openSUSE Project Meeting - 22.10.2012 14:30-15:30


Agenda:
=======

1. Conference impressions
2. Summer of Code / Google Code In
3. openSUSE Summit
4. FOSS in South America


1. Conference impressions
=========================

- kkaempf - very good idea, learned about Nix(OS) packages
- henne - goodparts/bad parts
        - too general stuff is useless for us
        - future media is nice and adds sprinkle
          but 3+ talks about foss unrelated stuff is too much
- rjschwei - good, opportunity to present us as a project to people who don't see opensuse as a community (yet)
- henne - there are lot of other conferences where we can do that
- warlordfff - more people that would be at opensuse talks went to linuxdays talks (not vice versa)
             - we lost more visitors than gained (eg. ambassadors vs sysadmin talks)
- henne+kkaempf - having too many tracks hurts in a way, indeed
- tampakrap - major problem was coordinating all organizing parties _before_ the conference
            - we should try to put more emphasis on communication
- rjschwei - document on the wiki how to organize the conference, what to do, what to avoid
- tampakrap - many things are already documented (sort of), because wiki was used during the organizing of the conference
- vincent - people from greece already saw a lot from the organization, because they were here at the prague conf


2. Summer of Code / Google Code In
==================================

- henne - quality of the proposed projects is dropping
- rjschwei - fdisk guy is here, one of the reasons for soc is to attract new people and it did succeeded in that case
           - lets look at that example and see what to do, to have more good proposals/projects/successses next year
- henne - there's no time for deep analysis of projects, because mentors appear just few days before deadlines
- vuntz - admins didn't do a very good job this year, there's more to do there
- rjschwei - preparation for GCI - it is for highschool students, add your tasks to the wiki
            - no money for students this year, they are inviting ~20 people to campus in california
            - 2 students from each project are nominated to go to the googleplex
- miska - does GCI has the same format for tasks like last year? (one-three day long tasks)
        - that way a mentor can manage 3-4 students, because it's not that tiring as mentoring GSOC
- rjschwei - yes, just small changes: translation tasks are no longer allowed
           - tasks can be short, but have to meet certain criteria


3. openSUSE Summit
==================

- henne - lot of people could not come to opensuse conference, because they were at susecon/summit
- vuntz - first time we organized it
        - lot of local people came, quite successful for the first summit
        - travel support program, if people wanted to go, could ask for sponsorship
- warlordfff - do you think that summit helped opensuse community?
             - summit undermined opensuse conference, it's not local, but not global either
- kkaempf - good part - close to susecon - made opensuse community more visible to business people
          - the naming of summit/conference was not ideal - caused lots of confusion
            (people submitting talks to wrong one, etc.)
- warlordfff - it divided the community into 2 parts
- tampakrap - lots of problems with organizing conference, because of susecon
            - lot of people were unavailable
- izabel - it's pretty hard to get visa to USA, thus summit was not an american conference, just for USA/Canada
         - lots of people that were on susecon are not here
         - it's hard to keep both sides happy
- warlordfff - more people from the board were on susecon than here - that's lame
- henne - maybe we should try to get more space (for opensuse) at susecon, not have it as a separate event
- rjschwei - we can try to move susecon/opensuse conf around the year, we could check the schedule of other confs
- tampakrap - akademy also had one (or two?) editions in USA, but they cancelled it,
              because of the same problems as we face


4. FOSS in South America
========================

- tian2992 - meetings every week, not only about opensuse but free software in general, lot of collaboration
           - FLISOL - moving from guatemala, costarica, etc.
           - some major challenges - too few communication, opensuse summit could serve as a central point
                                     for people from americas, but that was not the case
                                   - not enough install disks - making their own, funding resources
                                   - people don't know what resources are available, because it is not translated
                                     into spanish - effort that has to be done
- jospoortvliet - what exactly we can do?
- tian2992 - let people know there is a central information in their language (and translate more)
           - make tools to connect people better