TL;DR: openSUSE as a project needs to raise its game, and the next openSUSE Board can guide the project to agree a tight set of goals for our releases and work to a higher standard on them. Otherwise we risk being an undirected mess of pet projects, bikeshedding discussions and bickering tribes.
Read more at my platform page. Then go and vote!
This post is for the openSUSE Members!
Well, I think I have to explain that french title…
Nah, let’s not bother and move on 
Part of democracy is that if you don’t cast your ballot you have no influence! So don’t let others decide for you, when you can act!
We’re almost 500 members, and this message is for you.
Our freedom to choose our direction and control our project as we wish works only when we vote. As in real world democracies, not voting gets you nowhere.
Because : I want you to vote!
What we need here is to send a strong signal that 99% of our members are alive and care about our project.
Otherwise, why would we bothered to become members, and keep that status, if not to infuence?
Why not add this signature to your mails you use on ML and/or forums?
The openSUSE Strategy, I've casted my vote! And you? http://bit.ly/iB2Dzh
Oh come on, I really hope that you’ve acted before reading this line 
Dead line is 29 June
[1] Aux armes citoyens : La Marseillaise
[2] etc the singing version by Serge Gainsbourg
[3] Cast your vote connect poll
[4] Article on news.o.o
Yet another foto stream from the openSUSE conference. You see the desktop leads from KDE and Gnome (Cornelius Schumacher and Vincent Untz) giving a talk about the past and future of the free desktop, Stephan Kulow about the future of the distribution, Bernhard Wiedemann about QA testing and so on.
Most important may be the presentation of the openSUSE board (mainly by Pascal Bleser) how they plan to found an independent foundation for openSUSE as non-profit organization. An important rule of that foundation is that it is independent of any company (no majority of Novell here) but can handle sponsoring, partnering and trademark questions.
We had also very filled rooms during the OBS talks, but I was unable to take pictures at that point of time unfortunately
After the second iteration on the rules, a number of clarifications have been made and also the complete rule set got reordered and edited.
I’d like to thank David that did the major editing on this one.
What do you think? Are we good now to run the next elections with these rules?
A month ago I presented my first draft for the new openSUSE board election rules and received some good feedback, especially on the opensuse-project mailing list. Since the last version presented on the mailing list I reworked the draft some more taking into account the proposal by Henne to remove the split of the elected seats into Novell and non-Novell employees.
So, now the goal of the changes for these rules are:
I’d like to thank Vincent Untz and Alan Clark who helped me with this revision step.
Below is the new draft, for reference I gave each rule a name.
I’d like to hear now whether those complete rules are fine or where they need further revision and I’d also like to see wordsmithing to clarify and improve the rules.
Last years election of seats for the openSUSE board showed that our election rules are not complete. So, before the elections this year start, I propose that we refine the rules and like to start with this post a discussion on how to change them.
I see the following situations not handled:
We also need to clarify when the new board constitutes.
We should have a light weight process that is not overly complex and results in endless votes. We vote for people that volunteer their time for the openSUSE project and don’t get any material benefits for it. So, let’s keep that in mind when discussing alternatives.
Working as a manager sometimes has not so nice days, but tomorrow it will be a really great day. Novell HR has asked me to celebrate a team members ten years anniversary with Novell. That means fun and a present since ten years is a long time, yes, quite a long time for IT industry.
The guy who comes in to S.u.S.E, SuSE and Novell every day since exactly ten years now is Henne. You all know him. He is the guy who helps you with your multimedia problem, the man who finally dries your tears when your package does not build and the one who is first at breakfast after he kicked the last hackers to bed the night before. Of course looking fresh like a new born baby and with the energy of a power plant. Whenever there is work to be done in openSUSE, one can rely on Hennes advice and helping hand.
But that is not all. You might have realized that the openSUSE project is not really ten years old. But maybe it is? Might be that before it was officially set up a few years ago, it was already nested in Hennes heart? He is with openSUSE from day one and before, always following the idea of an open, community driven, vibrant and optimistic openSUSE project with space for opinions, ideas and argues. Over that he never looses focus on a practical compromise that works for all.
He gave very valueable direction in the Guiding Principle discussion as well as designing the devel project concept in the Build Service which makes external package maintainance possible. Today he gives important guidance as a member of the openSUSE Board and is of course one of the strong shoulders in the openSUSE Boosters Team.
I think Henne is one of the persons who make our community valueable and enjoyable. openSUSE is so much benefiting from people like him who take up responsibility and drive things forward.
Henne, in the name of Novell and I guess the whole openSUSE community I like to thank you for all your work so far. I am really looking forward to continuing to do crazy stuff with you. There is a lot more the openSUSE project can achieve over the next couple of decades, great that we have you on board as a green rock 
Community,
for everyone not subscribed (yet) to the opensuse-project mailinglist: here is my candidacy announcement for Board Member of the openSUSE Community Board once again.
Community, Election Committee,
I herewith announce my candidacy for Board Member of the openSUSE
Community Board.My name is Rupert, I’m 28 and I’m currently on the home stretch of
studying business administration and electrical engineering at
Darmstadt University of Technology.I have been involved with the openSUSE Project for several years. I
started using Linux with the release of SUSE Linux 9.1 and became an
active contributor to the Project during my Internship in Product
Management at Novell/SUSE in 2007/2008. In January 2008, I have been
approved as an official openSUSE member. As an employee and afterwards
as a community volunteer, I served as the Project Manager of the
openSUSE forums merge and contributed as a moderator to the openSUSE
community until May 2009. As a Workstudent for Community Architecture,
I worked on several forums-internal projects and contributed to the
openSUSE Weekly Newsletter in 2008/2009.Currently I’m involved in the efforts to come up with a sufficient
usability concept for the openSUSE Wiki in co-work with the Wiki- and
Booster Teams.My contributions to the openSUSE Project so far imho reflect clearly
that I’m an organizing and coordinating kind of person and that I’m
focused on the social components of building and growing an
Open-Source Community. From my perspective, having a strong marketing
focus and thus providing sufficient support- and documentation
resources to the end user is just as important to the success of the
openSUSE Project as contributing to the distribution in a developing
capacity actually is. Just to make clear where I’m coming from.Thanks,
Rupert
Thanks a lot for listening,
Rupert
Today at the openSUSE Conference I took the notes of the governance session. We will continue the discussion tomorrow but let me just publish the raw notes as I took them at the meeting without much editing.
Notes below:
Up to now 65.40% of the votes have been cast.
So if you’re a member or franchise voter -> now it’s time to cast your vote !
Because of the power outage the deadline has been extended and ballots will close 1200UTC Saturday 25th October .
Here’s the link to users.opensuse.org .
Adrian Schröter (12)
Agustin Chavarria (6)
Alessandro de Oliveira Faria (9)
Alex Barrios (12)
Alexander Naumov (10)
Alexander Orlovskyy (3)
Alin M Elena (5)
Andrea Florio (27)
Andreas Jaeger (70)
Andreas Stieger (4)
Andrew Wafaa (31)
Arvin Schnell (7)
Atri Bhattacharya (2)
Bernhard Wiedemann (8)
Bonnie Kurniawan (1)
Bruno Friedmann (45)
Carl Fletcher (1)
Christopher Hobbs (17)
Ciaran Farrell (2)
Stephan Barth (1)
Tom Schmidt (2)
Dinar Valeev (1)
Dirk Müller (1)
Dmitry Serpokryl (7)
Fabio Mucciante (2)
Federico Lucifredi (9)
Holger Sickenberg (2)
Hubert Mantel (1)
Ilya Chernykh (3)
Ismail Donmez (1)
J. Daniel Schmidt (2)
James Tremblay (7)
Jan Blunck (4)
Jan Loeser (3)
Jan Madsen (1)
Jan-Christoph Bornschlegel (3)
Jan-Simon Möller (19)
Javier Llorente (11)
Jigish Gohil (48)
Jiri Srain (1)
Jiří Suchomel (3)
Johan Kotze (5)
José Oramas M. (6)
Josef Reidinger (11)
Juergen Weigert (1)
Julio Vannini (9)
Dinar Valeev (5)
Kevin "Yeaux" Dupuy (11)
Klaas Freitag (55)
Lars Vogdt (11)
Ludwig Nussel (10)
M. Edwin Zakaria (1)
Marcus Hüwe (26)
Marcus Meissner (2)
Marcus Moeller (3)
Marcus Schaefer (3)
Martin Lasarsch (8)
Martin Mohring (11)
Masim "Vavai" Sugianto (20)
Michael Andres (1)
Michael Löffler (7)
Michal Marek (7)
Michal Vyskocil (10)
Miguel Angel Barajas Hernandez (2)
Peter Linnell (1)
Nelson Marques (54)
Nikanth Karthikesan (2)
Peter Pöml (4)
Petr Mladek (59)
Petr Uzel (5)
Ray Wang (1)
Raymond Wooninck (1)
Ricardo Chung (6)
Ricardo Varas Santana (7)
Richard Bos (10)
Robert Schweikert (6)
Rossana Motta (1)
Rupert Horstkötter (10)
Sascha Manns (66)
Saydul Akram (1)
Sebastian Schöbinger (4)
Stanislav Visnovsky (7)
Stefan Haas (1)
Stefan Hundhammer (5)
Stefan Schubert (7)
Steffen Winterfeldt (4)
Stephan Kulow (17)
Suresh Jayaraman (3)
Susanne Oberhauser (3)
Thomas Göttlicher (6)
Thomas Jones (1)
Thomas Schraitle (23)
Togan Muftuoglu (2)
Tuukka Pasanen (13)
Will Stephenson (16)