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!

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.

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!

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)

We need an openSUSE Ambassador to rock the Central Pennsylvania Open Source Conference (CPOSC) in October! CPOSC is a small, one-day event about “all things open source” to be held on October 17, 2009 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

CPOSC organizers are looking for openSUSE contributors to speak at the event, so if you’re local to the area — please do put in a speaking proposal. The CFP is open through July 10th.We’re looking for openSUSE enthusiasts to spread the word at CPOSC, so be sure to sign up if you’re nearby.

If you need help prepping a talk about openSUSE, ask on the openSUSE Marketing mailing list — plenty of people on the marketing list would be happy to help proof and help develop the talk. If you need more info on CPOSC, ping the organizers or drop me a line and I’ll put you in touch.

A quick reminder, if you’re interested in leading a session, track, birds of a feather, etc. — you should submit a proposal by end of day* May 20th using the form here.Read more about the CFP here.

A large part of the conference will be in “unconference” format — meaning that contributors attending the Conference will have the chance to set the agenda for much of the time, and discuss and work on topics of greatest interest. (Rather than sitting around watching someone give a presentation the entire time!)

A couple of folks have asked “why do you ask for my phone number and/or mailing address?” Generally speaking, we may not need these but it’s not uncommon to need to get in touch with a presenter or track leader quickly, especially right before a conference. We’d also like to have snail mail addresses in case we need/want to send something to you that doesn’t travel over TCP/IP. You will not be spammed or telemarketed to.

Have questions about the Conference? Drop me an email at zonker@opensuse.org.

*There is a bit of leeway here, so don’t worry if “end of day” in your time zone is later than end of day in Europe or North America.

Today we announced (officially) that iFolder code has been pushed out and we have a new iFolder Web site.

So, you can grab the source code from SourceForge immediately. We’re working on packages for openSUSE 11.0 and 11.1, and there’s work being done to put iFolder into the openSUSE Build Service as well.

Of course, there’s lots to be done. The new iFolder site needs some love, and we’re working on getting iFolder into the openSUSE Build Service, packaged for openSUSE 11.0 and 11.1 (and later) and generally turning it into a kick-ass project.

I’ve already seen quite a bit of enthusiasm about the code release and the #ifolder channel on Freenode has been relatively lively.

This time around, we really want to make sure iFolder is a collaborative, community effort. Brent McConnell will be heading up the community efforts with iFolder, so he’s a good person to get to know. If you run into roadblocks, email me and Brent and let us know.

Time is slipping away: If you’re interested in applying for the Google Summer of Code as a student (for openSUSE or any other project) you have a bit more than 73 hours — time runs out on Friday, April 3rd at 19:00 UTC.

Announcement for openSUSE here. If you have questions, please ask on the opensuse-project mailing list, or in IRC in the #opensuse-project or #opensuse-gsoc channels on Freenode. If you have general SoC questions, you can also ask in the #gsoc channel. Email me if you have additional questions, but asking on -project is probably the best way to go.

A lot of good feedback so far on the newly minted trademark policy. Thanks to all the community folks who’ve responded so far and made comments.

As we mentioned when the guidelines were announced, we expect to revise the guidelines after seeing what sorts of uses people want to make of the marks and find out what needs to change.

I’ve put up the guidelines on the wiki here and added another page here to start work on the next iteration of the guidelines.

We’ve also started a page here to outline areas where the guidelines are either unclear, too restrictive, not restrictive enough, or cases where we should have a registered trademark and we don’t.  If you’re interested in revising the policy, feel free to head over to the wiki and provide your input! (Feel free to discuss in the comments or on the mailing lists, but we can’t promise that all input not on the wiki will be considered.)

With the openSUSE launch last week, I spent quite a bit of time talking to press — either on the phone, via e-mail, and on IM — about openSUSE 11.1.

In 2009, I hope that many members of the openSUSE community will have opportunities to speak to press at one point or another, in order to promote and educate about the work that’s being done within openSUSE. I can give high-level overviews of features and trends in the community, but no one is going to explain the importance of work on specific projects as well as the people who actually do the work. So don’t be surprised if you get an email from me or someone in Novell PR saying “hey, can you talk to somebody about your work…?”

Since I’ve been on both sides of the fence (interviewer and interviewee), I’d like to give a few suggestions for talking to press if the opportunity presents itself:

• Be expansive — I’ve noticed that many developers give fairly terse answers, up to and including responses like “you can see what’s new in the release notes.” While technically accurate, it’s not what reporters and journalists (or their editors and readers) are looking for. Take the opportunity to explain the features and how they benefit their intended audience. If you wonder why some projects get better press than others, one reason is that the projects in question understand how to work with press and give them material to work with.I can’t stress this one enough. When a door is opened and you have the opportunity to talk about the good work that’s being done, take it. Give some detail, and show enthusiasm.Responding to questions is sort of like creating a useful bug report. Saying “it doesn’t work” gives the developer little to work with. Saying “look at the release notes” gives the reporter little to work with.

• Be responsive — if you say you’re going to respond by a certain day or time, do so. If you can’t, try to pass the request on to someone who can respond in a timely fashion. (Which is one good reason to involve PR – part of their job is to find the right person to respond and shepherd the response through in time to meet the reporter’s deadline.)
• Be polite — the standard of communication between developers is, let’s face it, fairly blunt. Successful interactions with the press need to be diplomatic. If an article gets a fact wrong, a polite correction is OK – a flame isn’t. The adage about not picking fights with people who buy ink by the barrel still applies, even when there’s no actual ink involved.If it helps, try to remember that press are not generally able to be experts on all thing they cover. (This goes back to rule 1 – be expansive…) Most reporters genuinely try to get the facts right, and when they don’t will welcome polite corrections.
• Be on message – as a reporter, I hated talking to executives who’ve gone through media training and think that a good interview practice is to parrot the same responses to every question in order to “stay on message.” I don’t recommend that.However, I do recommend thinking about what you are trying to accomplish by participating in an interview. If you want to highlight XYZ features in the latest release of a project, make sure you get that message across.Do not feel obligated to stick with the original premise of a question. If a reporter gives you something like “Well, lots of people say that project ABC is better at blah than your project, why is that?” Reframe the question, and don’t give a quote that reinforces a position you don’t agree with. (I get a lot of questions trying to position openSUSE as a competitor to Fedora, for instance, rather than as a competitor to Windows. I won’t go down that path. While I’m happy to talk about what makes openSUSE unique and interesting, the goal is not to win users away from Fedora, it’s to spread Linux to users stuck on proprietary platforms like Windows.)

  Also remember, you should never feel obligated to answer all of a reporter’s questions. A “that’s not my area,” or the like is perfectly acceptable.

• Be careful – remember that when you’re talking to press about a story, everything you say is “on the record,” and don’t count on information being offered “off the record” staying that way.I’m not saying that many reporters will purposefully report information offered off the record (though some will), I’m saying that all reporters are human and subject to mistakes. Information that’s not offered can’t be reported. And don’t confirm “rumors” and such — sometimes a smart reporter will take a shot and luck into getting someone to confirm it.
• Be the media – don’t wait for press to come knocking at your door. If you’re working on projects that you can talk about, do so. Early and often. Blog and use social media (Twitter, Identi.ca, Facebook, etc.) to mention your work, hitting milestones, any hurdles that the community could help with. Join the openSUSE-marketing mailing list / team if you’re working on a project that could benefit from publicity and ask for some assistance in publicizing. (Remember, of course, that as blogs are often quoted by IT press, you shouldn’t say anything on your blog you don’t want to see on the front page of Slashdot or Digg…)

I can’t overstress that last bit. It’s easier than ever to get the word out about open source projects, and taking the time to blog and so forth about work being done on projects can pay off big time.