openSUSE Board Meeting Minutes Nov 19th, 8pm - 10:30pm CET Participants: Federico Mena Quintero (federico1) Hendrik Vogelsang (henne) Michael Löffler (michl) Bryen Yunashko (suseROCKs) Pascal Bleser (yaloki) Joe Brockmeier (zonker), for the 1 hour Advisory Board Zonker suggested to have an advisory board to enhance direct communication with sponsors. This board shouldn't be limited to sponsors ony but open to people having interest in openSUSE. This is kind of additional value for sponsor and was brought up by company which show interest to sponsor openSUSE. Discussion about pros and cons. Just for political reason, does it works, what is the benefit? Adds two-way for interaction and exchange for sponsors and people with a key role. It may add bureaucracy to the project also. At what cost does an advisory board comes? The existence of such a Board filled with nice names may add prestige, visibility and credibility to the project. openSUSE deserves some broader backing that we have today. Would this make a legal entity for openSUSE necessary? The board couldn't come to a clear yes or no. This need some more discussion and the role of an advisory needs to be described in detail. We agreed having the discussion on the board list till Friday and then move it to -project to get feedback. AI: michl to send sponsor agreement to the rest of Board members Member Approval 36 approved 14 rejected 14 need additional review to reach 3 times + or - suseRocks came up with the idea to send the reject one a friendly mail and offer kind of mentorship to show them how to become a future openSUSE member suseROCKS is willing to handle the reject mails, henne does the approval mails, we post for volunteers for a mentor program on -project Discussion of the hard ones: Does upstream contributino qualifies to become a member? For openSUSE related stuff like infrastructure (eg. OBS) yes, for software (KDE, Mono) no. But we shoudn't be "Heiliger als der Papst" (more catholic than the pope). All need to finish voting by Monday Nov 24 Action Items Membership scripting WIP by Henne, probably done by Friday this week AI: henne, post meeting logs to board wiki Thank you letter to the election committee AI: michl to write one personally to the members of the committee + public post + ping zonker on gifts Board Introductory letter AI: suseROCKs Board Blog We'd like to have our own blog. Lizards does not offer RSS feed tied to an author. Own board tag - but fear of abuse and press don't like it. We may need to set up our own wordpress on board.o.o - takes too long Why not using news.o.o? Using news.o.o found broad acceptance. We start using that an see if it works out. openSUSE conference Michl shared the information that zonker is planning an openSUSE conference in summer 2009 targeted to developers and packagers. SUSE has now for years an internal SUSELabs conference in the Czech Republic where around 100 developers gather to meet each other, exchange information, do some hacking and to have fun. The idea is to extent this event to the community. Probably it takes place in the Prague or Nuremberg area as we so make it easy for many SUSE developers to attend the conference which the conference will benefit from. Next meeting Dec 3, chaired by yaloki -- Michael Löffler, Product Management SUSE LINUX Products GmbH - Nürnberg - AG Nürnberg - HRB 16746 - GF: Markus Rex -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org