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…

The SCALE folks are looking for a few good speakers. The 8th annual So Cal Linux Expo (SCALE) will be held in Los Angeles on February 19th through 21st, 2010. Once again, SCALE will be held at the Westin LAX, which is just minutes away from the airport.

If you’re thinking about speaking at SCALE, check out the Call for Papers here and be sure to submit your proposal by the deadline: December 15th.

We’re also going to be looking for local ambassadors to help run the openSUSE Booth at SCALE. If you’re interested, drop me an email or speak up on the openSUSE Marketing mailing list.

The openSUSE Board is pleased to announce a number of new openSUSE members and we reached currently 330 openSUSE members. See the list below or just browse the membership list for more details. We’re happy that we accomplished another round of approvals and want encourage everybody who shows continued and substantial contribution to the openSUSE project to apply for membership. Please note that contribution can be made in any areas of the project like bug reporting and triaging, translation, user support on any communication medium, promoting openSUSE by giving openSUSE talks and presentations, coding and packaging and others. Apart of an @opensuse.org email address and other benefits all openSUSE members are eligible to vote for Board seats and we’ll have 2 Board seats running for re-election in October ‘09.

How to become a member? See here for details.

The openSUSE Board wants to thank all people contributing to openSUSE and helping to make the openSUSE project more community driven from day to day.

List of new members

Andreas Ernst (aeps)
Axel Braun (docb)
Carolina Acevedo (caro_acevedo)
Chuck Payne (terrorpup)
crane cai (cranecai)
David Haller (dnh)
Dominik Heidler (dheidler)
edy purwanto (edypurwanto)
Fred Blaise (chapeaurouge)
Glenn Doig (doiggl)
Greg Freemyer (gregfreemyer)
Grozdan Nikolov (microchip8)
James Willcox (snorp)
Jan Karjalainen (jankarjalainen)
Jason Ferrer (jetchisel)
jean-christophe baptiste (phocean)
Karsten Keil (kkeil)
Luis Lastra (llastra)
mao huanxue (vsu)
Marco Mendoza (secomlinux)
Michal Hrusecky (-miska-)
Michal Seben (mseben)
Michal Svec (msvec)
Olli Tuominen (otuominen)
Rainer Sigl (SiglRainer)
Rajesh Ganesan (ganesanrajesh)
Raymond Wooninck (rwooninck)
Rasmus Plewe (rasmusplewe)
Robert Schweikert (rjschwei)
Sid Boyce (sboyce)
Siegfried Olschner (sdolschn)
Stanislav Brabec (sbrabec)
Stephan Kleine (bitshuffler)
Stephen Holmes (stephen_holmes)
Suresh Jayaraman (sjayaraman)
Vittorio Manfredini (vitsoft)

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.