Hi On 1/27/20 3:49 AM, Ariez J Vachha wrote:
Election candidates, et al,
Happy Chinese New Year from Hong Kong!
Firstly let me thank the candidates for stepping forward as well as the other election officials especially, Ish and Edwin for their hard work in getting this process so far.
As an openSUSE old timer, yet probably one of the newest members of openSUSE. I have a question for the the election candidates albeit extremely 11th hour, which I believe is extremely pertinent to the future of openSUSE. For some years I saw openSUSE fall down the rankings as well as as experienced some lag in the update cycles relative to other distros. I put this down to SUSE being passed from pillar to post for over a decade. Recently though openSUSE has really got its "mojo" back and is on fire! I've had a number of projects recently which I think would have been extremely difficult to execute with any other distribution.
But here's the thing, the future relies on getting new blood involved. My recent experience in trying to get involved in the project by understand the workings of the organisation has been a long and relatively painful process. So much so that I failed in my commitment to the other election officials. I do not want to detract from any of the contribution of any of the volunteers, as I know no from other projects I'm involved in the commitment it takes.
I would like to know the candidates views on making it easier for those that want to participate, especially non coders, to do so, and how they propose to do it.
From reading the mailing lists, I can see that this has been touched on on and talked about quite a bit. I feel it needs to be moved up the priority list. Not being one to make comment if I'm unable to contribute I'm happy to volunteer in this effort regardless of election outcome.
Hi, As I said in my response to Gerald's questions I think one of openSUSE's biggest strengths is that we deal with language support better then most which is great but does come with a unique set of challenges. Given that many many users can use openSUSE in there native language it has meant that we have a large number of communities that tend to meet and work in there own native language which is great. I have had the privilege of meeting people from many of these communities at the last few Asia Summits. I think that one of the things we see here is that many people in many communities aren't aware of which communities are doing what and which people in which communities are capable of doing what. After 3 years I have a bit more of an idea because i've had the privilege of going to conferences and seeing talks on some of these things but I know its only scratching the surface. So I tend to agree we should do a better job of telling everyone which communities we have and what they are doing. Its very hard to contribute to something if you don't know it exists. I also think another of our strengths compared to many other distro's is how easy it is to make technical contributions (atleast if you speak english) at the same time I think this combined with the fact that SUSE in the last few years has done a reasonable job of keeping its commitment to keep the core of the distro in a good working state has meant we haven't done as well at attracting new contributors as we probably should. I think the one area we tend to do reasonably well is providing channels for members to provide support for each other, providing forums / chatrooms for a bunch of languages is reasonably straight forward. Having said that I was contributing to openSUSE for 2 years before I even realized we had forums, and was only made aware because a forum moderator told me someone had a question about something I maintain. So I agree with Vinz that refreshing our web platform and making a how to contribute is an absolute must. This topic has been raised by previous boards that I have been on and at the time we decided that due to much of openSUSE's web presence being hosted by Microfocus and the fact that due to SUSE's sale to EQT much of this infrastructure was scheduled to be moved back to SUSE / the Heroes team it would be better to wait until that finished. That process is getting closer to being done so I believe the next year or two will provide an excellent opportunity for us to re address this issue. Another thing I alluded to above that I discussed with some of the team at Asia summit last year was the fact that many of our tools and processes for development are really easy to contribute to if you have a good understanding of english (this probably also extends to things like this board election) for example without understanding some basic english you would struggle to follow these discussions and no who to speak to. At the same time I am friends with many members of our community on facebook and when they post something in there native language I get a great "see translation" button that I can press and have a reasonable understanding of the conversation. Personally I think we should be looking at how we can adapt something like this into our tools such as bugtrackers and obs so that its possible for people who dont speak any english to contribute to more parts of the project. This would obviously take alot of work and probably isn't even possible with our current bugzilla. But the board is probably an ideal place to put together some form of joint business plan to work toward a open source auto translation platform (if one doesn't exist) then get it integrated into things like obs. Maybe this is a product some of SUSE's customers would be interested in, maybe not, but having such a feature would give openSUSE a unique advantage when it comes to attracting contributors who don't speak english to open source development. While I have never really liked the idea of having a "Community Manager" position, our community really should be free to go do whatever they want and they don't really need managing but maybe we should create some form of "Community Communications Manager" that keeps track of which communities we have, who the best contacts are and works to harness the fantastic translation team we have so that we can communicate important things more effectively with all our different communities. The final thing I have on my list is improving how we do documentation and making it much easier to contribute to, due to my time constraints i've been leaving this one until after the foundation work is mostly done. Basically the concept is to merge the documentation we inherit from SUSE with additional "User generated content such as tips etc" along with pulling in the user documentation currently on the wiki maybe also with some content from the forums and some how to articles all merged into once central openSUSE knowledge base. Given the amount of foundation stuff still going on i'm not sure if this is something i'll be able to pursue in the next year or if it gets left until the year after. Thanks for your feedback and prompting us to do better here, at every openSUSE related conference i've been to there has always been a couple of users that come along and get inspired to be more involved and I think that's fantastic so i'd encourage everyone to come to a conference at some point if they can. Cheers -- 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