On April 6th and 7th the openSUSE Board had a meeting at SUSE offices. Vincent Untz, chairman of the board, asked me to participate in the meeting. He also invited several other SUSE employees that have internal responsibilities in different areas relevant for the community project. Among the requests made by the openSUSE Board to us as openSUSE team was to increase the communication about what we are doing beyond the reports we were sending to the project mailing list every once in a while.
I think that it was a good request. The openSUSE Team at SUSE have been working on tasks that will bring some noticeable results for the project. But most of those tasks are not visible to many in our community. This blog can help mitigate that.
Team blog
The fact that much of what we have been doing lately is not very visible has a lot to do with the nature of our current focus. We felt there was a need for going back to basics in some areas, in order to re-structure them in a way that makes us stronger in the future. We have been planning (like the merchandising program), improving and building openSUSE tools (openQA, TSP site), focusing on the release and in short – preparing. This new approach reinforces the commitment SUSE has in openSUSE, not the opposite.
To communicate what we are working on, both in terms of planning as well as building and developing, we returned an idea we discussed several months ago, the creation of a team blog focused on describing our actions.
Changes
As you probably know by now, SUSE decided almost a year ago to make internal changes to better address new challenges around openSUSE. The openSUSE Team at SUSE is one of the results of such changes. Currently it is formed by Alberto Planas Domínguez, Ancor González Sosa, Christopher Hofmann, Ludwig Nussel, Jos Poortvliet, Max Lin (temporary assigned to other department), Michal Hrusecky, Stephan Kulow, and myself. Another engineer will join us in July and we have two openings, a senior KDE developer and a graphical designer. Hopefully, together, we can make a real difference and get some great things done!
If you are interested in what we are doing we hope you enjoy reading this blog. We will put a sustained and collective effort on it the following months. There are other teams in openSUSE doing great things that will benefit from more visibility. We hope some of them follow our example!
Agustin Benito Bethencourt
openSUSE Team Lead at SUSE
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