I know a lot of openSUSE users and contributors probably don’t look at the openSUSE landing page (front page) every day — I have most of the openSUSE pages I need bookmarked or have the URLs memorized, and rarely ever start from the front page.

So, you may not have noticed that the front page has been redesigned. Go ahead, pull up a new browser window and take a look.

Isn’t it fantastic? I liked the old page, but this redesign really looks great. Robert Lihm and Andreas Demmer have done a great job rethinking the page and putting a lot more information on the landing page without making it look cluttered or ugly.

One of the things the marketing team will be looking at now is how we can start improving pages further inside the Web site to better serve new users and the existing community as well. If you’re interested, please be sure to sign up for the marketing list and join in. The openSUSE Web site is the first contact for the project for many people, so it’s vitally important that it look good and be as usable as possible, and the new landing page is both usable and great-looking.

The next openSUSE Marketing Meeting will be held on Tuesday, September 23 at 15:00 UTC. (Which is 17:00 CEST, 11:00 Eastern, 7:00 Pacific, and 00:00 JST on Wednesday. Sorry…) The meeting will be held in #openSUSE-Project on Freenode. Grab your favorite IRC client and join us for an hour of fun, frolic, and open source marketing goodness.

I’ve put up an agenda on the wiki as is the standard operating procedure. If you have additions, suggestions, etc. please feel free to add them to the agenda.

And, of course, discussion is always welcome on the opensuse-marketing list. We try to keep the IRC meeting to an hour, so it helps to have most of the discussion before the meeting or right after.

Again, please join us for the marketing meeting next Tuesday. Linux isn’t going to dominate the world by itself!

Apparently the nice folks over at SourceForge.net are having a tattoo artist at their Community Choice Awards next week at OSCON. Ross Turk asked whether I’d like a “tech-related tattoo” on Twitter. Sure, I said, I’ll get one if we can hit one million openSUSE 11.0 installs by the time of the party next week.

Now, that’s not terribly likely, but hey — if we hit the 1 million mark, I’ll totally get a Geeko tattoo. If we just hit 300K, I’ll just dye my hair green. So, if you’d like to see me sporting a geeko tattoo, start hitting up your friends, family, co-workers, and random strangers to install openSUSE 11.0!

LugRadio Live UK is coming up next weekend, and the openSUSE project will be in attendance. Roger Whittaker and Andrew Wafaa are going to be representing the green at LRL, and (assuming the shipping gods are kind to us) handing out openSUSE 11.0 DVDs to all and sundry.

If you’d like to assist at the booth, get in touch with Roger. A big thanks to both Roger and Andrew for taking the initiative at LRL!

Do you have a passion for Linux and a desire to promote openSUSE? Would you like to paint the world’s desktops openSUSE green? If so, the openSUSE marketing team wants you!

Some of the things I’d like the marketing team to address:

• Ensure we publicize community events and meetings to maximize turnout and participation
• Create presentations and materials that can be reused to promote openSUSE
• Create artwork, banners, logos, etc. for openSUSE
• Help organize launch parties, local events, installfests, and talks at LUGs
• Support the openSUSE booth at shows
• Give presentations about openSUSE, the openSUSE Build Service, Linux, and other related topics to interested groups

In short, I’m looking for openSUSE contributors (and potential contributors) to help publicize community events more effectively, so anyone who’s interested in contributing to openSUSE knows how they can do so and when meetings are being held, etc — and also to help promote openSUSE to the rest of the world, so everyone has a chance to experience Linux.

I’ve spoken with a number of people in the past few months who have expressed an interest in being part of a marketing team, so here’s your chance to get involved! This is a particularly good opportunity for non-developers who want to find a way to contribute to openSUSE. If you can write, have artistic skills, want to create and/or deliver presentations, staff a booth, or have a knack for organizing, we’d love to have you on the team.

I’d like to start off with a discussion on the newly minted mailing list (thanks, Henne!) and then find a suitable time to hold meetings on IRC to get coordinated.

With openSUSE 11.0 rapidly approaching, there’s plenty to do, so if you’d like to help spread Linux, start your favorite email client and send a subscribe request to opensuse-marketing+subscribe@opensuse.org.