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Fosdem 2014 Report & Beta testing new openSUSE booth merchandising Stuff

February 4th, 2014 by

Fosdem 2014

fosdem 2014 - full

Again this year, Fosdem was really delightful, a bit crowdy as hell concerning a number of conference rooms.

But if there’s a constant, it is the awesomeness of the Fosdem staff and its armada of volunteers. Please all of you who made this event so great, receive in the name of openSUSE’s community our warmest thanks and congratulations.

I will not make a mistake if I predict a big success for the different talk’s videos, in the next following weeks.

openSUSE merchandising new collection

After a loooong wait, perceived as a century, openSUSE Booth was furbished with the next generation of merchandising stuff.

At least some part of the complete kit, which should be available in April.

(more…)

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Posted in Ambassadors, Artwork, Distribution, Events, Marketing | 2 Comments »

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!

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Posted in Ambassadors, Board, Elections, Uncategorized | 6 Comments »

The openSUSE TSP application

June 20th, 2013 by

Introduction blog of the TSP
Today, Ancor Gonzalez Sosa writes about the Travel Support Program Application he developed with the openSUSE Team.

Traveling to an event to represent your project, sharing experiences with other people with common interests and showing them what you are passionate about is absolutely awesome – but it can get expensive. This is why openSUSE introduced a Travel Support Program last year.

The openSUSE Travel Support Program

The goal of the Travel Support Program is to support contributors representing openSUSE at events by reimbursing up to 80% of the travel and/or hotel costs. In turn the contributors make a worthy contribution at the event and report back to the openSUSE community about what they did.

We’re not alone in doing this, having drawn inspiration from GNOME’s Conference Travel Subsidy Program, the KDE e.V. Travel Cost Reimbursement initiative and the Travel Policy from The Document Foundation.

vanilla entering reimbursement request_crop

entering reimbursement request

The program is sponsored by SUSE, but the Travel Committee independently manages the money and decides who is supported and how. This is a lot of work: decisions involve the event itself, the contributor asking for support, other Geekos in the area, the costs and of course the entire budget. The team also has to plan the priority of events with the marketing team and communicate about the status of the requests and reimbursement.

And the Free Software world was lacking a proper tool to manage all this… until now!

The brand new TSP application

We developed a new web tool to make the life of the TSP team and the community easier and do this in an open and generic way so other projects could benefit as well. We’ve started using it already for the upcoming openSUSE Conference 2013 and you can see it in action here. It even offers a pretty diagram explaining the TSP process! Of course, the complete source code of the project can be found on Github.

Development

For a more detailed explanation of the goals of the project you can refer to the ‘about the TSP application‘ page in our projects management tool. In that page you will find ‘the 6 Ws’ of the new application: who, what, when, where, why and how (yes, we know that ‘how’ does not start with ‘W’, but we didn’t invented the 6Ws term).

During development we honored the motto “release early, release often” and worked following agile development principles. We begun by collecting ideas and requirements of the TSP team and the people handling the payments on the SUSE side. After developing a first prototype, it was presented in a video conference. You can find the minutes of this meeting in the project’s wiki.

Once the feedback was in and new goals were set, the prototype was deployed on a provisional server in order for the Travel Committee to test it. Using this test-drive installation, the application was improved in an interactive way. Every two weeks (sometimes a bit longer), a new version was installed. Izabel tested the new version providing very useful feedback used to plan the new milestone in our projects management tool and so on. This cycle is still in motion: new version, feedback, planning, new version…

bento style request status

bento themed request status

Awesome Rails goodies

While working on the TSP application we have developed some features that can be interesting for other Ruby on Rails programmers working within the openSUSE infrastructure, like the team behind OSEM. The TSP application includes a Devise backend for the openSUSE authentication infrastructure, a Bento theme for Bootstrap (written in pure Less) and integration with openSUSE Connect through its REST API. We plan to release all these features as individual components to allow reuse in other openSUSE developments.

Present and future, sharing with others

We plan on continuing maintenance of the application and as with most free software projects, it’s hard to predict in which direction the tool is going to evolve. Conference volunteers in charge of the visa invitation letters and the team in charge of merchandising shipping already made some interesting suggestions so it will not be a surprise if we end up developing a full event management tool. Not for registration and scheduling individual conferences -the oSC’13 guys are already doing a great job developing OSEM– but for the administrative tasks and planning behind the attending various events that communities like openSUSE do.

Concluding

So, if you are an openSUSE contributor and you might need sponsorship for traveling in the future, bookmark the TSP page! If you are a Ruby on Rails developer, just Fork it on Github™ and meet us at oSC’13 to talk about future collaboration. And if you are in charge of a travel support program for another open source project or are thinking about the possibility of starting one, you can run it yourself and we’d be happy to help you in case of trouble. You can find me (Ancor Gonzalez Sosa) as ancorgs in the openSUSE-Project channel on Freenode.

And always remember: have a lot of fun!

Posted in Ambassadors, Boosters, Events, Infrastructure, Marketing | Comments Off on The openSUSE TSP application

The Resourcefulness Of Our Great Community — An Example

June 18th, 2013 by

At the risk of stepping on other people’s toes let me apologize before I start. I am certain we have many members in the community that have gone out of their way to overcome hurdles placed in their way by our “organization” or others. I was inspired by this story because it shows how dedicated our community members are and it really fits well with some of the issues we are still struggling with in the transition from Boosters to SUSE team and the transition between initiatives, Ambassadors to Coordinators and shipping of DVDs to boxes of promo material for designated events.

Peter Czanik was caught in the middle of all of this at a recent FSF conference where he and others had an openSUSE booth. With no DVDs being shipped, due to the transition in the promo material shipping procedure (this has been announced) and no money available through TSP for local production of marketing materials due to a snafu (a temporary solution is in the works) there was basically no help from the resources where help should be coming from, sorry about that Peter.

Despite these obstacles Peter and the team showed up and made due with what was available to have great success. In Peter’s words:

“”””
– distributed the last few remaining openSUSE 12.2 DVDs. Many people complained, that it’s not the latest and greatest, but also many were happy, as they have an old machine and older Linux versions usually have lower resource requirements.
– reused the posters we printed last autumn to decorate the booth (at the end of the day they were in a sorry state, so can’t be reused any more…)
– used the few remaining openSUSE brochures, stickers we printed last year (printing was contributed last year by somebody working at a printing company and our company printer…)

– used my ARM machines and a few borrowed mini PCs to demo openSUSE and make the booth eye catching (people asked about the machines and went away with openSUSE DVDs and brochures )

So, in short: last autumn we had local contributions from community members, this year we used what was last few bits of it and some creativity.

The good thing is, that I was told from multiple directions, that openSUSE had the best booth among software projects at the conference (and they did not know, that it was from a ZERO budget…).

The bad thing is, that we don’t have any marketing materials left. No DVDs, posters or brochures.

“””””

There is no need to rose color the situation, leaving community members trying to represent openSUSE at a conference stranded like this should not happen and there is no excuse for creating this situation in the first place. Work is proceeding to address these issue. However, I want to focus on the positive, and that is undoubtedly how determined Peter and the team were to make the conference a success and how they overcame the obstacles presented to them.

Thank you Peter and team fro being such dedicated representatives of our community and project. Also thank you for pointing out the shortcomings in our current transition period. This will allow us to address these, hopefully in short order.

As I mentioned, am am certain many of you have similar stories to tell. Thanks for your efforts as well.

Posted in Ambassadors, Events | 1 Comment »

BITA 2013 Invite

February 21st, 2013 by

BITA2013

 

You are invited to this mega IT exhibition, see you there if you are in or around Baroda during the next three days.

Posted in Ambassadors, Events, Marketing | Comments Off on BITA 2013 Invite

openSUSE in Education, Spreading Continue

May 17th, 2012 by

What do you feel as an open source developer, user, or enthusiast if you see this beautiful piece of software is used by hundred of schools and thousand of students? Great isn’t it? And that’s what happened here in a small dot on this earth in Yogyakarta Indonesia.

This program was initiated by the Government of Indonesia with the objective to introduce the open source and e-learning method to student and teacher. So three years ago I was contacted to help them to realize their dream, and here I’m now reporting that there are around 7300 openSUSE installation in 350 elementary and junior-high schools. We also use SLES in servers to provide repositories and e-learning materials in SCORM using Moodle.  This is work in progress. We educate teachers to use openSUSE and also creating learning material so it is always in beta stage I think 😀

I want to say thank you to all the good people, my friends and co-workers, they are unknown in openSUSE community, even many of them are not subscribing the mailing list, but they are the true openSUSE ambassadors in Indonesia. They come to schools and persuade the teachers to use openSUSE. Without them this dream will never come true. Picture below show some of them smiling holding the openSUSE 12.1 promo DVD that AJ sent to me. You all great! Also picture of teachers while following our session about openSUSE.

All the good people

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Teachers train using openSUSE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Finally we welcome everyone in openSUSE community if you want to visit Indonesia don’t forget to pay a visit to one of this schools in Yogyakarta and you will see how student are happy using it 😀

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Posted in Ambassadors, Education, Marketing | 2 Comments »

openSUSE at BITA2012

February 20th, 2012 by

We once again participated in Baroda IT Association’s annual exhibition, gave out whole lot of promo DVDs and also ‘sold’ some openSUSE-Edu DVDs. Here are few of the pictures from the event:
openSUSE at BITA2012
Click the picture above for the rest of the pictures.

Posted in Ambassadors, Education, Events, Marketing | 1 Comment »

Geeko says: Hey dude, that’s my car!

October 9th, 2011 by
Geeko in its new car

Geeko : I love riding

Imagine it!

A few months ago, I’ve started to look for my next car. Then a crazy idea emerged, why not a Geeko’s car?

Find it!

At that time Gilbert my mechanic [www] told me that Ford will get a new Fiesta model called Sport+ with a more powerful engine, a new look & feel. I went to the exhibition and made a short test drive. The car was cool. The exhibit model was in blue with 2 white stripes.

Blue? Green would have been cool isn’t it?

(more…)

Posted in Ambassadors, Artwork, Boosters, Marketing | 14 Comments »

3 new virtual party on SecondLife for upcoming openSUSE 12.1

October 3rd, 2011 by

You get an invitation!

Geeko place on SecondLife

Geeko place on SecondLife

Ladies & Gentlemen, months after the first virtual party [1][2][3] organized for 11.4 launch,

Françoise (aka Morgane Marquis) and myself (tigerfoot) organize 3 new parties on SecondLife [4] to welcome and fest our next release openSUSE 12.1, coming around the 11.11.11.

  • Three virtual great Saturday: October 22th, November 12th and December 10th.
  • From 6 to 8am Australian DJ Ariella is back again.
  • From 9 to 11am (SL time : utc-9) we will have the pleasure to listen American DJ Esquivel.

You should take this opportunity to try Second Life, creating an avatar, coming to dance and drinking some beers with us at Geekos Place.
(more…)

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Posted in Ambassadors, Distribution, Events, lizards.openSUSE.org, Marketing | Comments Off on 3 new virtual party on SecondLife for upcoming openSUSE 12.1

Desktop Summit Berlin 2011 – Report

August 15th, 2011 by

Desktop Summit

Last minute team

Monday before Desktop Summit, I’ve just learned that we (as openSUSE/SUSE) will not have the SuseStudio kiosk.
Too bad, but Wednesday, I finally get confirmation from my customer, that the new hardware will not be delivered before Friday 12th. Ah ah good news. I will be able to go to Berlin. So I bought the last airplane ticket for Friday afternoon, and also the last bed at good price.

I will be a Berliner for a few days! And fill the blanks to maintain our booth up and welcoming

Somethings has to be done? sometimes has been done!

(more…)

Posted in Ambassadors, Boosters, Desktop, Distribution, Events, GNOME, KDE, Marketing, X.org, XFCE | Comments Off on Desktop Summit Berlin 2011 – Report

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