I’m here in the belly of the Geeko at SUSE’s offices in Nuremberg, due to the fact that the new openSUSE Board had their Face to Face meeting yesterday (whole different topic needing its own post ;-) ). As I was coming here I thought it would be prudent to try and get the various people dealing with and interested in the ARM port around a table at some point to discus the status of things.
For those that aren’t subscribed to the openSUSE Project Mailinglist: As was announced last month, the Board is looking for some new blood. As such I intend to run for one of the available seats. Yes people, your lovable FunkyPenguin is hoping to be able to represent you and all your crazy ideas (I’ve got some of those myself ;-) ). I know of a few other candidates that are running, and they’re fine upstanding folk of the openSUSE community.
I’m going to be holding a Bof at the openSUSE Conference all about the 5 Ws of contributing to openSUSE. WTF is it about? Well I’m glad you asked (I don’t care if you didn’t ask, because I’m going to tell you anyway ;-) ) My intention is to have as interactive a session possible, I will take on the role of compère and with audience participation I will try and highlight where we have issues both as a project and as a contributor and try and get to some form of resolution even if it is just a plan not an actual fix.
tl;dr – To all you doomsday FUD mongers about Novell/SUSE/openSUSE STFU & let us show you what we can and will do!! For those living under a rock, yes Novell has agreed to be acquired. Welcome to the world of business, and especially in software this sort of thing is very common. Now for some reason a whole heap of people seem to think that this spells doom for Novell, SUSE and openSUSE.
It looks like I’ve been asking you, the community, a load of questions recently on this here blog. As such I thought it only fair to turn the tables and let you guys and girls do the asking :-) If we can make a bit of a game out of this I would appreciate it. So first up I’ll give you a deadline of 1200UTC 17June2010 to get you questions in by.
It’s been a while since I mentioned anything about Goblin and anything netbook related, sorry. Anyhow as everyone is aware, Moblin has since been superseded by MeeGo. The timing was a bit of a PITA for me, as it coincided with the Factory freeze, which means I couldn’t update the relevant packages etc in-time for 11.3. As it stands, 11.3 should have an almost fully functional Moblin environment – I say ‘almost’ as there were two packages that I just couldn’t get to co-operate and build (the modified Moblin browser, and the Web panel).
I’ve had a lot of people ask me both within the openSUSE community and outside of it, whether I applied for the vacant openSUSE Community Manager role. In a nutshell, yes I did apply for it. Why the past tense? Well I got notified almost two weeks ago that I was unsuccessful :’-( The good thing that did come out of it, is that there seem to be some very good candidates in the running – let’s face it, they would have to be pretty damned good to beat me ;-)
Enterprise in the Community It has been mentioned that the Geeko is somewhat of a schizophrenic at times, and do you know what I kind of have to agree. The difference is I disagree on how the schizophrenia affects our dear friend. Most people think that the multiple personalities are desktop related – you know, KDE vs GNOME vs XFCE vs $DE. I on the other hand feel it is to with audience – Enterprise vs Consumer.
Yes I’m still at it, trying to get YOU the openSUSE community talking about what is important to you. This time round I’d like to hear your opinions and thoughts about something. I’m going to keep my views on the matter quiet until we get some dialogue going, so if you want to hear my thoughts (and let’s face it who doesn’t? ;-) ) best you start airing your opinions.
You have to grant me that I’m persistent ;-) OK so this time round I thought I’d do a quick round up of some of the feedback that I’ve received so far – some of it has been in the form of comments on this here blog, others have been responses on mailing lists, and some has been from direct converstation with me. I’d love to get more from you, and ultimately you get more from yourselves.
Oh yes, I’m still going at it folks! Let’s discuss :-) This time round I’d like us to discuss Collaboration, Learning, Listening and Leading. Let me clarify what I mean by Collaboration; I’m NOT talking about Groupwise/Exchange/Zimbra/Alfresco/SharePoint/Kablink style collabortaion, but I AM talking about working with other parties and teams. Within openSUSE as with other distributions there are multiple teams/projects that in some cases could be classed as competitors – GNOME & KDE are a prime example.
Yup, I’m still trying to get us, the openSUSE Community, to discuss ways we can improve ourselves. This time round I’m going to look at Education, Coaching and Teamwork. Again there is nothing groundbreaking or revolutionary here, but these are topics I feel are easily forgotten or misunderstood. One item that seems to pop up fairly regularily regardless of which side of the fence you’re on (Novell employee or not), is community contribution and ownership.
Continuing my series of getting the openSUSE Community engaged in how better to improve itself, I thought I would look at Transparency and Communication. So what do I mean by these two? If we look at the definitions of these two: Transparency - Lack of hidden agendas and conditions, accompanied by the availability of full information required for collaboration, cooperation, and collective decision making. Minimum degree of disclosure to which agreements, dealings, practices, and transactions are open to all for verification.
It’s been a couple of weeks since my first Discussion with the Community, so as a follow on I thought I would cover the topic of Tools for the community. In my mind I split tools into two groups – hard & soft. What I mean by this is “hard” = infrastructure based, and “soft” = software based. Some may seem pretty obvious to you, and some may seem like they aren’t tools at all.
I thought it would be a good idea to try and engage you – the fine openSUSE community – in discussion about “Us” the Community. We seemed to have been spoiled by having a Community Manager, people kind of seemed to let him do the work or worse expected him to do so. Now that we don’t have that position any more we need to go back to basics and start rolling our sleeves up.
It’s been over a week now since I came back from the fantabulous FOSDEM, and have had a chance to digest a lot of the conversations I had whilst there. One of the conversations I had was with a senior developer who was in a sort of Special Interest Group. He mentioned to me that his management had asked the SIG to formulate a plan for where they wanted to see their project in five years, and how they aimed to get there.