A bit longer than four weeks ago the board announced the first openSUSE board election. With the beginning of the next phase of the election process, I would like to give you a short status update. Since the initial announcement we raised the openSUSE member count by 50% to now 212 approved openSUSE members. I am impressed by the enormous interest in participating in our project. And we have a total of ten candidates running for a seat in the next openSUSE board: Non-Novell * Pascal Bleser * Peter Linnell * Tuukka Pasanen * Alex Rodriguez * Jakub Rusinek * Bryen Yunashko Novell * Marco Michna * Stephen Shaw * Henne Vogelsang * Federico Mena-Quintero Find platforms and contact details for all candidates in the openSUSE wiki: http://en.opensuse.org/Board_Election/2008#Candidates = What is next? = During the next two weeks, each of the 212 openSUSE members is able to give voting privileges for this election to another user (which is not an openSUSE member). This person should be an active contributor of the openSUSE community and needs an account at users.openSUSE.org which has been created before September, 1st 2008. The possibility to give franchise to another person is for you the perfect chance to get a friend or colleague more involved in the openSUSE project. Do not miss this opportunity and help us to get as much people as possible participating on the election! Unfortunately I used a wrong variable in the mail template for the first notification mail, the appointment of additional voters ends October 9th, 2008 at 12:00 UTC. Until ballots will open on October, 9th 2008 (12:00 UTC) we have now two weeks of campaigning, which should be mainly driven by the candidates themselves. Potentially there will be a public IRC debate with all candidates, but this is not set yet. If you are interested and have time to support us organizing it, please get in touch now! Concluding I would like to thank all candidates for standing, the openSUSE board for checking more than hundret membership requests, my colleagues from the election committee and Zonker for their great support. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-announce+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-announce+help@opensuse.org