Please see below the Meeting Minutes of the openSUSE Board. We welcome any feedback and recommend to use the opensuse-project mailing list so more people can participate. As always the openSUSE Board is reachable through board@openSUSE.org

June 3, 7-9:15pm UTC
Participants:
Stephen Shaw, (decriptor)
Federico Mena Quintero, (federico1)
Hendrik Vogelsang, (henne)
Michael Löffler, (michl)
Bryen Yunashko, (suseROCKs)
Pascal Bleser, (yaloki)
Joe Brockmeier, (zonker)

List of topics:
* Ambassador program
Announced and already pretty many people signed in for it.

* Foundation
Zonker and michl will meeting with a Novell expert on such stuff on Monday June 9 to evaluate which possibilities we have and which way openSUSE should take.

* Membership requests
We are too lame, 15 requests out of the last round are waiting for more than 4 weeks for final approval now. Just another 70 requests were imported into the tool today.

* open openSUSE Factory for contribution
Henne drove this project inside Novell for a while now and we had at the Board several discussions around it. Meanwhile it is announced and is an important step to bring the whole project ahead.

* openSUSE Board presence at the openSUSE conference
There need to be a strong Board presence but in a very interactive way so no big presentation but rather round table conversations about the status of the project and its future.

* read and write access to news.openSUSE.org?
The Board suggest to extend the group of people with read and write access for news.opensuse.org. Anyone interested please send a mail to board@opensuse.org and as for write access or even suggest another person to get it. Approval body will be the openSUSE Board.

* Federico resigned due to work over load, Stephen Shaw (decriptor) is the uprunner and takes over his seat

The Kablink team has released 2.0 of the Kablink teaming platform.This release includes an updated user interface, advanced workflow features, an “expertise locator,” and tools for users to define what is (and isn’t) relevant to them.

What is Kablink? Kablink is an open source collaboration platform that is the foundation of Novell’s Teaming + Conferencing products. It’s a “total” collaboration tool that integrates blogs, wikis, forums, document sharing, and workflow features for teams that need an integrated collaboration platform rather than a piecemeal set of collaboration tools that only solve part of the collaboration puzzle.

The 2.0 release is ready for download — you’ll find a Linux installer, a VMware image, and Windows installer (if you insist) on the Kablink Web site.

Questions about Kablink? Touch base with Brent McConnell, who’s the community manager for Kablink and the ever-popular iFolder.

LinuxTag is going well so far, but tomorrow will be the big day! The openSUSE Day takes place tomorrow (Saturday, June 27th) at LinuxTag, and we have a full track of excellent talks that will be of interest to new users as well as openSUSE contributors and users.

openSUSE Day kicks off at 10:00 a.m. (a completely reasonable and sane time, plenty of time to grab breakfast and coffee even if you’ve been to social events the evening before!) with a break for the LinuxTag keynotes between 13:00 and 15:00. Here’s the rest of the schedule:

• 10:00 - 10:30: openSUSE Day Introduction — Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier
• 10:30 - 11:00: Easy-LTSP - Configure an openSUSE LTSP server easily - Jan Weber
• 11:00 - 12:00: Was ist neu in openSUSE 11.2? - Andreas Jaeger
• 12:00 - 13:00: Do it Yourself: openSUSE Home Theater PC - Henne Vogelsang
• 13:00 - 15:00: Break for keynote
• 15:00 - 16:00: Wine - Windows Applikation und Spiele für Linux - Marcus Meissner
• 16:00 - 16:30: Warum mein WLAN nicht funktioniert? - Helmut Schaa
• 16:30 - 17:00: AppArmor in der Praxis - Christian Boltz
• 17:00 - 18:00: SUSE Studio: Maßgeschneidertes Linux für Jedermann - Cornelius Schumacher

If you’re in or around Berlin, you don’t want to miss it!

As you know, Federico Mena-Quintero has ceded his seat on the openSUSE Board. We are all sad to see him go, but know we are grateful for his continued and ongoing contributions to the openSUSE Project.
The openSUSE Board is happy to announce Stephen Shaw (decriptor) to be a new openSUSE Board Member filling up the vacant seat after Federico’s resignation. We thank Stephen that he took up the position in such a quick and decent manner. We know Stephen for a long time and think he is a perfect fit due to his long term contribution and activities around the openSUSE community.
Stephen as of last years elections was the runner-up to Federico’s seat. He takes Federico’s seat and this seat is due for re-election this year in November.
Please join us in welcoming Stephen to the Board.  We look forward to his fresh ideas and contributions as we gear up for openSUSE Summit this coming September 17-20 in Nuremberg, Germany.

Sincerely,
Michael Loeffler
openSUSE Board Chairman

We need an openSUSE Ambassador to rock the Central Pennsylvania Open Source Conference (CPOSC) in October! CPOSC is a small, one-day event about “all things open source” to be held on October 17, 2009 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

CPOSC organizers are looking for openSUSE contributors to speak at the event, so if you’re local to the area — please do put in a speaking proposal. The CFP is open through July 10th.We’re looking for openSUSE enthusiasts to spread the word at CPOSC, so be sure to sign up if you’re nearby.

If you need help prepping a talk about openSUSE, ask on the openSUSE Marketing mailing list — plenty of people on the marketing list would be happy to help proof and help develop the talk. If you need more info on CPOSC, ping the organizers or drop me a line and I’ll put you in touch.

Please see below the Meeting Minutes of the openSUSE Board. We welcome any feedback and recommend to use the opensuse-project mailing list so more people can participate. As always the openSUSE Board is reachable through board@openSUSE.org

May 20, 7-9pm UTC
Participants:
Michael Löffler, (michl)
Bryen Yunashko , (suseROCKs)
Pascal Bleser , (yaloki)

List of topics:

• Foundation
  We’ll investigate more into the creation of an openSUSE foundation. We reached out already to Novell how they feel about and received positive feedback. The foundation at the beginning should be a more independent body then openSUSE is today and should make it easier to collect donations in a transparent way to use directly for community efforts.
• Expanse spotlight.o.o to Board Members
  All openSUSE Board members will have access to spotlight.opensuse.org to post/blog there.
• openSUSE Membership requests
  The membership requests still are a pretty manual process. We imported out of users.opensuse.org another bunch of requests and are in the process of evaluation. But we need to admit we could have been faster with that.
• Status of “ambassador program”
  The Ambassador program will be announced soon by zonker (meanwhile happened)
• Add features to openFATE without being member?
  During community week the request was stated several times to make it possible to add new features for non-members as well. We had a discussion about it and the Board recommends to make this request happen as we think there are more up then down sides. See also Feature 306460

Next openSUSE Board Meeting on June 3, 7pm UTC

Some pretty good news for the ZYpp team! Ark Linux after some evaluation has choosen to use zypper with their next release.

A quick reminder, if you’re interested in leading a session, track, birds of a feather, etc. — you should submit a proposal by end of day* May 20th using the form here.Read more about the CFP here.

A large part of the conference will be in “unconference” format — meaning that contributors attending the Conference will have the chance to set the agenda for much of the time, and discuss and work on topics of greatest interest. (Rather than sitting around watching someone give a presentation the entire time!)

A couple of folks have asked “why do you ask for my phone number and/or mailing address?” Generally speaking, we may not need these but it’s not uncommon to need to get in touch with a presenter or track leader quickly, especially right before a conference. We’d also like to have snail mail addresses in case we need/want to send something to you that doesn’t travel over TCP/IP. You will not be spammed or telemarketed to.

Have questions about the Conference? Drop me an email at zonker@opensuse.org.

*There is a bit of leeway here, so don’t worry if “end of day” in your time zone is later than end of day in Europe or North America.

A friend of mine sent me a note about Jeff Shantz’s post on his initial impression of the openSUSE Project thanks to a couple of helpful responses:

it certainly struck me that these replies that I received were illustrative of a working, functional open source community — the end goal is to improve the product, and if one person doesn’t have time to continue working on a particular piece, then maybe someone else can. No territorial markings or egotism. Just one common goal to get it done.

So thanks to both Daniel and Jan (and my mentor, Marek Stopka, of course!) for a good initial experience in the openSUSE community! I look forward to making many future contributions.

Of course, for every person who is willing to put their neck out and blog about a good (or bad) experience, there are hundreds or thousands who don’t bother.

But please keep this in mind when interacting on the mailing lists. A positive, helpful response can make all the difference. We need to be doing our best to help new users and contributors, rather than spraying (as Karsten Wade often says) “community repellent” on potential contributors and users.

So, as Jeff says - thanks to Jan Weber and J. Daniel Schmidt. Glad to see this sort of attention being focused on openSUSE contributors.

In case you missed it, we’ve put out the openSUSE Summit Call for Participation here.

This is the chance for contributors to get up and lead on the topics that are near and dear to their hearts. Note that’s contributors and not only developers (though, of course, developers are very welcome!). Whether you contribute as a translator, wiki editor, packager, developer, member of the marketing team, etc., this is for all openSUSE contributors.

The summit is not going to be composed exclusively of presentations and such. Much of the summit will consist of workshops, birds of a feather, hack sessions, and other hands-on participatory sessions. So come prepared to give a lot of input and have a lot of fun!

Deadline is May 20th. Get those proposals in!