LibreOffice code on a regular basis, The Document Foundation has announced the appointment of an Engineering Steering Committee (ESC) to direct and coordinate the efforts of the developers. The ESC members, selected by the steering committee, are Novell's Michael Meeks, Andras Timar and Petr Mladek, Red Hat's Caolan McNamara and David Tardon, Canonical's Bjoern Michaelsen, Lanedo's Michael Natterer, Debian's Rene Engelhard and independent contributors Norbert Thiebaud and Rainer Bielefeld.

The ESC will be meeting weekly by telephone to discuss the progress of development efforts in meeting LibreOffice's time-based release schedule and to coordinate development activities within the organisation. According to the foundation, the 120 full time developers are divided into 20 core developers, 40 regular developers and 60 "less-regular" developers. There are also around 80 developers who make occasional contributions or are just starting to "dig into the code". There are also around 200 other contributors involved in localisation and quality assurance. The TDF says it is also grateful for the students who will be working on LibreOffice full time this summer as part of the Google Summer of Code program.

(djwm)