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Archive for the ‘Elections’ Category

A brief 360° overview of my first board turn

January 18th, 2016 by

You’ve certainly noticed that I didn’t run for a second turn, after my first 2 years. This doesn’t mean the election time and the actual campaign are boring 🙂

If you are an openSUSE Member, we really want to have your vote, so go to Board Election Wiki and make your own opinion.

The ballot should open tomorrow.

board-leaving-tigerfoot

Why not a second turn?

Being a board member (present at almost every conference call, reading the mailing lists and other task) consume free time. It has increased during the last semester too. And we’ve got some new business opportunities here at Ioda-Net Sàrl in 2015, and those need also my attention for the next year(s). I prefer to be a retired Board member, than not being able to handle my responsabilities.
But I’m not against the idea of a "I’ll be back" in a near future. Moreover with a bit more bandwidth in my free time, I will be able to continue my packaging stuff, and other contributions.

What a journey!

With the new campaign running, I found funny to bring back to light my 2013 platform written 2 years ago. And spent 5 minutes on checking the differences with today. I’m inviting you to discover the small interview between me and myself 🙂

1. Which sentences would you say again today?

I’m a "Fucking Green Dreamer" of a world of collaboration, which will one day offer Freedom for everyone.

Clearly still a day by day mantra and leitmotiv. But even if I’m dreaming, I never forget that
Freedom has a price : Freedom will only be what you do for it.

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Final Election Thoughts

January 22nd, 2015 by

As the openSUSE Board election quickly draws to a close, I take a moment to remind openSUSE Members to vote.

Elections and voting are a rather remarkable thing.  We take up or values, our beliefs, our interests, and briefly toss them in the air, letting the air flow somewhat disrupt them as they gently fall like leaves.  We think for a moment: What’s important to me?  Why is this important to me?  And does it really matter who I vote for?  Can a small Board of Directors really make a difference in the larger scheme of things?  Can the elected person really represent my interests?

In American politics, there is much apathy for and little trust in elections.  There are many reasons for this (and it’s a topic for discussion and reflection saved for a very different forum).  But as much analysis is done by professionals who analyze these things, they often conclude that each individual doesn’t think that one vote will matter.  “I’m just one person in an ocean of people; how will my vote matter?”  But for us, well, no one knows better about Freedom and Openness than an opensource community.  Voting — expressing one’s confidence in another person to serve as a representative of an ideal, a promise — is a hallmark of Freedom and Openness.  If only one vote is cast among many, then the ideal of only the one is expressed.  If your vote is not cast and the others of your community are, then your voice is diminished.  When a whole community votes, the full range voices is heard and discerned.

Vote.  Our community is strengthened when your vote is cast.  Whether or not you vote for me, please vote.

I believe it matters.

The election ends on Monday, 26 Jan 2015.

Standing for Re-Election to the openSUSE Board

January 12th, 2015 by

Hi Fellow Geekos,

This post is a summary of my wish to continue to serve on your behalf on the openSUSE board.

My term has been a short one, as I was appointed to serve out the remainder of Vincent Untz’ term.

While I now work for SUSE (and it has been a fabulous experience), that does not change my view or efforts to contribute to openSUSE.  Prior to joining SUSE, as a part of the Sales Engineering team, I was elected to the board for a two year term. To avoid having too many SUSE employees, I had to step down.  A rule I completely support.

Having been an openSUSE member long before joining SUSE, I think I have a keen awareness of what the community is about and where we can improve together.

My take is we have an awesome group of contributors who want to see the community grow and prosper.  With things like Tumbleweed and OBS, among others, we have shown real innovation and technical leadership in the Linux world. We have arguably one the top distros available.  It is solid, polished and usable for a wide variety of use cases. We need to keep the openness and solid collaboration which enables everyone to participate and succeed.

My efforts within openSUSE have been mostly focused on the Open Build Server, maintaining several projects, as well as, being part of the Factory review team.

Going forward, I want to concentrate on reaching out beyond our community to build more awareness of what an awesome distro we have, along with a pretty friendly community. I see other, less compelling, distros getting more visibility than perhaps is deserved.

Along the same lines, my take is we as a community can take a more active role in bringing in new members, who might not be technical folks, but can help in the marketing and outreach. I’ve started a local SUSE group through meetup.com which is a different way to find new users and contributors.

One other reason I wish to remain on the board, is we have a solid working relationship and there is a lot of mutual respect and good collaboration.

No matter who is elected to the board, I am very pleased with the caliber of the folks running and know the community will be in good hands moving forward.

Thank you in advance for your vote!

Peter Linnell

Craig Gardner’s openSUSE Board campaign

January 8th, 2015 by

Hi openSUSE Team,

It’s campaign season, and time for me to make sure all voters know what I stand for regarding openSUSE, “The Finest Distro, Period.”  As I mentioned in my announcement, if elected to The Board, my intended involvement would focus on these three principle goals:

A) Improving the visibility of openSUSE among the huge variety of distro offerings that exist. Specifically, improving the amount of press and exposure of openSUSE to offset the over-represented exposure that other distros receive.  Since openSUSE is the The Finest Distro, Period (as I asserted above), we can do better to make it known.

B) Promote openQA, and make it the bedrock of quality assurance for openSUSE. Improve the confidence that the community and the public should have in the quality of our great product! The Quality of openSUSE — out of the box, and updated over the wire, over time — is dependent upon a battery of high quality testing. Perception is everything in this business. Great testing will give us great quality, great results, and great users.

C) Support the improvements that have been incrementally made over time by prior board members, building on their successes. There are too many accomplishments to enumerate here, but the project has come a long way under some great leadership. We don’t need huge changes in leadership or direction; we need to capitalize on our prior successes and press forward.

And I wish to add one more goal to my original list:

D) Continue to foster community involvement and attract new talent to the project through high quality openSUSE Conferences. Bringing together the best talent to oSC events does a great deal to build bridges of trust and move the project forward in a unified way. A high quality oSC improves the quality of the brand and the product.

But of course, the few members of the Board are just a small functioning part of a successful community. The real success of openSUSE is a result of the hard work, the passion, and commitment of the members. As a member of the board, I intend to be someone who brings out the best in others; to help you do what you do best; to bring good people together fo the strength of the project. openSUSE is “The Finest Distro, Period,” only because its contributors are The Finest. Period.

As the polls open in a few days, please vote for Craig Gardner (@ganglia). You’ll get a firmly committed member of the board, who wants to help you — the community — to find even greater success.  And don’t forget to have fun.

Standing for re-election: openSUSE Board Election Jan. 2015

December 27th, 2014 by

My name is Robert Schweikert, IRC handle robjo, and I am standing for re-election in the upcoming openSUSE Board election in January of 2015.

With the end of 2014 my first term on the openSUSE board is already coming to an end, time flies. During my first term we collectively have seen many changes to our project. Many of these changes were difficult and I would say we had a rough ride for a good chunk of th last 2 years. I think, and am hoping others agree, that I was able to help smooth some of the rough spots and help the project move into what could now be considered calmer waters. It was not easy, but I am glad I was able to contribute.

Since 2009 I work for SUSE in the ISV Engineering team. When I started I primarily worked with IBM on joint projects. I also worked with other ISVs helping them with questions regarding their application on top of SUSE Linux. In recent years my role has transitioned and I am now focused on Public Cloud work, working with our partners.

I have been using SUSE Linux, now known as the openSUSE distribution since the beginning, i.e. I still remember when SUSE Linux 10 was released. I have been contributing to the project for many years, not from the get go, it took me some time to move from user to contributor, by maintaining packages, more recently also maintaining and publishing openSUSE images in the public cloud, and helping with organization of events. For the past two years I also had the privilege to contribute to the project as a board member. I would very much enjoy being able to continue my contribution to the board for another 2 years.

Looking forward I see the need that an effort needs to be made to re-invigorate our project. As a whole the distribution “business” has lost some of its appeal and shine. Something that is certainly to be expected. Never the less even in a world that is getting more and more dominated by cloud services, containers, and whatever else, distributions are a necessity and the openSUSE distributions always stands out as one of the top notch community distributions. We have also proven that there is still plenty of innovation potential with the recent merge of Tumbleweed and Factory, turning what was previously a pure development stream into a usable rolling release. The credit for this of course goes to the Factory team, release team and many others that contributed to the new tools and backend infrastructure that make all this possible. Re-invigoration for me not only means being proud and excited about such major technical accomplishments but also means we need to be better organized when it comes the representation of our project at FOSS events. Although the new booth box material is great we have had a difficult time getting things organized and helping those that want to represent the project at events. I want to continue to push on this part and help make the distribution of material better. There is plenty of work to be done at the board level and I am asking for your vote in the upcoming election to allow me to continue what is already in the works and help start new initiatives to re-invigorate our project.

Waouh, Thank you, Merci, Danke, etc

December 16th, 2013 by

Thanks you!
I really & sincerely thank all of our members who not only took the risk of being recognized as active members, but also cast their vote to myself.

Thank you, Merci, Danke etc..

Thank you, Merci, Danke etc..

I’m deeply touched, now the time of let’s begin the fun has come.
Be assured to my strong commitment in our project and community.

See you on earth!

openSUSE Board Election – My Manifesto

December 10th, 2011 by

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!

Revising the Board Election Rules, 3rd iteration

October 8th, 2010 by

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?

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Revising the Board Election Rules, 2nd iteration

September 29th, 2010 by

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:

  • Fill the holes that exist in the existing rules
  • Clarify the existing rules
  • Open up the project even more with removing the restriction on two members beeing Novell employees.  To help ensure that the board will always represent a wide part of the community, I’ve followed the example of the GNOME foundation to have a rule that only 40 % of the elected board members can work at the same company.
    Note that 40 % of 5 elected seats means 2 seats.

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.

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Revising the Board Election Rules

August 25th, 2010 by

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:

  • Less candidates than seats for a category (Novell/non-Novell)
  • Equal number of candidates and open seats for a category (Novell/non-Novell)
  • a board member resigning
  • a board member disappearing and not engaging in the board
  • a board member getting hired by Novell or leaves Novell

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.

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