On 1/13/24 04:04, Gerald Pfeifer wrote:
On Mon 2024-01-01, ish@sysadmin-journal.com wrote:
Voting will end on 15 January 2024.
I encourage you to ask the candidates questions about the project, their vision and ideas for the future.
This must be the most silent election we ever had? Four strong candidates for two seats.
With nobody else asking any questions (and sadly quite some delay) allow me to ask some questions:
1. If you have been on the board before, what do you see of your key contributions related to that board role (not openSUSE as such)? What, if anything, would you change if awarded a time machine?
I think one key area of contribution that many outside the board wouldn't see is in the area of conflict resolution, unfortunately when I was last on the board that was something we had to deal with more then I would have liked. I think one thing i'd probably change is I don't think we got moderation right across all our platforms quickly enough so if I had a time machine i'd go back and put a higher priority on that. I probably also wouldn't spend as much time focusing on foundation proposals if I knew SUSE management was going to completely change within weeks / months of us putting forward a proposal.
2. What would you like to contribute specifically related to the board role? And what you see as opportunity cost, that is things you won't be able to cover (or cover less of) due to the board obligations?
I think now being able to partner with the geekos.org foundation provides us with a range of opportunities that we didn't have in the past and I look forward to starting to explore these as a part of the board over the next couple of years as we start to get a firmer idea around what donations and budgets are etc. Also having been on the board before I know I can contribute a lot in the area of conflict resolution as it comes up. Also as someone who has been a part of the project for a decent amount of time now I enjoy the opportunity the board provides to connect people with similar goals ideas and passions who may not know each other yet. In terms of opportunity cost, if you asked me 9 months ago I would have said work on a Leap replacement for ALP probably to the point where I wouldn't have considered running for the board. But a lot has changed since then and i'm much more comfortable about the way it will progress, so now i'll probably just loose some time working on whatever random side projects I think of and probably some of my other hobbies such as music.
3. What are you biggest concerns about openSUSE (or you serving on the board) or risks for openSUSE? How would you tackle those?
There are two slightly related issues that currently I see as my biggest concern, unfortunately neither will be that easy for the board to do something about currently. Firstly the disconnect between the fact we have a lot of Leap users but significantly less contributors. This can regularly lead to features being not implemented and Leap not reaching its potential. The second is related to the desktop and the fact a lot of openSUSE's Gnome and broader desktop stack has been maintained by SUSE and so far that seems like less of a focus for ALP at the moment. At the same time during my work on ALP prototypes for hackweek new community members came forward wanting to help with this which gives me hope that the community will pick this up over time if SUSE does drop it off. Here the board might be able to help connecting the dots a bit.
4. If you had a blank voucher from the SUSE CEO for one wish, what might that be?
Firstly i'm going to say that SUSE already does a lot by providing * Release Engineering for Tumbleweed, MicroOS and Leap * An open source codebase via SLE and ALP * A commitment that its engineers will contribute to Tumbleweed through Factory first. * A commitment to maintain the core infra openSUSE Needs * Marketing and Legal support. With all this already provided the openSUSE Community has everything it needs to grow and shape openSUSE into whatever it wants it to be. Having said that, if you gave me a blank cheque I think we could start to address some of the issues raised in 3. by returning somewhat to an old idea or atleast something similar. Before my time there existed an "openSUSE Boosters" team who's focus was simply improving openSUSE, some parts of this still probably exists through the release engineering team. But if I had an unlimited budget (or even a semi limited one) i'd start by creating a team of people that focus part time on improving the parts of openSUSE that they see as needing improvement but more importantly they'd spend the rest of there time working on things the community thinks are important via some form of mechanism that would allow the community to vote on features and bugs that they care about most for this team to work on. Currently openSUSE is somewhat limited in what it does and at times has gaps largely due to the fact that nothing gets done unless someone cares enough to do it, on the other handthe fact openSUSE manages to do so much says alot about how awesome our contributors are, thanks to all of you reading this. But still we have gaps and this model would allow us to continually address the bigger ones. Another hope of mine for geekos.org is that one day they receive enough funding to be able to contribute in a similar way via hiring contractors, but I don't think its there yet. As a slightly more realistic bonus answer having been able to travel to many of our conferences such as the openSUSE Conference and openSUSE Asia I have seen how well they do at bringing the community together as well as bringing new people to open source. So the wish would be to have strong conference and travel support budgets.
Thanks, Gerald
Thanks for the questions, apologies if any of this response is slightly disjointed I wrote it in a somewhat random order between taking care of a bunch of other weekend tasks Thanks -- Simon Lees (Simotek) http://simotek.net Emergency Update Team keybase.io/simotek SUSE Linux Adelaide Australia, UTC+10:30 GPG Fingerprint: 5B87 DB9D 88DC F606 E489 CEC5 0922 C246 02F0 014B