Author: Michael G

THE INTERNET, 20 March 2023 — The global F-Droid community is pleased to
announce that it has officially accepted the merge request to adopt an
official governance plan, and an inaugural board of directors consisting of
community-nominated members.

The community has been legally established through The Commons
Conservancy, a Netherlands-based
foundation (“Stichting”) that
exists as a home for technology efforts in the public interest. While The
Commons Conservancy is our official and new legal home, F-Droid has
established its own independent volunteer board of directors, who are
entrusted by the F-Droid community to develop strategy, identify areas of
improvement, help to resolve conflicts, and oversee technical projects and
decisions by the community to reduce risk and increase trust of F-Droid
users around the world. With so many recent changes to existing app store
policies and government regulations, it’s an interesting time for FOSS app
stores like F-Droid. (Our new board member John Sullivan recently spoke
about this during FOSDEM
2023.)

For the past several months, prospective board members drafted and refined
internal organizational statutes and regulations which will become part of
The Commons Conservancy’s organizing documents, and which will also live and
grow in the existing F-Droid administrative
repositories where community members can
provide feedback over time to improve governance. The official statutes were
voted and approved by the board on 19 January, and the first official
meeting of the board took place on 16 February.

Inaugural board members were selected through F-Droid community discussion
and will serve in staggered 2-year terms: Morgan Lemmer Webber (Chair), John
Sullivan (Vice Chair), Michael Downey (Treasurer), Matthias Kirschner,
Andrew Lewman (Clerk), and Max Mehl. The Board also includes a special role
of Technical Lead which will ensure representation of the F-Droid developer
community, initially filled by Hans-Christoph Steiner.

Board members
and community observers attend the virtual singing of the board statutes.

Although announcements of new governance bodies for free & open source
software projects often include plans for the new organization to raise
money, the F-Droid community plans to retain its existing donations model
with individual donors contributing directly to community members via
Liberapay and Open
Collective. The newly-established Board
of Directors has created a treasurer role, who will work with the existing
stewards of those funds to help ensure funds are spent on the most impactful
and important community priorities.

“The significant investments of creativity and energy by our community
volunteers has made F-Droid the leading FOSS mobile app catalogue,” said
Morgan Lemmer Webber, the newly-elected Chair of the Board of Directors. “We
are very excited to be able to help guide the project through its next
phases of growth and maturity by providing advice and resources to everyone
who has been involved in making F-Droid a success, and those who are eager
to join us with their individual talents and skills.”

The new Board would like to thank everyone from the community who
participated in this process over the past few months, with extra thanks to
those who helped in drafting our new foundational documents, including Rivka
Karasik, Andrew Lewman, Michael Pöhn, Jochen Sprickerhof, and Licaon_Kter.

To download F-Droid and start using it today, head to
https://f-droid.org/. For more information about the new F-Droid Board of
Directors, review the newly-adopted Statutes or Roles &
Regulations documents
in the F-Droid administrative code repository. And if you’d like to
contribute to our ongoing work, we
look forward to you joining the community! We also look forward to hearing
from you in our online forum, chat channels, and on the
Fediverse.

For more information about The Commons Conservancy, visit:
https://commonsconservancy.org/