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.