As we’re facing upcoming openSUSE Board election I’d like to share with you what the current Board normally does. This is especially for people which may run for a Board seat and so might know better what they can expect and how much time is needed for that. But for everybody else it should help to make a picture what those Board members are doing.
Currently we do have bi-weekly meetings in IRC which are scheduled for 2 hours. In average I’d say we need those 2 hours. Apart of this fixed meeting we Board Members communicate ongoing via emails or IRC.

Membership approval
Everybody can sign in as an user at opensuse.org and if they feel they do ongoing contribution everybody is invited to request openSUSE membership (request your membership via users.opensuse.org on your profile page). As membership is a kind of a merit someone needs to prove this request if they are valid. Currently this process is pretty manually (tools improvements is needed and planned) and is quiet time consuming as we check things like bugs, activity in the wiki and on mailing lists and we check for traces of contribution in the Internet. Sometimes we contact other people in the openSUSE project for getting more and better information about the applicants. And unfortunately we see quite a number of spam applications or applications with no substance at all.

Creation of the openSUSE foundation
This summer we had the idea to create a foundation for the openSUSE. Reasoning behind this is that openSUSE still is perceived as pretty much controlled by Novell which is actually not the case anymore – just think of the opening of Factory,  request and vote for features etc. So this foundation should help that openSUSE can act on its own, offers the possibility for other companies to step up for major sponsoring and it would come with the benefit that we’d have a simple way to collect and spread donations for the project. The creation of a Foundation needs pretty detailed plans and a foundation could be done in different countries under different laws. So the Board is currently through that to have an openSUSE Foundation established next year.

Discussion about what happens in the Linux/OS world
Apart of full filling our clear task we use our meetings often to discuss what currently happens in the Linux and general operating system world. And discuss the matter if openSUSE should go in certain directions or react to some stuff happened somewhere else. And of course we’re talking about how the project should be improved, eg. we see the challenge to integrate the forums better with the rest of the project.

We invite people to meeting
Depending of the topics we’re in we normally invite “experts” to our meetings. As we deal often with the face of openSUSE to the outside world we have overlaps with Marketing and PR and therefor Zonker is a regular guest in our meetings but some other folks as well join once in a while our meetings to clarify things or give us advise.

Presence on mailing lists and IRC
We try to be visible in general around the openSUSE project, be it on ml, in IRC in the forums or at other places. The Board always can be reached through board@opensuse.org and we try to answer as soon as possible.

Drive certain topics
The openSUSE Board or a Board member who volunteered normally drive certain topics, eg. the next openSUSE Board election or the Governance discussion. Depending on the topic but its realistic that a topic owner needs to spend 1-2 hours per week additional on such topics.

The topics above are the current main tasks but this may change as we’re are a living project. The membership approval for example we think to “outsource” to a group of people doing that because a) it has a slight conflict of interest as the Board is approving exactly the group which is allowed to vote for future Boards and b) to save the Board’s time as this is really time consuming. I assume an openSUSE Board member needs 2-4 hours in average per week to address his Board duties accordingly.

So get your openSUSE membership now if you’d like to vote and/or step up to announce you’re running for election on opensuse-project. With this election we elect 3 seats. 2 seats for re-election and 1 new seat. We’re looking for non-Novell and Novell people and will have after the election a balanced ratio of 3:3 of Novell and non-Novell community members. Have a look at the candidates and think about adding yourself to run for a seat.

Have a lot of fun!

The openSUSE 11.2 launch is over, but there’s still plenty to be done to promote openSUSE 11.2 and spread the word. One of the ways to get the word out is through social and traditional media — the openSUSE main Web page, openSUSE News, Lizards, Twitter, Facebook, and the myriad of publications outside the openSUSE.org domain that cover Linux, open source, or technology in general.

To make serious headway here, we need a coordinated effort — just like we had with the openSUSE 11.2 launch.

What we need:

• openSUSE teams to coordinate with the marketing team ahead of time with things they’d like publicized. Major updates, openSUSE spins, events, etc. The marketing team should support these efforts with updates to the main site, openSUSE News, and helping to get the word out with press across the Web.
• Marketing team members to step up and write copy. This is a great job for openSUSE ambassadors and marketing team members to step up and help support the project.
• A coordinated schedule so we have project members working on the same “messages” at the same time.

As a start, we have an editorial calendar on the wiki that we can use to coordinate. Right now I’ve just put in some sample material, but it’d be great to expand this with plans for the next five to six months and get the marketing team moving on this. If you’re looking for something to do to help with openSUSE – look no further!’

We can also work with the editorial calendar to plan out the social media pushes as well. Questions? Ask on the opensuse-marketing mailing list.

Ever wanted to know what the openSUSE Board is up to? Have you always wondered what the Board discusses and how it comes to decisions? Are you interested in how your elected representatives work with each other? Maybe you are even interested in running for a seat in the elections and want to know what duties that would bring with it?

Don’t look any further. The openSUSE Board has decided to open up its bi-weekly IRC meeting to the public. The meeting will be held in the #opensuse-project channel on freenode.net. The openSUSE Board will meet after each openSUSE Project meeting, every other Wednesday, to discuss topics concerning the project. This includes governance issues, strategy for the project, and membership requests.

The openSUSE Members have tasked the board to lead the project and to facilitate the decision making around these issues. And members have also asked us to hold meetings publicly so there’s more visibility on how the board works. To allow the board to get through a busy agenda, the channel will be in moderated mode during the meeting. This means that anyone can see what the board is discussing, but questions and comments will be held until the question and answer period at the end of each meeting. The board will continue to invite people to discuss or present when it’s relevant to the topics being discussed.

The next open board meeting for you to participate in will take place at

Wednesday 2009/11/18 19:00 UTC

Be there!

Ho Ho Ho!

Were you a very good Member this year? Only 49 days until Santa is coming to town.

You know whats better? 3 and a half days before that we will have the results of the openSUSE Board elections! But to actually get results all the cool, good looking and smart (pick any one) openSUSE Members have to vote for the candidates. If you already have applied as a Member in the past and got rejected we would like to strongly suggest to re-apply. Just because your contributions weren’t enough the last time it has to be true this time right? We have recently added the possibility to re-apply in users.opensuse.org, so just click on the “Reapply for membership” link.

If you did not apply for an openSUSE membership yet, simply head over to users.openSUSE.org, login, and then go to your profile page and select the “I want to Become a Member” link, and there mention your contributions.  Once you are accepted as a Member you will receive an @opensuse.org email address, can cloak your freenode.net IRC nick with the opensuse/membber cloak and Planet SUSE wil syndicate your blog which you can start directly at Lizards.openSUSE.org. But most importantly you can vote in the upcoming  ballot which will start December 8th, 2009. So…

Update:

From well informed circles we just gathered that shortly there will be a piece on the Member Application process on this very blog! So stay tuned for more.

The openSUSE Board elections are right around the corner.We’re in “phase 0″ right now, so you have four weeks from October 26th to declare candidacy if you’re running, and four weeks to get those membership applications in to vote. (If you’re already a member, you’re good, of course.)

Phase 0 closes on November 23rd, then we have a two-week campaign period for candidates, followed by a voting period from December 8 through December 22nd.

The last year has been pretty formative for the openSUSE Project. A lot has happened, and we’ve seen areas where our governance needs to be improved and streamlined. The next year is going to be really important for the board, and we need some really committed openSUSE contributors to step up. The existing board has done a great job so far, but there’s a lot more to do.

In case it hasn’t gotten enough attention — we will have a sixth seat on the board next year. This will be held by a community member. This means that the seats are balanced between community and Novell employees, yet another step to ensure that openSUSE contributors outside Novell have a strong voice in the direction of the project.

Questions? Contact the election committee at election-officials@opensuse.org. Thanks to the committee for running with this, and may the best community members win!

ZDNet’s Jason Perlow takes an early look at openSUSE 11.2, and finds it quite good:

openSUSE’s implementation of KDE 4.3 finally gives the Open Source and Linux community something to brag about from a UI technology perspective, and in many ways I feel it is superior to both Windows 7, in both the underpinning technology and from a usability standpoint. It is also at least at parity in terms of object oriented technology with Mac OS X, and Qt 4’s cross-platform nature may actually give KDE an edge over Mac’s Cocoa. KDE 4.3 is pretty and functional, proving that Open Source advocates that choose a Linux OS for their desktop can have their cake, eat it as well as flaunt it.

He also has a few comments about the security settings affecting use of Samba on first install, but overall — looks good.

He also has a screencast of openSUSE 11.2 with KDE 4.3, which is well worth a look if you haven’t already installed M8. (But of course you have, right?)

Has it really been a week since the openSUSE conference kicked off? The time passed far too quickly!

Since I didn’t have a chance to participate in the “what I learned” lightning talks, I thought I’d write a few thoughts down on my blog. I’ve taken a few days to reflect on the conference while I was attending the Linux Foundation’s initial LinuxCon (more on that later).

As with any major event, I’m feeling glad that it’s behind me and it appears to have been quite successful. I’m also a bit sad that it was over so quickly and I didn’t have quite as much time as I wanted to talk to many of the contributors who attended. Of course, with more than 200 kick-ass people at the conference, it was impossible to spend much time with every openSUSE contributor I wanted to talk to in greater depth.

It was fantastic to meet so many people in person for the first time. Putting faces to names (or IRC nicks) was a lot of fun. Funny how people so rarely match up with the mental picture you form of them over a network connection!

No Network

The only consistent complaint I’ve heard about the conference was the lack of WiFi. We knew that would be missed, but unfortunately the choices were either no network or a very crappy network. We opted for no network so that the speakers could still have a wired connection for their presentations, if necessary, and a “email garden” where a limited number of connections were available.

I know that there’s quite a lot of withdrawl for contributors when they’re separated from email and so forth — and some sessions benefit from connectivity. However, in general, I think that the lack of network was additive to the conference rather than a problem. Seriously, it forced everyone at the conference to mix and talk to one another and give primary attention to the presentations and the people at the conf.

Over the last ten years, I’ve attended more conferences than I care to count. It’s been my experience that the better the network, the more likely it is you lose attention to whatever is on the other side of the network — be it Twitter, email, IRC, or whatever. Yes, it’s inconveient to be disconnected. But you don’t fly across the planet to do email — you go to meet with folks face to face.

To sum up: I think the advantages of focusing attention outweighed the problems associated with no WiFi network. Next time we do this we’ll probably have better acccess to a faster and more robust network. We need to think hard whether we want to utilize it, though.

Format

I think there was some skepticism around the BarCamp/unconference format prior to the conference, but it looks like the format proved very effective. For the most part, the unconf sessions and BoFs were booked solid and seemed to be very productive.

I wish I could have stayed Sunday for the lightning talks. I’ve seen the photos of the talks, but I would liked to have been there to see how well they went over.

The keynotes seemed to be well received, so we should probably look at doing something similar next time around. Maybe we should add more keynote slots? I’d love to hear suggestions for future keynotes.

Thanks!

The openSUSE Conference couldn’t have happened without a lot of hard work and planning. I’ve been involved in planning conferences before, but not as directly as this. I learned a lot in the process, which is to say that I had many assuptions about planning a conference that were corrected during the process of putting on the openSUSE Conference.

I’d like to thank (in no particular order) Michael Löffler, Alexia Henrie, Jacqueline Junghanns, Ulrike Beringer, Robert Lihm, Karl Cheney, Henne Vogelsang, Jan Blunck, the openSUSE Board and everyone else who volunteered their time and effort in organizing the conference. Each of you brought a great deal of energy, talent, and enthusiasm to this endeavor and it’s hard to overstate how important your contributions were to the project in general and the conference in particular.

I’d also like to thank our sponsors, B1 Systems, Linux Magazin, Aeroaccess, and (of course) Novell.

Finally, I’d like to thank all of the contributors who not only showed up, but jumped in with both feet and participated while having a lot of fun. Without you, none of the planning and organization would have made a difference. It was a distinct pleasure seeing so many openSUSE contributors together and getting to know one another. I have no doubt that we should do it again and again. Speaking of which…

Next Year

We don’t have an exact date for the next conference, but the current plan is to co-locate the next openSUSE Conference (we still need a snappier name!) alongside Brainshare Europe in May, 2010. We will publish additional details as soon as we have them.

And, of course, we’ll continue to attend and participate in other events like FOSDEM, LinuxTag, SCALE, and other important FOSS events.

The openSUSE Conference kicked off yesterday in Nuremberg. We had more than 150 people in attendance the first day, with Lenz Grimmer’s keynote on “Working in a virtual community” kicking things off.

Aside from the lack of network at the venue (something that, unfortunately, simply couldn’t be helped) things have been going amazingly well. Actually, the lack of network may have been a benefit in some cases because people have actually been talking to each other rather than just staring into their computers. But it’s also a challenge for some of the unconference sessions and so on, so we’ll be sure that the next event will have a rock-solid and beefy network.

Thursday was fantastic, we had great sessions and tons of great conversations. It’s been fun to meet community members I haven’t yet had a chance to meet in person, and catch up with all the contributors who’re attending. Thursday night’s party, pulled together by Henne and others, and sponsored by B1, was a blast. Great food (though a little less than we expected) and drinks (plenty), and fun. Thankfully, no dancing, but a great deal of fun.

Really impressed by the folks who’ve turned up — we have a great mix of Novell employees and community contributors, and the conversations and sessions have been very productive. It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you get people face to face.

Today, for example, we had an excellent session on openSUSE governance with stakeholders from pretty much every aspect of the project: Novell developers paid to work on openSUSE, developers paid to work on SUSE Linux Enterprise who have an interest in openSUSE, members of the openSUSE community, and the board. Note that nothing final was decided in the meeting so community members who were unable to attend the conference will have the opportunity to weigh in later.We took two hours to talk through some of the recent decisions and how decisions are made with the openSUSE Project, and how things should be done.

We have several tracks at the conference — two tracks of pre-planned discussions, two rooms for the “unconference” which have been consistently lively and full, and the “hallway” track. More on those later, but I wanted to say — if you haven’t made it over to the conference yet, you’re missing out. We still have two days of awesome and room for more.

Tomorrow we have the Open Day track, in German, for Software Freedom Day — new users more than welcome! Tell your friends, your family, even your enemies if they need to learn Linux.

It has been a year since the first-ever elections where the community voted in a new openSUSE Board. Replacing the bootstrap board selected by Novell, the Community elected, as its representatives, non-Novell employees Pascal Bleser and Bryen Yunashko and Novell employees Federico Mena-Quintero and Henne Vogelsang. In May, due to overwhelming work responsibilities, Federico stepped down and runner-up Stephen Shaw assumed his position. Michael Loeffler was appointed by Novell as Chairperson of the Board.

As agreed upon, prior to last year’s elections, the highest vote-getters in both Novell and non-Novell positions would assume a two-year term, and the second vote-getters would get a one-year term. This was a one-time arrangement, with the intention of ensuring there would be an election every year for half the electable board positions. As such, we will be holding elections again this year. All winners this year and subsequent elections will have a two-year term.

The Board has several announcements to make regarding the upcoming elections.

• The Board has recently agreed that as our community continues to grow, it is important that the diversity of voices of our community needs to be adequately represented and heard during Board discussions.  As such, we are adding a new elected non-Novell position to the Board, effective immediately with the next election. This position will also be for a two-year term. The new Board makeup will be two Novell employees, three non-Novell employees, and a Chairperson selected by Novell. The Board grows from 5 seats to 6 seats.

• As the number of openSUSE members has seen a strong increase over the last 12 months we won’t have the “Nomination of second voters” again.

• We are proud to see some returning members of last year’s Election Committee along with some newcomers. New members Kevin Dupuy, Sascha Manns, and Thomas Schmidt join returning members Claes Backstrom and Andrew Wafaa.

• The Election Committee has begun initial discussions and will make their own announcement in the near future regarding campaign guidelines and timelines.  With this, effectively all discussions, planning and announcements pertaining to the election will be handled by the Committee and the Board steps out of further election discussions.

At this time, the Board would like to remind you that only Members of the openSUSE Community are eligible to vote in the upcoming election. If you are not currently a member and have actively participated in the Project as a developer, packager, tester, advocate, evangelist, or some other form of active participation, we urge you to apply for membership at users.opensuse.org before the Election Committee’s announced deadline for application.

See you all in Nuremberg for the openSUSE Conference this week!

The SCALE folks are looking for a few good speakers. The 8th annual So Cal Linux Expo (SCALE) will be held in Los Angeles on February 19th through 21st, 2010. Once again, SCALE will be held at the Westin LAX, which is just minutes away from the airport.

If you’re thinking about speaking at SCALE, check out the Call for Papers here and be sure to submit your proposal by the deadline: December 15th.

We’re also going to be looking for local ambassadors to help run the openSUSE Booth at SCALE. If you’re interested, drop me an email or speak up on the openSUSE Marketing mailing list.