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!