If I needed any affirmation that I’d made the right choice in joining Novell and the openSUSE team, I got it yesterday, in bulk. I got a ton of “welcome aboard” notes via IRC, IM, email, blog posts, and blog comments from Novell employees and openSUSE contributors and users wishing me good luck on the job — and, in many cases, asking when I’d be in [insert location here] so that we could meet face to face. I find it interesting, and reassuring, that even in a “virtual” community there’s a strong preference for meeting face to face.

The good news on that front is that I’ll be at SCALE this weekend, at FOSDEM ‘08 the 23rd and 24th, and visiting several Novell offices between now and the big Novell event, BrainShare. (And plenty more travel to come in 2008. Those are just the events on my immediate radar.) If you’re at one or more of these events, please come look for me — I’ll be at the openSUSE booth or wandering the show floor.

Thanks very much for all the support. It’s great to be welcomed so openly and graciously, and I hope that we will extend the same sort of enthusiasm to each new member of the openSUSE community. One of my major goals for this year is to help grow the openSUSE community by attracting more users and contributors. If new users and contributors are all greeted this warmly by the community members they encounter, I’m sure that it won’t be difficult at all to grow the community by leaps and bounds.

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