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.

As you may have already read on news.opensuse.org (thanks, AJ, for the warm welcome!) or elsewhere, I’ve just joined Novell as the openSUSE community manager. I’m really jazzed about joining Novell and the openSUSE team, and excited to be getting started. I’d like to start off by saying a big thanks to AJ, Martin Lasarsch, Michael Loeffler, and Justin Steinman and other openSUSE and Novell folks for the information and help they’ve provided leading up to today. It’s already a group I feel comfortable with and look forward to working with.

Next, I’d like to talk about what this position will entail, and what I hope to accomplish over the short and long term. First, my main priority will be to serve as the openSUSE community’s advocate with Novell and make sure that it has what it needs to make openSUSE the best distro available. I think Max Spevack from Red Hat has done a great job along these lines, helping to transition Fedora into a much more community driven project than it was when it was originally split off from Red Hat Linux, and I’d like to take some cues from his work and apply them to openSUSE. I’ve had the opportunity to speak to many of Novell’s executive team, Ron Hovsepian, John Dragoon, Roger Levy, and Jeff Jaffe, and I think that Novell is seriously committed to making openSUSE a more independent and community driven project.

When I talk about the openSUSE community, I mean all of those involved in some way with openSUSE — the users (and potential users), the openSUSE contributors, and the upstream developers who work on projects that are part of openSUSE.

I’ll be attending a lot of conferences and meeting with the community in order to best get feedback from users and developers (SCALE and FOSDEM are the first two shows on my list) but I also would encourage you to send me an email and/or leave comments on my blog if you have thoughts about what openSUSE needs, or how to make it better — or what we’re doing right, so we know to keep doing it! I’ll also be meeting with the openSUSE board and developers to formulate a plan for world domination, er, growth and improvement.

I’m also going to be focusing my attention on getting the word out about openSUSE to more potential users, and trying to bring in more new users to openSUSE Linux. And by “new users,” I don’t mean people switching from another Linux distro — if someone is using another distro and is happy with Linux, that’s great. I want to reach the masses of Windows users who are looking for a better computing platform, and find ways to address their needs with Linux.

But, I think openSUSE has enormous potential, as a distro and as a community — so I want to make sure that we live up to that potential and give everyone a chance to use and contribute to openSUSE. I’m looking forward to getting started.