The openSUSE Board elections are right around the corner.We’re in “phase 0″ right now, so you have four weeks from October 26th to declare candidacy if you’re running, and four weeks to get those membership applications in to vote. (If you’re already a member, you’re good, of course.)

Phase 0 closes on November 23rd, then we have a two-week campaign period for candidates, followed by a voting period from December 8 through December 22nd.

The last year has been pretty formative for the openSUSE Project. A lot has happened, and we’ve seen areas where our governance needs to be improved and streamlined. The next year is going to be really important for the board, and we need some really committed openSUSE contributors to step up. The existing board has done a great job so far, but there’s a lot more to do.

In case it hasn’t gotten enough attention — we will have a sixth seat on the board next year. This will be held by a community member. This means that the seats are balanced between community and Novell employees, yet another step to ensure that openSUSE contributors outside Novell have a strong voice in the direction of the project.

Questions? Contact the election committee at election-officials@opensuse.org. Thanks to the committee for running with this, and may the best community members win!

Has it really been a week since the openSUSE conference kicked off? The time passed far too quickly!

Since I didn’t have a chance to participate in the “what I learned” lightning talks, I thought I’d write a few thoughts down on my blog. I’ve taken a few days to reflect on the conference while I was attending the Linux Foundation’s initial LinuxCon (more on that later).

As with any major event, I’m feeling glad that it’s behind me and it appears to have been quite successful. I’m also a bit sad that it was over so quickly and I didn’t have quite as much time as I wanted to talk to many of the contributors who attended. Of course, with more than 200 kick-ass people at the conference, it was impossible to spend much time with every openSUSE contributor I wanted to talk to in greater depth.

It was fantastic to meet so many people in person for the first time. Putting faces to names (or IRC nicks) was a lot of fun. Funny how people so rarely match up with the mental picture you form of them over a network connection!

No Network

The only consistent complaint I’ve heard about the conference was the lack of WiFi. We knew that would be missed, but unfortunately the choices were either no network or a very crappy network. We opted for no network so that the speakers could still have a wired connection for their presentations, if necessary, and a “email garden” where a limited number of connections were available.

I know that there’s quite a lot of withdrawl for contributors when they’re separated from email and so forth — and some sessions benefit from connectivity. However, in general, I think that the lack of network was additive to the conference rather than a problem. Seriously, it forced everyone at the conference to mix and talk to one another and give primary attention to the presentations and the people at the conf.

Over the last ten years, I’ve attended more conferences than I care to count. It’s been my experience that the better the network, the more likely it is you lose attention to whatever is on the other side of the network — be it Twitter, email, IRC, or whatever. Yes, it’s inconveient to be disconnected. But you don’t fly across the planet to do email — you go to meet with folks face to face.

To sum up: I think the advantages of focusing attention outweighed the problems associated with no WiFi network. Next time we do this we’ll probably have better acccess to a faster and more robust network. We need to think hard whether we want to utilize it, though.

Format

I think there was some skepticism around the BarCamp/unconference format prior to the conference, but it looks like the format proved very effective. For the most part, the unconf sessions and BoFs were booked solid and seemed to be very productive.

I wish I could have stayed Sunday for the lightning talks. I’ve seen the photos of the talks, but I would liked to have been there to see how well they went over.

The keynotes seemed to be well received, so we should probably look at doing something similar next time around. Maybe we should add more keynote slots? I’d love to hear suggestions for future keynotes.

Thanks!

The openSUSE Conference couldn’t have happened without a lot of hard work and planning. I’ve been involved in planning conferences before, but not as directly as this. I learned a lot in the process, which is to say that I had many assuptions about planning a conference that were corrected during the process of putting on the openSUSE Conference.

I’d like to thank (in no particular order) Michael Löffler, Alexia Henrie, Jacqueline Junghanns, Ulrike Beringer, Robert Lihm, Karl Cheney, Henne Vogelsang, Jan Blunck, the openSUSE Board and everyone else who volunteered their time and effort in organizing the conference. Each of you brought a great deal of energy, talent, and enthusiasm to this endeavor and it’s hard to overstate how important your contributions were to the project in general and the conference in particular.

I’d also like to thank our sponsors, B1 Systems, Linux Magazin, Aeroaccess, and (of course) Novell.

Finally, I’d like to thank all of the contributors who not only showed up, but jumped in with both feet and participated while having a lot of fun. Without you, none of the planning and organization would have made a difference. It was a distinct pleasure seeing so many openSUSE contributors together and getting to know one another. I have no doubt that we should do it again and again. Speaking of which…

Next Year

We don’t have an exact date for the next conference, but the current plan is to co-locate the next openSUSE Conference (we still need a snappier name!) alongside Brainshare Europe in May, 2010. We will publish additional details as soon as we have them.

And, of course, we’ll continue to attend and participate in other events like FOSDEM, LinuxTag, SCALE, and other important FOSS events.

The openSUSE Conference kicked off yesterday in Nuremberg. We had more than 150 people in attendance the first day, with Lenz Grimmer’s keynote on “Working in a virtual community” kicking things off.

Aside from the lack of network at the venue (something that, unfortunately, simply couldn’t be helped) things have been going amazingly well. Actually, the lack of network may have been a benefit in some cases because people have actually been talking to each other rather than just staring into their computers. But it’s also a challenge for some of the unconference sessions and so on, so we’ll be sure that the next event will have a rock-solid and beefy network.

Thursday was fantastic, we had great sessions and tons of great conversations. It’s been fun to meet community members I haven’t yet had a chance to meet in person, and catch up with all the contributors who’re attending. Thursday night’s party, pulled together by Henne and others, and sponsored by B1, was a blast. Great food (though a little less than we expected) and drinks (plenty), and fun. Thankfully, no dancing, but a great deal of fun.

Really impressed by the folks who’ve turned up — we have a great mix of Novell employees and community contributors, and the conversations and sessions have been very productive. It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you get people face to face.

Today, for example, we had an excellent session on openSUSE governance with stakeholders from pretty much every aspect of the project: Novell developers paid to work on openSUSE, developers paid to work on SUSE Linux Enterprise who have an interest in openSUSE, members of the openSUSE community, and the board. Note that nothing final was decided in the meeting so community members who were unable to attend the conference will have the opportunity to weigh in later.We took two hours to talk through some of the recent decisions and how decisions are made with the openSUSE Project, and how things should be done.

We have several tracks at the conference — two tracks of pre-planned discussions, two rooms for the “unconference” which have been consistently lively and full, and the “hallway” track. More on those later, but I wanted to say — if you haven’t made it over to the conference yet, you’re missing out. We still have two days of awesome and room for more.

Tomorrow we have the Open Day track, in German, for Software Freedom Day — new users more than welcome! Tell your friends, your family, even your enemies if they need to learn Linux.

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)

Please see below the Meeting Minutes of the openSUSE Board. We welcome any feedback and recommend to use the opensuse-project mailing list so more people can participate. As always the openSUSE Board is reachable through board@openSUSE.org

Board Meeting July 01, 2009
7pm – 8:45 UTC

Participants:
Michael Löffler (michl)
Bryen Yunashko (suseROCKs)
Pascal Bleser (yaloki)
Stephen Shaw (decriptor)
Hendrik Vogelsang (henne)

List of topics:
- membership approval still way to slow as it is a manual process and we don’t have anybody who could enhance users.opensuse.org, This might be a good project for hackweek project.
- Creation of an openSUSE foundation. Work in progress. Was a bit slowed down through vacation and events.
- Ambassador program has had a good start and has lots of enthusiasm and activity.
- Opening of factory – done. Groups are now forming up.
- hack week, Hackweek IV will be held from July 20-27, product in openFATE to be used to get people together

Board Meeting July 14, 2009
7pm – 9:15 UTC

Participants:
same as above

List of topics:
- membership approval, this time the Board members promised to vote, michls proposal to add a third vote automatically where already 2 same votes exist was denied. (side note – the Board delivered on this promise, meanwhile all requests from the last import are worked through, we have around 30 new openSUSE members and the next requests are imported to be worked through)
- openSUSE Foundation, the bylaws are drafted by a Novell employee with strong interaction of zonker and michl, as there were several questions by other Board members about the foundation michl will get Alan with the openSUSE Board in direct contact to answer those questions more efficiently
- some tech talk started by decriptor, baseline most important to have the latest stuff regardless if it adds value to the users – just joking

Next Board Meeting July 27

Please see below the Meeting Minutes of the openSUSE Board. We welcome any feedback and recommend to use the opensuse-project mailing list so more people can participate. As always the openSUSE Board is reachable through board@openSUSE.org

May 20, 7-9pm UTC
Participants:
Michael Löffler, (michl)
Bryen Yunashko , (suseROCKs)
Pascal Bleser , (yaloki)

List of topics:

• Foundation
  We’ll investigate more into the creation of an openSUSE foundation. We reached out already to Novell how they feel about and received positive feedback. The foundation at the beginning should be a more independent body then openSUSE is today and should make it easier to collect donations in a transparent way to use directly for community efforts.
• Expanse spotlight.o.o to Board Members
  All openSUSE Board members will have access to spotlight.opensuse.org to post/blog there.
• openSUSE Membership requests
  The membership requests still are a pretty manual process. We imported out of users.opensuse.org another bunch of requests and are in the process of evaluation. But we need to admit we could have been faster with that.
• Status of “ambassador program”
  The Ambassador program will be announced soon by zonker (meanwhile happened)
• Add features to openFATE without being member?
  During community week the request was stated several times to make it possible to add new features for non-members as well. We had a discussion about it and the Board recommends to make this request happen as we think there are more up then down sides. See also Feature 306460

Next openSUSE Board Meeting on June 3, 7pm UTC

A friend of mine sent me a note about Jeff Shantz’s post on his initial impression of the openSUSE Project thanks to a couple of helpful responses:

it certainly struck me that these replies that I received were illustrative of a working, functional open source community — the end goal is to improve the product, and if one person doesn’t have time to continue working on a particular piece, then maybe someone else can. No territorial markings or egotism. Just one common goal to get it done.

So thanks to both Daniel and Jan (and my mentor, Marek Stopka, of course!) for a good initial experience in the openSUSE community! I look forward to making many future contributions.

Of course, for every person who is willing to put their neck out and blog about a good (or bad) experience, there are hundreds or thousands who don’t bother.

But please keep this in mind when interacting on the mailing lists. A positive, helpful response can make all the difference. We need to be doing our best to help new users and contributors, rather than spraying (as Karsten Wade often says) “community repellent” on potential contributors and users.

So, as Jeff says – thanks to Jan Weber and J. Daniel Schmidt. Glad to see this sort of attention being focused on openSUSE contributors.

In case you missed it, we’ve put out the openSUSE Summit Call for Participation here.

This is the chance for contributors to get up and lead on the topics that are near and dear to their hearts. Note that’s contributors and not only developers (though, of course, developers are very welcome!). Whether you contribute as a translator, wiki editor, packager, developer, member of the marketing team, etc., this is for all openSUSE contributors.

The summit is not going to be composed exclusively of presentations and such. Much of the summit will consist of workshops, birds of a feather, hack sessions, and other hands-on participatory sessions. So come prepared to give a lot of input and have a lot of fun!

Deadline is May 20th. Get those proposals in!

I typically don’t post about Novell enterprise products, but I’m making an exception here because this really affects the larger community and not just the corporate customers.

A few weeks ago, Novell released some videos to demo SUSE Linux Enterprise. The only problem was, they were released without captioning for deaf and hard-of-hearing people. This was due to the rush to finish the videos and release them in time for the launch.

I’m glad to say that this has now been made right, and the videos are available with captioning. Furthermore, in the future I know that Novell will be trying to make sure that videos are released with captioning right away, without any delay.

This is also something that the larger community should take into consideration. If possible, when making tutorials and videos, consider adding closed captioning.

Looking for captioning tools? Jon ‘maddog’ Hall has written a nice piece that discusses this issue over on Linux Pro Magazine:

What finally convinced me was the ease of doing the closed captions. Joner showed me a site where you can easily link to the existing video on various “video” sites, then use overstream to create a file that has the timing marks and the text for your native language. This file is called an “SRT” file. Once you have the marks and closed captioning correct, you can download the file and upload it to places like YouTube by editing your video’s information, clicking on “Captions and Subtitles” and uploading the SRT file.

You can also create another copy of the file, and either you (or a friend) can substitute another language for your native language. Then you have a foreign language subtitle!

Captioning and translation capability in one fell swoop! Can’t beat that.

Most people never have to think about captioning, so it’s one of those things too often overlooked. However, captioning makes a major difference for those who do need it. By going a few extra steps, your message reaches a larger, and grateful, audience.

I’d like to produce some openSUSE reference cards (like these, but a bit more colorful in general).

It’s a no-brainer to include Zypper commands on the card. What else should we find room for on a two-sided reference card? Thoughts:

• YaST Command Line
• openSUSE Build Service commands / interface
• Specific YaST Modules
• General Linux commands

Thoughts? Would like to produce something useful for new openSUSE users as well as openSUSE experts.