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!

Don’t look any further. The openSUSE Board has decided to open up its bi-weekly IRC meeting to the public. The meeting will be held in the #opensuse-project channel on freenode.net. The openSUSE Board will meet after each openSUSE Project meeting, every other Wednesday, to discuss topics concerning the project. This includes governance issues, strategy for the project, and membership requests.

The openSUSE Members have tasked the board to lead the project and to facilitate the decision making around these issues. And members have also asked us to hold meetings publicly so there’s more visibility on how the board works. To allow the board to get through a busy agenda, the channel will be in moderated mode during the meeting. This means that anyone can see what the board is discussing, but questions and comments will be held until the question and answer period at the end of each meeting. The board will continue to invite people to discuss or present when it’s relevant to the topics being discussed.

The next open board meeting for you to participate in will take place at

Wednesday 2009/11/18 19:00 UTC

Be there!

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.

As agreed upon, prior to last year’s elections, the highest vote-getters in both Novell and non-Novell positions would assume a two-year term, and the second vote-getters would get a one-year term. This was a one-time arrangement, with the intention of ensuring there would be an election every year for half the electable board positions. As such, we will be holding elections again this year. All winners this year and subsequent elections will have a two-year term.

The Board has several announcements to make regarding the upcoming elections.

• The Board has recently agreed that as our community continues to grow, it is important that the diversity of voices of our community needs to be adequately represented and heard during Board discussions.  As such, we are adding a new elected non-Novell position to the Board, effective immediately with the next election. This position will also be for a two-year term. The new Board makeup will be two Novell employees, three non-Novell employees, and a Chairperson selected by Novell. The Board grows from 5 seats to 6 seats.

• As the number of openSUSE members has seen a strong increase over the last 12 months we won’t have the “Nomination of second voters” again.

• We are proud to see some returning members of last year’s Election Committee along with some newcomers. New members Kevin Dupuy, Sascha Manns, and Thomas Schmidt join returning members Claes Backstrom and Andrew Wafaa.

• The Election Committee has begun initial discussions and will make their own announcement in the near future regarding campaign guidelines and timelines.  With this, effectively all discussions, planning and announcements pertaining to the election will be handled by the Committee and the Board steps out of further election discussions.

At this time, the Board would like to remind you that only Members of the openSUSE Community are eligible to vote in the upcoming election. If you are not currently a member and have actively participated in the Project as a developer, packager, tester, advocate, evangelist, or some other form of active participation, we urge you to apply for membership at users.opensuse.org before the Election Committee’s announced deadline for application.

See you all in Nuremberg for the openSUSE Conference this week!

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)

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

June 3, 7-9:15pm UTC
Participants:
Stephen Shaw, (decriptor)
Federico Mena Quintero, (federico1)
Hendrik Vogelsang, (henne)
Michael Löffler, (michl)
Bryen Yunashko, (suseROCKs)
Pascal Bleser, (yaloki)
Joe Brockmeier, (zonker)

List of topics:
* Ambassador program
Announced and already pretty many people signed in for it.

* Foundation
Zonker and michl will meeting with a Novell expert on such stuff on Monday June 9 to evaluate which possibilities we have and which way openSUSE should take.

* Membership requests
We are too lame, 15 requests out of the last round are waiting for more than 4 weeks for final approval now. Just another 70 requests were imported into the tool today.

* open openSUSE Factory for contribution
Henne drove this project inside Novell for a while now and we had at the Board several discussions around it. Meanwhile it is announced and is an important step to bring the whole project ahead.

* openSUSE Board presence at the openSUSE conference
There need to be a strong Board presence but in a very interactive way so no big presentation but rather round table conversations about the status of the project and its future.

* read and write access to news.openSUSE.org?
The Board suggest to extend the group of people with read and write access for news.opensuse.org. Anyone interested please send a mail to board@opensuse.org and as for write access or even suggest another person to get it. Approval body will be the openSUSE Board.

* Federico resigned due to work over load, Stephen Shaw (decriptor) is the uprunner and takes over his seat

openSUSE Day kicks off at 10:00 a.m. (a completely reasonable and sane time, plenty of time to grab breakfast and coffee even if you’ve been to social events the evening before!) with a break for the LinuxTag keynotes between 13:00 and 15:00. Here’s the rest of the schedule:

• 10:00 – 10:30: openSUSE Day Introduction — Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier
• 10:30 – 11:00: Easy-LTSP – Configure an openSUSE LTSP server easily – Jan Weber
• 11:00 – 12:00: Was ist neu in openSUSE 11.2? – Andreas Jaeger
• 12:00 – 13:00: Do it Yourself: openSUSE Home Theater PC – Henne Vogelsang
• 13:00 – 15:00: Break for keynote
• 15:00 – 16:00: Wine – Windows Applikation und Spiele für Linux – Marcus Meissner
• 16:00 – 16:30: Warum mein WLAN nicht funktioniert? – Helmut Schaa
• 16:30 – 17:00: AppArmor in der Praxis – Christian Boltz
• 17:00 – 18:00: SUSE Studio: Maßgeschneidertes Linux für Jedermann – Cornelius Schumacher

If you’re in or around Berlin, you don’t want to miss it!

Sincerely,
Michael Loeffler
openSUSE Board Chairman

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