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.

Just a quick reminder – when you install openSUSE 11.1, please be sure to run Smolt to send the hardware profile to the Smolt project. I’m looking over on the Smolt Web site and the participation seems to be a bit less than 30% in terms of people who’ve run Smolt vs. people who seem to have installed openSUSE and run an update.

Every bit helps, and the more hardware data the Smolt project has, the better.

You should be prompted to run Smolt the first time you run the updater. If not, you can run Smolt from the command line or run it using “smoltGui” (see the Smolt site for more info).

One of the things that we want to do as a project is to have more community involvement in major decisions, like the release schedule. Right now, we’re discussing the proposed 11.2 release schedule on the openSUSE-Project mailing list. Yes, 11.1 is not out the door yet, and we’re already talking about the 11.2 release.

From Michael’s email on opensuse-project:

First we talked about July ‘09 release to come close to an 8 months release cycle. But KDE 4.3 is scheduled for release on June 30th and probably an OpenOffice.org release will be out end of June as well – both wouldn’t make it into a July openSUSE 11.2. Therfor we’re now thinking about a September release. Beside of getting the most current OpenOffice and KDE in this would even have one additional upside. It probably would be just in front of our openSUSE conference. So the conference could be used for very a focused openSUSE 11.3 planning. But it has its downside as well. Finalization of the release would happen during the summer holiday season. To address this we we added one Beta to stretch the development time a bit.

Here’s what we’re talking about:

2009-02-05 openSUSE 11.2 Alpha 0
2009-03-05 openSUSE 11.2 Alpha 1
2009-04-02 openSUSE 11.2 Alpha 2
2009-04-30 openSUSE 11.2 Alpha 3
2009-05-28 openSUSE 11.2 Alpha 4
2009-06-25 openSUSE 11.2 Beta 1
2009-07-09 openSUSE 11.2 Beta 2
2009-07-24 openSUSE 11.2 Beta 3
2009-08-06 openSUSE 11.2 Beta 4
2009-08-20 openSUSE 11.2 RC1
2009-09-03 openSUSE 11.2 GM
2009-09-10 openSUSE 11.2 Public Release

The downside of this is that it would probably miss the GNOME release. But I’m not sure we can satisfy all schedules. (If anyone can persuade the GNOME & KDE folks to sync up their release schedules, that would be spiffy.)

If you’re interested in participating in the discussion, head over to openSUSE-project and chime in. If you’re not subscribed, now would be a great time to do so! (To subscribe to the project mailing list, just send an email to opensuse-project+subscribe@opensuse.org)

A question has come up a few times recently that I’d like to throw out for discussion: How can we show some of our outstanding contributors that we recognize and appreciate their efforts, without offending other contributors who are also doing outstanding work?

While I was in Nuremberg last week, I had several conversations (and a few online) about the fact that we have some really excellent community contributors and wouldn’t it be great if we could have awards or something to say “thanks!” and recognize those folks publicly.

I know of quite a few people who definitely deserve an award for all their hard work on openSUSE — both inside and outside of Novell’s walls. And that’s just the people I’ve noticed — which is to say, no matter how you slice it, we’d end up missing some people.

Thoughts and suggestions?

Looking around, I’m seeing a lot of great stuff going on in the openSUSE community — watching the openSUSE-marketing list, I’m seeing a lot of work being done on Sneak Peeks and publishing and translating openSUSE Weekly News.

And there’s more! The Contrib repo is moving forward, which should be a major step forward in terms of getting new packages in and maintained by community members and making those easy to access for openSUSE users.

There’s work being done to support ARM in the openSUSE Build Service. I had a chance to sit down with Martin Mohring in Munich to talk about ARM and openSUSE on new platforms while I was in Germany last week, and I’m really impressed and excited by all the work that’s going into supporting ARM with openSUSE, and the possibilities.

Oh, and I keep hearing something about a release next week, too… If you haven’t, make sure you grab one of the countdown banners and display them proudly on your Website! Like so:

I guess this is why Ars says that openSUSE is one of the best distros of the year:

OpenSUSE is one of the oldest Linux distributions, but it has gone through some significant changes since its original launch in 1994. Under Novell’s stewardship, OpenSUSE has become significantly more inclusive and community-driven. The distro announced its first community-elected board this year and has grown its base of contributors considerably. The distro has also made major technical advancements, including major improvements to its package management system and support for installation from a Live CD.

OpenSUSE delivers a powerful user experience and is one of the few distros that provides equally outstanding support for both GNOME and KDE. Its KDE 4 environment is the best out there, which is why OpenSUSE has become the reference distro for all of our KDE reviews. Its GNOME environment is also top-notch and provides the perfect selection of applications in the default installation.

I’m continually impressed and inspired by all the work that goes into openSUSE. As always, there’s always more work ahead. But, if you step back and look at the state of the project today compared to a year ago, or two years ago, there’s been clear progress on every front — and no signs of slowing down.

Martin already sent out an announcement about the upcoming hackfest for Monday, but I wanted to bring it up again.The details:

• We’ll meet in IRC on Freenode, in the #opensuse-project channel.
• Hours are 11:00 to 18:00 CET (that’s 05:00 to 12:00 EST)
• Everyone is welcome to participate!

We’ll be going through the wiki and organizing content for “beginners” to openSUSE so that on the launch day, we can point people to the best resources we have so new users can easily find what we have and benefit from the documentation that exists. Of course, people are welcome to contribute new info where we’re already missing info.

As we’re getting closer to 11.1 final release, it’s time to start giving the wider openSUSE audience (and, very importantly, potential new users) a sneak peek at what’s going to be in the new release.

So, we could use a few good openSUSE users to step up and write a “sneak peek” for their favorite new features — whether that’s the latest release of GNOME in openSUSE, Banshee, KDE 4.1, or whatever. There’s a list of ideas over on the wiki, but don’t feel constrained! If you have a passion for YaST and want to write about the new modules, knock it out and submit it. (Thanks to Kevin Dupuy for getting the ball rolling.)

Sneak peeks are published on openSUSE News, but if you don’t have an account — don’t worry. Someone with posting privileges will be happy to put it up.

If you have questions or aren’t sure where to start, feel free to ping the openSUSE marketing list with questions. (If you’re not subscribed, sign up!) We have a very friendly bunch of people on the -marketing list, everyone is welcome to join and pitch in.

Let’s get those sneak peeks rolling! We have a slew of interesting new features in 11.1, and it’s time to start telling the world about them.

If all goes as planned, we’ll be releasing openSUSE 11.1 beta 5 tomorrow. (We were expecting to release 11.1 RC1, but it was decided there were too many blocker and P1 bugs to call it RC1.)

I’ve put up a draft of the release announcement on GitHub here:  http://gist.github.com/24232 Any feedback or additions would be welcome. If you don’t have a GitHub account (and don’t feel like signing up for one…) feel free to send me a diff or just send me an email with comments. Thanks!

openSUSE 11.1 isn’t even out, but YaST is already getting some positive reviews over on OStatic. Imagine what kind of reviews YaST would get if it were released separately from openSUSE? Which brings me to the topic at hand… Stanislav Visnovsky is asking the question: Should YaST be released independently from openSUSE?

But in principle, YaST is a tool that can be used across distributions and there are people interested in this to happen. There are technical barriers to do releases independent of openSUSE (e.g. a lot of openSUSE-specific knowledge and behavior coded in YaST) as well as procedural. During past years, a lot of these non-technical issues has been addressed as we opened up the YaST development (re-licensing the code under GPL, opening up source control system and mailing lists, etc).

But still, there is one big thing left: YaST packages are released in concert with openSUSE. Yes, it is very convenient for openSUSE, but it makes it almost impossible to track the development during for people outside of our great distribution.

YaST is, for me, one of openSUSE’s major strengths, and I think it’d be beneficial for other distros and projects to use and extend.

Linux, after all these years, still lacks a good, comprehensive, and cross-distro system management tool that’s suitable for use at the console or from the desktop. (YaST qualifies as good and comprehensive, in my book, but falls down on the “cross-distro” part.)

I’d really like to see YaST development visible to the community at large as a separate process, for several reasons:

• Provide more attention to YaST releases — currently, YaST releases are announced concurrently with openSUSE releases and I don’t think they get the same attention they would separately.
• Provide more visibility into YaST development — which might help involve more projects with YaST.
• Assuming there’s more adoption of YaST outside of openSUSE, it would help provide additional testing and (presumably) improve YaST all around. Not that YaST isn’t perfect already, of course…

If you have thoughts around this, I’d encourage discussion over on Stano’s blog.

Spending some time in #opensuse-testing and working through the features list on the wiki.

We’ve got a few people in channel and getting a few tests knocked out. We can always use more testers, of course. We’ll have people in channel until 13:00 Eastern (19:00 CET).

Since we’re testing on a workday, I know that makes it a bit difficult for some people to join in — but testers are always welcome, and there are usually people around on #opensuse-factory.

Also, suggestions for improving our testing procedures are always welcome. Right now, I don’t think we have quite as much directed and organized testing as would be optimal. I know we have a lot of people from the community who report bugs as found, but we could probably do with additional directed testing.