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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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

openSUSE Board Elections phase 1 will be finally over at 1200 UTC on 09 October 2008. I’m quite silent with the elections discussion on openSUSE mailing list (marketing, project and another mailing list) due to my job, my project in Indonesian openSUSE community and due to Happy Eid Mubarak holiday here in Indonesia, but as openSUSE lovely user, I will vote for somebody who will be stand for openSUSE board, as our (or me as openSUSE user) gateway between community and Novell.

I’m really appreciated for everyone who take the opportunity as openSUSE board candidate. It should be a great job.  All of openSUSE board candidate have technical or supporting background, active in the community and show their great effort and participation in the past.

One of openSUSE board candidate is Pascal Bleser (well known as yaloki on IRC). I have a nice discussion by IRC and by mail with him and get a good response. He is an incumbent of openSUSE board, means that he was currently openSUSE board member with AJ, Coolo, Federico and Francis.

I know he has good technically background (describing zypper stuff for about 1 hour 😛 ), active on FOSDEM, good dad for his baby (look at the photos 😀 ) and don’t forget, he has been actively on merging and joining Packman repositories for openSUSE.

I don’t see any reason why I could not choose him as openSUSE member for next period. With his experience as first openSUSE board member; his technically background; his connection to another person in various open source project; and his good position to understand relation between Novell and the community, he would be the best choice for next openSUSE member.

Vote and campaign for Pascal Bleser as openSUSE Board member !

I have served as chairperson of the openSUSE board the last year and would like to announce that I decided to pass the honours on for the next election period.  I’ve made this decision out of personal plans for the next year that will not allow me to devote as much time to the board as it deserves since I’ll be some time on paternity leave.

In my professional role I will stay involved with the openSUSE project and I will support the new chairperson fully to make a smooth transition. The new chairperson will be announced at the same time as the new board members, at the end of this election.

I enjoyed being openSUSE chairperson – working together with excellent board members (thanks Coolo, Federico, Francis, and Pascal), internal and external community members to move openSUSE forward in areas like openSUSE “members” (I would really love to see a better name), forums, the distribution, marketing (getting Zonker onboard was part of it) and also getting these elections setup.

Btw. I have given some comments (like here) on the board previously.

The openSUSE board met yesterday to go through all the open membership applications.  Since many applied in the last days, we had to go over 67 applications.  Additionally there were some members that applied after the deadline for voting, we did not look at their applications for now and will handle them later.  Out of the 67 applications, we postponed 6 since we first needed to answer some more questions, approved around 30 and rejected the rest. So, we have right now 211 approved openSUSE members.

Details about membership are in the wiki but let me explain a bit more what membership means using some practical examples.

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