On Thu, Nov 24, 2022 at 6:58 PM Gerald Pfeifer <gp@suse.com> wrote:
On Mon 2022-11-07, ddemaio wrote:
Please ask your questions (Ask us Anything) in this thread so we can keep the conversations focused and centralized for all the candidates and members who want to ask questions of the candidates.
All the candidates are in cc and you can find their profiles at the board election wiki. https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Board_election
This is a great idea (and I meant to ask questions two weeks ago, but ... personal circumstances).
This may be my most difficult choice in an election as an openSUSE member so far. (A great problem to have, of course.)
Here are some aspect I am curious to learn more about:
1. Why are you running for the openSUSE board? (Some of you have covered this already.)
2. Clearly you care a lot about openSUSE and have contributed to the project. What do you think will you be able to add as a member of the board?
I'm going to answer these two questions together, since it's hard for me to separate the answers. I'm running for the openSUSE Board because I care a lot about openSUSE and I feel I can help strengthen the Project as a whole. As a board member over the past two years, I've advocated and led with example for increased transparency and accessibility to project governance. We now have a public board tracker[1], board meetings are public by default, and we have more engagement between SUSE and openSUSE than we ever did before (e.g. openSUSE Leap/ALP feature review[2]). [1]: https://code.opensuse.org/board/tickets [2]: https://code.opensuse.org/leap/features
And what would be the opportunity cost, i.e., what might you not be able to do, or do less of, for openSUSE in that case?
Admittedly, I do less code and packaging work than I used to, but I wouldn't attribute that to being a board member. It's more that life has gotten a bit more busy for me in the past couple of years...
3. What would you like the board to do differently / more / less of?
I'd like the board to become more of an advocate for commercial growth of openSUSE. We have a lot to offer to the world, but it's hard when we're not available anywhere or not in the news with partnerships and such. This is where our relationship with SUSE should be able to help us. I'd like for us as a Board to work with SUSE to start establishing relationships with OEMs to broaden the reach of openSUSE. In other words, I'd like to figure out what it will take for us to get OEMs to offer openSUSE Linux as a preload option for their laptops, like Fedora Linux has with Lenovo[3] and Pop!_OS has with the HP Dev One[4]. [3]: https://fedoramagazine.org/lenovo-fedora-now-available/ [4]: https://hpdevone.com/
4. What are your thoughts on an openSUSE Foundation or similar structure? If positive, how would you address that practically and what, if any, role do you see for yourself in the way there?
I think a Foundation is an excellent opportunity for us if we can get it right. We need not only SUSE on board, but a number of other "founding sponsors" with commitments. If we can square that away, then this would be viable. I've talked to many folks over the years who have said that they'd be more willing to work with openSUSE if we had a 501(c)(3)/501(c)(6) or similar. We've had issues with corporate contributors for years because of how openSUSE is governed and owned, fixing that would make things tremendously better if we can garner the support from the wider community. Insofar as what I could do for that, I've got experience working with various community projects in different governance models and my perspective can help shape how we do this for openSUSE.
5. What are you biggest worries around / for openSUSE? (And how might we tackle those?)
I worry about apathy and lack of growth in the project. These are obviously super-existential type issues and there's no straightforward way to do anything about them. But, I hope that my enthusiasm and drive to make the distribution and the project better helps motivate others to do so too.
Bonus question:
6. What makes you happy about openSUSE? What do you appreciate, enjoy?
Things generally work. The engineering is pretty solid. It makes for a pleasant experience. :) -- Neal Gompa (ID: Pharaoh_Atem)