Hi Community, Over the last weeks your Board has been busy with the following broad topics: - Welcoming Sarah Julia Kriesch and Christian Boltz to the Board - Discussing/Renewing the Treasurer position - Arranging annual Face 2 Face board meeting - openSUSE Network Infrastructure - Various Legal issues - GSoC & openSUSE Conference To give a little more detail about the topics: - After the successful elections Sarah and Christian have now joined your Board, replacing Kostas Kouduras and Michal Hrusecky. As with previous Boards we re-evaluated our usual meeting schedule and have now moved our Board meetings to happen once every 2 weeks at 1900 Berlin Time. As always, the community can provide items for the Board to discuss at meetings by emailing board@opensuse.org. - Last year the Board created a new appointed role of Treasurer to assist the Board with financial matters in the Project. This individual can attend Board meetings in a non-voting capacity, and is responsible for liaising with our sponsors and dealing with matters such as the Travel Support Programme, primarily so the Board can focus its energies on the Project and not lose too much time on detailed financial matters. As an unelected, Board appointed position, this role has to be re-evaluated annually after each formal Board election. The Board has opted to continue the position and invited Andrew Wafaa to continue in this role for the coming year. Andrew has accepted this responsibility for another year. Thank you Andrew - Every year the Board has one several day workshop/board meeting, hosted at SUSE HQ in Nuremberg. This is our primary gathering to get around a table and focus on major topics and themes for the Project for the year, and to do what we can to help 'set the course' for the Project. It is also a good opportunity to meet contributors and management working at SUSE. This year the meeting will happen during the 3 days before the openSUSE Conference in Nuremberg. Your Board will therefore be meeting during 23-25 May. One topic is certain to be discussed already are how to build upon and extend openSUSE's growth as a project, especially in the light of the dramatic growth in Tumbleweed [1]. This will not just be a discussion of the people and organisational issues that need to be addressed by the infrastructure growing pains we've been going through as a result of this growth. Any suggestions as to how YOU would like these issues addressed and any other issue you want to make sure is discussed at the Face 2 Face meeting please email your thoughts to board@opensuse.org. We promise to take every bit of suggestion on board (pun intended) and do our best to ensure the Project goes forward in the way that reflects the whole communities wishes. - openSUSE Network Infrastructure. As mentioned above and in all of the recent Board meeting minutes, the situation with our infrastructure has been a matter of some concern for the Board for some time. We're pleased to be able to say that after some very rough times we seem to now be on a good track to resolve our issues and put the project on a good track to have the infrastructure it requires as it grows. Thanks to exceptional work and contributions from many sources. The Board would like to extend significant thanks especially to SUSE IT, Micro Focus IT, SUSE Management, and the openSUSE Heroes who have all contributed in their own way to tackle problems as they arose and put in new solutions that should serve the project well into the future. In particular, great effort has been made to address the backlog of tickets to the admin@opensuse.org support request list, which is now in a much healthier than at any time in recent memory. Significant improvements have been made to our mirror infrastructure, with broken mirrors being fixed and much more bandwidth now in place between our primary download systems and our registered mirror hosts. That said, we could always do with more mirrors, so if you know any schools/universities/hosting providers/anyone with bandwidth in your area who might be interested in hosting an openSUSE mirror, please encorage them to volunteer and send them to https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Mirror_infrastructure More broadly, much of our infrastructure (such as the wiki and www.opensuse.org) were hosted on systems solely controlled by Micro Focus IT. While these systems were cared for very professionally, the policies and procedures that come with such an arrangement have proven to be too restrictive for the needs of the openSUSE Project. There is now an ongoing collaborative effort to transfer control of all openSUSE infrastructure to the effective control of the openSUSE Project, specifically the openSUSE Heroes with SUSE-IT supporting them. This is ongoing, with the control of the DNS planned, tested, and almost ready to switch over, as well as individuals within SUSE/openSUSE now having direct access to the MF hosted systems to help facilitate the planned migrations. On this topic, the Board have two requests from the community in the coming weeks and months. Please give your support and understand and these migrations are ongoing, everyone involved is going to do their best to make sure these changes are as painless as possible, but hiccups are bound to happen in such a busy time. And please, consider volunteering to join the openSUSE Heroes [2]. They're going to need all the help they can get, and anyone with any skills or interest in any system administration what so ever (which I think should include most of this mailinglist) should be capable of helping if they can give the time. Please also do anything you can to help spread this request for help as wide as you can, the team really could do with growing in the face of our growing projects future. - The Board have been dealing with a number of legal issues. Obviously not all of these can be discussed. Our Trademark Guidelines were updated to reflect the fact the Board now is the first point of contact for requests to use the openSUSE Trademarks [3] One ongoing trademark request is our work with the openSUSE Indonesia community to transfer ownership of opensuse.id to the openSUSE Project to ensure our trademark is protected appropriately, while still ensuring the openSUSE Indonesia community can still run their community services and mirrors on the domain. Thank you to the openSUSE Indonesia community for being so understanding and helpful as we work through these issues. If anyone has any questions regarding the use of openSUSE Trademarks, please feel free to email board@opensuse.org - and last but by no means least the Board was involved in some decisions regarding Google Summer of Code and the openSUSE Conference, both of which are coming up, look like they're on track to be even bigger successes than last year, and we're all really excited to see openSUSE take part in. What do you all think of this style of Board report? Do you prefer it to the old bi-weekly meeting minutes, or would you prefer the old way of doing things? With the last few months the Board has found it hard to have the time to properly put together meeting minutes for the Project, so this less irregular reporting is certainly easier for us, but we do not want to continue to do it if everyone would prefer more regular reports (though likely in less detail than this) Regards, Richard Brown on behalf of the openSUSE Board [1] https://speakerdeck.com/sysrich/fosdem-2017-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-a... [2] https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Heroes [3] https://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-project/2017-02/msg00032.html -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org