10 września 2004 roku cyberluk wysłał do mnie i do Mirona taką wiadomość:

Witam,

Od początku istnienia Forum uważnie obserwujemy użytkowników i ich wypowiedzi. Wczoraj padła propozycja, żeby zaoferować dwom osobom moderowanie Forum. Dzisiaj po dyskusji na ten temat ustaliliśmy, że faktycznie te osoby dostana status moderatora, oczywiście o ile się na to zgodzą. Jedna z tych osób jest Pan. Czy pasuje Panu status moderatora?
Drugiej osoby na razie nie ujawniamy. Dostanie takiego samego maila.
Oczywiście cala załoga będzie nadal patrzeć, co się dzieje z Forum, ale praca jest pracą i czasami nie ma czasu na zajmowanie sie Forum.
Liczymy na pozytywna odpowiedz. Na razie jest to status moderatora Forum, ale zaczęliśmy się również zastanawiać nad FAQiem, który byłby zbiorem problemów z Forum “w pigułce”. Oczywiście status moderatora wiązałby się z odpowiednimi uprawnieniami przy takim FAQu.

cyberluk

Oczywiście pod domeną forum.suse.pl już wcześniej był dostępny skrypt phpBB. Jednak to połowa 2004 roku spowodowała, że Forum otworzyło się na zwykłych użytkowników. To właśnie zwykli użytkownicy zdominowali Forum, tworzyli jego kontent, zarządzali nim i warto to podkreślić. Początkowo Novell Professional Services, a ostatecznie SUSE Polska, udostępniało nam, polskiej społeczności, zasoby i przestrzeń, z których z pożytkiem dla każdego z nas korzystaliśmy.

W ten sposób przez piętnaście lat zwykli użytkownicy, power userzy, a także ludzie zawodowo związani z branżą IT dzielili się między sobą doświadczeniem na Oficjalnym Polskim Forum SUSE Linux. Czas je pożegnać.

Obecnie przestrzenią dla nas będzie forums.opensuse.org. Będąc bliżej Projektu openSUSE, będzie nam łatwiej włączyć się w różnego rodzaju aktywności i koordynować je. Natomiast zwykli użytkownicy zyskają dostęp do znacznie większej społeczności.

Polska sekcja jest widoczna jako subforum pod adresem forums.opensuse.org lub bezpośrednio forums.opensuse.org/forumdisplay.php/936-Polski

W przypadku problemów z rejestracją, proszę o kontakt: pbojczuk@opensuse.org.

Poradnik przetrwania:
forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/531844-Poradnik-przetrwania-na-forums-opensuse-org?p=2871109

Dostęp do forum.suse.pl będzie ograniczany, a samo Forum wkrótce zamknięte.

Love & bruises,
Przemysław “Stefan” Bojczuk

We’ve seen how to gather some people and create a community (at least that’s the quick tutorial how it worked for us in Greece).

The product is cool (any product) but here we have people. They should know WHY they join a community as volunteers. Is it because they want to help FLOSS to make the world a better place? Is it because it is Fun? Is it because they like the pros that open source provides? Is it because they like to help other people? Find out WHY people want to join-form a community.

The key to increase the number of the members is to attend to events. Here a quick tutorial how to do that. The best possible scenario is a developer to come to your booth and join the team. But this is 1% possible to happen (maybe less). Usually developers we’re searching, they have their favorite distro/project and they don’t change so easy.

The best thing is to join events where you can find end users (end users = users they’re computer science students where they focus on windows, users that their computer being used for facebook/twitter/office suite). Why? Because those users can do some work that the developers hate. What’s that?

0. Junior Jobs. Write a junior jobs list where someone can find exactly what to do and how to do it. The list could have the following.
1. Report bugs to bugzilla. So developers can fix it (of course developers have to be polite and help end users to provide possible broken data etc).
2. Documentation. Developers just hate to write documentation.
3. Translation. Usually developers use some “strange” language. So if someone asks you, please be polite and reply.
4. Promotion. Everyone call it marketing. The term marketing seems that the distro/project earns money out of promotion. Maybe the best term is engagement. This is needed because if it’s the best distro/project among others, how more potential users will learn about it? And if it’s the best, if no one uses it, then it’s useless.

Usually end users join the community not because of the product but because of the people (remember to find your WHY people should join the community). They stay in the community ONLY because of the people. If he/she doesn’t feel good, then he/she leaves. Unfortunately community is a number of volunteers. There’s not someone that orders them to do something. If there’s someone that will present the result of the community as his/hers, then people will leave and community terminates.
Sometimes, members expect something in return. If there’s a company that supports your open source project, then maybe they expect material or money. It’s not like that because as volunteer you’re doing your hobby. If your hobby become your job later, that’s the best for you.

So the question is how to keep the community together? The answer is you can’t.
If everything is ideally, everyone grow. The time they spend as volunteers is limited. They have personal life. They have careers.
So what’s the workaround? Find more people before your time will become limited.

But why the article has a title:
From end user to developer

Well, as I mentioned before, it’s impossible a developer from Fedora to decide to do development only for openSUSE. So every project has to “develop” developers. How to do that? Volunteers in the community they join as end users. They like the various aspects of the project and want to search more. They can find a way how to contribute on bug fixing (there should be an end user to report a bug). Then they learn a programming language and they learn also how to package. So they become developers. Maybe the community is -1 person (because he/she might be tired-boring to travel and promote) but the project is +1 developer.

Develop developers. Help end users to grow.

Local open source community is bigger now and next step for you is to organise (or join) global conferences. One part of the organisation is the promotion of the conference. You want to have as many visitors as you can.

I will try to write down what I did during openSUSE global conferences and some local events.

BEFORE THE EVENT

0. Web page

There MUST be a web page and a system that accepts registration, paper submission, information etc. Write everything that visitor should know about the conference.
We use OSEM in openSUSE. Check out https://events.opensuse.org

1. Blog blog blog.

You’ll have some announcements for the conference. Dates, the place, new website, call for papers announcement, hotels that visitors can stay, schedule, keynote speakers etc. Usually, every open source project has a central blog or news site. You can write the articles there. Try to make fuzz by publishing your articles often.
Global communities can translate the announcements to their language and promote the conference locally.

Local communities are formed by members with blogs who publish on different planet sites. You can make a schedule so everyone can publish the announcement every other day. More eyes will see the announcement and will apply either as speaker or visitor.

Two things you want to have is contributors+visitors and sponsors. If your project is famous, then it’s easy. If not, then you better publish the initial announcement to magazines, newspapers, technical blogs-sites. If you don’t have access, then you better send it by e-mail or fax and then call them and ask them if they got the text. If they publish it, you’re lucky.

Translate those announcements and publish them, so local population will see that there’s a conference coming.

2. Promote to other FOSS conferences

There are plenty of FOSS conferences around the world.
* Community (local or global) has to apply for a booth and/or, if it’s possible, present why someone should attend.
* At the booth, you should have promo materials of your conference and give away to local LUGs or hackerspaces to hang posters at their places.
* Another cool thing is to have free coupons for beer at the conference. If beer isn’t the solution, then find another thing that can be found only at your conference and give free coupons.
* Wear special T-Shirts with the logo or #oSC or “Ask me for the conference”. You show people that you’re organizing something and can ask you questions.
* Finally, go to other project’s booth and invite them. You can ask them if they want to have a booth at your conference or apply for a presentation.

3. Messages to post

Create a list of messages you’ll post to social media.
First of all, you should post the announcements.
Then create a list of general messages that you should post before the conference. Content will be related to the subject of the conference or the country etc.
When you have the schedule ready, create a post with the name of the person (mention him/her on the social media), the title of the presentation (mention if it’s a famous project).
The messages can be 2-3 per day but not the same time. Try to have 4-5 hours time delay between tweets.

4. Twitter

Create a twitter account that will be used for the conference. Everyone can use it as hashtag (#) and also can communicate with you before and during the conference. For openSUSE we had #opensuseconf as hashtag. The account was @opensuseconf
The same account can create the Lanyard event (you’ll see next).

5. Facebook event page

Create a Facebook event page under the official account of the project. Post the tweets here as well. Post the messages (no 2). If you have some cool documentation of the subject that will be presented, just post it.

Since the address will be difficult to remember, create a subdomain under your project’s name (eg facebook.conference.opensuse.org) that will forward it to the event page.

6. Google Plus event page

Do the same as facebook. Some people hate to use facebook, so google plus is the solution. Do the same also with the URL.
Google Plus event notifies to e-mail every user about changes. So if you post, they’ll get a notification.

7. Lanyard event page

This isn’t very famous but it’s very cool. It uses twitter accounts. You setup the event and when you have the schedule, you can add the subject and mention the speaker. You can also use it to post announcements.
Here is the lanyard of openSUSE conference 2014

8. Meetup.com event

If money is not an issue for your project, you can create an event at http://www.meetup.com

9. IRC, mailing lists, forums

You have to create an IRC channel where you reply all possible questions. There’s also mailing list for that.
To promote the conference, you should post the announcement to mailing lists, forum of all possible projects (eg if we’re oprnSUSE, then post to GNOME, KDE, ownCloud etc). And try to inform the posts with the new announcements.

10. Flickr

Create a group where people can upload their pictures, so everyone who blogs can use those pictures. You can create it before the event starts and post picture from the venue, before you set it up.

DURING THE EVENT

1. Messages to post

Create a document with messages to post with all the presentations. The message has to be:

Presentation title (with mention) @ #Room_name. Not @ #oSC15 #openSUSE? Live @ Stream_URL

Create a table. Columns will be the rooms, rows will be the timetable. So you’ll check the time and post the right one.

WARNING: Check with program team if there was a day change of the program. Also check the right Stream URL.

2. Twitter

Here you start posting the messages per time. Don’t forget the mentions to people, projects and the #. Here you mention someone by using @username.

3. Facebook event page

Same as Twitter, don’t forget to mention. Here mention is with @Project name. Here you can use more characters that twitter. So here you can also add the hashtag of your project (eg #opensuse, #opensuseconf)
Ask people upload pictures here. Also ask people to post their reports.

4. Google plus event page

Same as Twitter, don’t forget to mention. Here mention is with +Project name. Here you can use more characters that twitter. So here you can also add the hashtag of your project (eg #opensuse, #opensuseconf).
Again, ask people to upload pictures here. Also ask people to post their reports.

5. IRC

You can post here as well. Some people didn’t join you or they just see live streaming and use IRC to ask the speaker. So it’ll be nice if theres the program of what’s in every room with the streaming URL.

6. Streaming

The social media guy is responsible to handle all the above. He checks if the streaming is working and if not, then warns the video team. It’s good for him because he can see all presentations but it’s kind of “I’m locked somewhere and I don’t mingle with people”.
Users who didn’t make it, they can see the conference over the Interent.

7. Flickr

Try to gather all pictures and upload them in the afternoon, so everyone who wants to blog, can use the pictures from there (there are Google Plus and Facebook events as alternatives). It’s very cool if the pictures are up very soon, so everyone can view them.

This is an attempt to make a list of things that someone-group of people can follow to develop a healthy community or team. This post is an overview of what I did with Kostas for the Greek openSUSE community.
A small detail is that we were only 2. So we took decisions fast. We didn’t have to vote or something.
We had an “advantage” because we have an awesome global community and we asked for something we weren’t sure how to proceed.

Let’s start:

0. Have a clear goal. What you want to do. Have a big goal that some parts aren’t “visible” when you start.
1. Web page: This is the web page-blog that will show information about community, the distro or the project. Make it visible on planets. BE CAREFUL. Don’t focus on how to make a great site-blog using personal wordpress, drupal etc. Set it up on blogger and start post articles. You want CONTENT (write an article every other day). Don’t spend time to maintain or secure your web page.
2. Mailing list: Ask the project if they can setup for you. If not, then try to find alternatives such as google groups.
3. IRC Channel
4. Forum: Prefer to ask from the project to setup a section for your language. If your project doesn’t have forum, then ask a LUG or tech forum to use their’s. Do not have your forum setup in your host for the same reasons as before. Don’t spend time to maintain or secure the forum.

The above list is the MUST have to start.
A key to everything is to try to have all information in your language, so it’ll be “attractive” to people who like the idea of open source but they don’t speak English. What’s the role of such people? They can organize local events.

Next step is to advertise the whole project-distro. This can happen:
1. Write to blogs-forums (technological or not).
2. Create Facebook group/page and advertise your attempt to other groups/pages.
3. Create Twitter account and tweet news about your community.
4. Create Google Plus Profile/Community.
5. Contact press. First contact local and then national press.
6. If you have a newsletter or weekly magazine, it’s good to translate it (or a piece of it), so the open source community in your country will learn about you and your projects.

Before deciding what social media accounts to create, be aware that you have to maintain them. So search the web, what social media is more famous to users. For “tech” users, Google Plus Communities is the perfect place. It also can be used instead of Forums.

A distro or project, it’s not all about write code. It’s have fun. So advertise it.
1. Release parties. When a new release is out, it’s time to party.
2. Meet ups. A good place to organize them is http://meetup.com/. A meet up can be also a hangout.
3. Special teams. Check Fedora‘s example.
4. Beer-drinks. Check out ChicagoLUG.
5. Organize events on your own (start small and then go big). For example install fest or special nights (2 hours of projects presentations and 3-4 hours hacking). Join events (even cohost with other organizations) or conferences that will show people what you do. You should search some big events in your country and attend. Here is a tutorial about your presence at conference.
6. Then go big. Examples? Organize something like openSUSE summer collaboration camp or if there’s a global conference, you can host it.

After you find people to follow you, then you can let them run special tasks (such as social media handling or forum moderator). When you’re all set locally, then you can go global and show what you did.

During the process, don’t act as leader or president. Since we’re all volunteers on this, no one likes if someone is ordering people to do tasks. People like coordination. Someone that will remind the community deadlines, news, special days. Announce the results of a task, cheer up people by reward them (somehow).

People don’t follow you for what you do. They follow you for why you do it.
So you have to know why you create a community.

A very good reference is Jos Poortvliet’s blog about 5 steps to organizing a meetup. It’s a small start that might go big.

Original post:
Personal Blog

1. Read the tech news
Read the news (RSS, social networks, mailing lists). There are many conferences that you can join (some conferences are annual). Unfortunately, the organizers might skip to sent you invitation because you’re either too small project without any marketing section or they forgot you for their reasons. You should contact them and ask them to join as community-project. Most conferences have call for papers period, where you can apply for a presentation.

2. Community Meetings
Now that you made the first contact, you should sent an e-mail to your project mailing list, informing them about the conference and asking for an IRC meeting. At the kick off meeting, someone MUST be the coordinator of everything (the tasks are following). Another thing that should be clear is how many members of the community will join. You have to decide early because you can book your trip and accommodation (if the conference is quite big, there won’t be any rooms available for you). Travel as a team. If you decide early, you can ask for sponsorship, like openSUSE Travel_Support_Program or GNOME Travel sponsorship (GNOME for smaller events).

3. Ideas for the coordinator
Coordinator doesn’t mean that he/she does everything himself/herself. It means that he/she knows everything about the trip and contact the organizers:

* First of all create a wiki page about the event. See some examples at openSUSE or GNOME. Ask members who will join, to write down their name and what materials can bring (even if they’ll have their laptops).

* Contact organizers for the booth. How many people will help at the booth. How many plugs do we need. If there’s a possibility to provide us with projector or monitors or tv.

* Blog post at community’s blog. Re post from members of the community to their personal blogs on different days (we want many people to read it on different days).

* Social media team. Find the conference’s facebook and google plus events and join. If they don’t have, contact them and ask them if it’s OK to create one. Ask members of the community to join the events. Ask members of the community to post everyday something about your project at the social networks event pages (something like: DON’T MISS THE PRESENTATION BY … AT …). Don’t forget to use a hashtag you want for the specific conference (like #project_is_coming). Remember to use also the “normal” hashtag (example #project). Ask members of the community to retweet you.

* Don’t forget to bring a camera. Bring one or more cameras to take pictures or videos. Those pictures will be used for reports (blog posts), upload them to your facebook-google plus groups. Also ask everyone that brought his/her own camera to upload the pictures to your groups or send them directly to you, so you upload them to public place. Don’t forget to take the family picture.

4. Swag for the booth
If you’re lucky and there’s a global project that sponsors your swag, then ask them to send you promo materials. Here comes the coordinator. If the conference is away from your home, then he/she can contact the organizers and the project’s marketing materials coordinator to mail them directly to the organizers’ address. If you want to keep some promo materials for future events, then you can ask them to mail them to your place. Regarding openSUSE, they can sponsor you to create some promo materials yourself with the openSUSE Travel Support Program.
If your project is small and you don’t have enough money to support it, try to have some brochures about it and maybe some promo cd/dvds.
Other promo materials are stickers, posters, T-Shirts, buttons, cubes, caps, plush toys etc.
Here comes the confusion. In my country (Greece), people think the swag is free. On the other hand, they ask us “how the community-project earn money?”. Well, personally, I think someone who wants something should “donate” to project. Unfortunately some countries have strict financial rules and it’s hard to “sell” something unless you give receipt. Well, I won’t analyze this now since it’s out of the scope of this post.

5. We’re at the conference
Tips to remember:

* Try to wear the same T-Shirt, so everyone will know that you’re from the same project and can come talk to you.

* Remember only one person stays behind the table and all the others in front of the table and speak with visitors. It’s better to stay 2 of you in front of the desk so it’ll be easier for the visitor to talk to you and ask than just one person and wait for the visitor to talk to him (it’s psychology). Remember to smile.
Another idea is how to setup your table at the booth. The best solution to have as many visitors as possible is to setup you table behind you, at the wall. That way you’ll have free room to stand and talk with visitors. You’ll make them to pass you to get some swag as well and either you or the visitor can start talking. Also this setup is just like hug someone and make him feel welcomed (thanks to Jos Poortvliet for this tip).

* Visitors like people from the projects to “goofy” around. Try to play games each other or with friends from other projects. Visitors are very bored of serious guys with suits to try to “sell” them products.

* If a smaller project cannot be present with a booth, you can host them at yours. Let them bring their swag. It’ll be cool for visitors to know about their existance and also they’ll talk to you about your project.

* Another cool thing you should do (if the room for the booth is enough), you can organize small talks (10-15 mins each). Make a small schedule and print it. Then go to put it on the wall around the venue. Everyone will notice that you’ll have short presentations and also your project’s logo.

Check out my presentation at openSUSE conference 2012:

Non verbal communication (presentation file)

* It’s prohibited to sit and work at your computer. Visitors aren’t interested on projects with someone watching his laptop screen at the booth. You’re there for a reason. Talk to people. If there’s emergency and you have to chat or reply mails or write code, go to a presentation and do it there. No one will notice.

* Someone should be at the social media. Repost what the official channels post and also do the same if someone from your team is at a presentation and uses his/her social media. That person could be from home (someone didn’t attend) since he/she can view online streaming all the presentations. If the person is at the conference, try to upload the pictures right after the photographer took them.

6. Aftermath, afterparty, after after…
You’re back. What happened? People MUST know about it. Write a report (even short one) at your community’s blog and the wiki page. Use the pictures you took. Send the link to the channels you promoted your party (facebook, google plus, twitter, mailing lists, forums etc) and ask members of your community to repost to their blogs-social media accounts (on a different days).

Procedure:

1. Find a date.
The date of your party should be during a weekend (because it’s easier for people to join, since most people work during the week). Prefer to have your party during the morning. People from outside your city want to join the party and they have to travel to your city and back home. If you discuss with the members of your community about the date, you have to find 2 alternative dates for the party since you have to find the place for the party (see below), so if the owners of the place do not allow you your first date, then use the alternative. A good tool to find common dates is http://www.doodle.com/.

2. Place of the party
If you have the 2 alternative dates, you have to find the cafe-bar, the place that will host your party. As I said above, you should have 2 alternative dates, so when you ask them if they’re OK to host your party and they refuse, you can propose them the second date. The location of the place should be at the center of your city (unless there’s a special place at the suburbs). If people from outside your city want to join the party, it’s easier for them to reach the place. Regarding the place, if you think that you can make deals for better prices of the drinks, it’s up to you. It’s not your concern what they will order. It’s best if the place serves coffee, beer, soft drinks. If someone is hungry, there should be soft food. Finally, background music is OK.

3. Promotion
* Your first task is to create a poster for the party. Be creative. Try to make the poster funny. The information you should have is TITLE/DATE/TIME/LOCATION (address)/CONTACT (mail or phone number). Regarding the location, if it’s easy for you, put a QR code, so they can see it on maps. Try to find a proper hashtag to use for facebook, google plus and twitter.

* Write a blog post at community’s blog and ask members of your community to take the text-pictures and write a post at their blogs (preferably different days). If those blogs are registered to planets, many people will read about your party.

* If your community-project has a global place where to add your party, go and add it. See some examples at openSUSE or GNOME. * Create a facebook event and invite as many people as you can. Remember, less than 1/3 that replied yes, will finally come.

* Create a google plus event and invite also as many people as you can. Ask people to invite their friends.

* Tweet your facebook and google plus events and encourage members of your community to retweet. Also try to tweet regularly about your release party. Don’t forget to use the hashtags.

* Send mails to ALL mailing lists about your party (text, poster and social media event pages). Send mails to all distros-GUIs-projects mailing lists. Although there are other channels the users can learn about your release party, you want them to join and celebrate with you, so they don’t have excuse that you didn’t invite them.

* Post to forums about your party (text, poster and social media event pages). Don’t forget to add the option to receive a notification if someone reply, asking questions. Again try to do the same. Post it to ALL distros-GUIs-projects forums, so they’ll celebrate with you.

4. Cake
Although it’s not necessary to have a cake (because it costs), it’s sweet to have one. Order it from your favorite patisserie. Ask-order them to print the logo of your project on the cake. Also choose your favorite flavor of the cake. According to my experience a 2kgr cake is OK for most parties. In my country costs about 30Euros. Since we’re volunteers and we’re doing our “hobby”, we pay for the cake. If the team has more than one person, it’s easier to cover the amount. If there’s only one person it’s normal if he/she doesn’t have a cake. When you’re going to get the cake, ask them if they have candles (if it’s not similar to the version number of your project, 1 candle is OK). Also buy from a market, plastic plates and forks/spoons. You’re going to use plastic plates to serve the cake.

5. Camera
Bring one or more cameras to take pictures or videos. Those pictures will be used for reports (blog posts), upload them to your facebook-google plus groups. Also ask everyone that brought his/her own camera to upload the pictures to your groups or send them directly to you, so you upload them to public place. Don’t forget to take the family picture. Also remember to make people laugh. After the “serious” picture, ask them to give you their silly face. We’re bored being serious.

6. Swag
I mentioned above that you should gather the people to talk for social event and not presentation. It would be nice to give them swag. The only “promo material” that it’s hard for you to have is PromoDVDs (if your distro still sends DVDs). For some countries it’s hard to have PromoDVDs after the release. Order them from the marketing channels, they produce the right amount of DVDs, send them to your country. It might take you 1-2 months after the official release to have the original PromoDVDs. Although everyone can download the new version from the Internet, people like to have an original version of the DVD. Regarding Live Media, you can have some empty DVDs and the ISO files. If someone asks for a DVD, you can burn one. If someone asks for a live USB, you can also make his.

7. Social Media during the party.
It sounds nasty, I know. There are people that didn’t make it to your party. They’re interested to know what’s happening. You can have ONLY one laptop (the same laptop can create the live DVD/USB). The person in charge, update your twitter, facebook, google plus with short messages (don’t forget hashtags) and also with pictures. Ask members of the community from outside your city to repost those messages (with the right hashtags). Try to keep the IRC informed as well.
Another cool thing to do is a google hangout (maybe set it up with your youtube channel). This is the easiest way to have your party brodacast live. To do so, you should have a web camera (not your laptop’s) and mute your speakers (leave the mic on).

8. Aftermath, afterparty, after after…
You had a successful party. People MUST know about it. Write a report (even short one) at your community’s blog. Use the uploaded pictures and send the link to the channels you promoted your party (facebook, google plus, twitter, mailing lists, forums etc) and ask members of your community to repost to their blogs-social media accounts (on a different days).

IMPORTANT TIP: Most of the release parties of FOSS projects attract male members. So even if a woman wants to join the party, she’s afraid or bored to come (or any other reason). So try to find women to join you, even if they don’t use Open Source. Where you can find them? At your university, ask your friends, ask your family, ask your friends to bring their girlfriends etc. They’ll come to drink a coffee or a beer and eat cake. They won’t learn how to compile code.

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.

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

Screenshot using Radiance Light Theme and default Ubuntu indicator layout.

Some brief updates about the ongoing work towards bringing Ayatana Project software into openSUSE:

1. Software Updates

Canonical recently released a batch of updates which bring new functionality (Indicators seem to respond faster now) and very nice improvements, some of them contributed by down-streamers. From my humble experience I would risk to claim that Canonical is doing an excellent job as an upstreamer. I’ve updated all packages to the latest versions. This allowed to remove some patches.

2. Unity

Unity is now one step closer. For Unity I’ve started to package Compiz git snapshots from the correct branches pointed by Unity documentation. This brought something new to me, cmake. I’ve done this very slowly, reading some docs meanwhile about cmake. My packaging around Compiz is mainly based on OBS X11:Compiz repository, so pretty much all the credits should be for the original project Packagers which done an awesome job. Currently I’m missing only 3 packages to test Unity. Recently with kernel and mesa updates some issues around ATI hardware seem to have fixed for openSUSE Factory users, which enabled in my case FireGL, therefore I can test properly Unity now and check for the integration into openSUSE.

Unity by default uses the Ayatana’s Indicators, and if they are not present, it will fallback to GNOME’s applets. This is very nice and I’m thankful Canonical made it this way. This brings non-Ubuntu users the Unity experience at almost no trouble, since there isn’t actually much patching required to implement Unity.

3. GNOME:Ayatana Repository

GNOME:Ayatana Repository will be populated during the next two weeks with the latest changes and will provide for the time being the Ayatana’s Indicators and Unity. I am currently working around libappindicator stack and it’s Indicators. Currently I’m testing the patches required on the GTK+ stack and this is pretty much the last barrier before going into #STAGE2, polishing and populating GNOME:Ayatana.

It’s not decided yet what packages are going to present on Factory. My wish is to push only Unity into Factory and it’s dependencies, this might not happen for 11.4 as I’m not sure about the freeze schedules and it might be too late already, but since we’re depending on Compiz upstream, we’ll see what happens. Even if Unity isn’t going to be available on Factory, I’m sure we can use KIWI or SUSE Studio to release a small openSUSE Unity Spin.

I’ve also decided that I (typo: previously would) wouldn’t like to see Unity available by openSUSE before the official release from Ubuntu, for which I wish all the success.

Since the very early start that I’ve been using pkg-config as much as I can. According to some information that I collected previously, this would be great for cross-distribution build. Depending on the time and work done, I might make the necessary modifications and enable cross-distribution building on this project, thus, making it available for other RPM distributions supported by OBS. This will require a bit of testing before, so it will be work to be done after 11.4 is released and during it’s lifecycle. Maybe by the time of openSUSE 12 gets released, we will have this project also available for other RPM based distributions. I have no knowledge on Debian packaging, but Ubuntu ships this software and Debian probably has it also available so… that won’t be a problem.

4. Artwork

I am providing on GNOME:Ayatana Ubuntu’s Light Themes (Ambiance and Radiance) and offering a patched version of Metacity that renders those themes perfectly. I’m not changing the original colors from the themes or modifying them in any way. So they might be a bit more of orange and not green.

I’ve contacted some people to ask if they would be willing to donate some artwork to make a small package with Wallpapers, some have answered yes, so I will make a small package with a couple of wallpapers for the traditional resolutions and distribute it alongside with this software as optional as always.

5. GTK2, GTK3 and QT

Implementation of GTK3 will be done within the next days, as I am also considering enabling QT support for KDE users (Indicators only for now).

That’s pretty much the result of the last days of work… more news to come in the nearby future.

The Verein Computerspende Hamburg does something very useful: It takes used computer parts that other people do not longer need and refurbish them to working computers again. These computers are handed to people who happen to be in a difficult situation in life. They have to live from Hartz IV which is a kind German social security, following the unemployment benefit which ends after a short period. Hartz IV means very, very little money the people have to make their lives from, too little to buy a new computer.

On the other hand, an increasing amount of the job offerings are posted on the web, so people currently unemployed basically have to search the web, not speaking about preparing the resumes to apply for a job. So how would one do that without a computer?

Computing is not only hardware and well known operating systems and applications are far away from free, so it’s obvious that our great project is a perfect partner here: Not that we only offer a user friendly, easy to install, secure, feature rich and last but not least completely free Linux Distribution, we as a community are also able to help if problems come up, regardless if somebody has money or not and what kind of problem it might be. This is another very concrete example where free software and the FOSS communities help your neighbor, or you – as it is very easy to get into a difficult situation in life.

We sent 500 openSUSE 11.3 DVDs to Hamburg with our warm invitation and welcome to all new users to show up and join our community. So be aware of new kids on the block

And if you are in Hamburg or around and want to help, I am sure Verein Computerspende can make use of the help of more Geekos, such as installation, first hand user support and probably much more. And if you know of a similar interested initiative, let me know, I am sure I will find more DVDs