Hi, As you probably know, the team within SUSE supporting the openSUSE community is going through some changes. To begin with, I have joined SUSE as Team Leader [1] and we are hiring [2] to fill other vacant positions. Secondly, to reflect the team's increased responsibility for openSUSE within the company, we've dropped the term 'Boosters' to become simply 'the openSUSE team'. We are concentrating our efforts on three main tasks. a.- 12.2 Release b.- openSUSE Conference and openSUSE Summit (especially the first one since it is larger) c.- Internal reorganization a.- 12.2 Release Those of you involved in the technical side are already aware that Ismail Doenmez is now part of the (virtual) Release Team, assisting Coolo with release management. This team is working alongside you on having the best possible openSUSE 12.2 release from the technical point of view. The release process of openSUSE, like any other complex integration process, requires the participation of people from different teams and expertise areas. An open project combines community, SUSE and other professional contributions as well as external involvements like media production. This makes the management/coordination perspective even more complex. One of the things we think is needed is to update the documentation related with the release. We thought it was the first step to go through the entire process, analyze it and improve it for future releases. So, we are talking internally with the people involved in previous releases collecting what they did, trying to have a simple document as an early result. Yes, this is preventing some of us on focusing on "real release work" for a few days, but we hope that will save us time in the near future. Whatever we do can only ever be partial if we do not take account of the huge amount of work on openSUSE done by the community. So next week, we will publish a draft describing the release processes, so that you can give us input for an open release process. The goal is not to have a perfect document this first iteration, but a useful document. This draft will include the actual 12.2 release date. As you can see, we are aiming to meet the adjusted schedule. b.- oSC'12 We will give you some update about the openSUSE Conference (from our perspective) later this month. Please ping any of the team members if we haven't done it by the end of August. Obviously you can ask Michal Hrusecky for details any time. c.- Internal reorganization SUSE is concentrating the professionals that work full time on openSUSE around a single team. So in addition to the technical support we usually provided, this team will also provide community, marketing and economic (coordination) support to the Free Software project. We will also serve as link to the service team, who takes care of the infrastructure, and other teams within SUSE which work is directly on indirectly related to the community. The goal of this new configuration is: 1.- Simplify management and coordination. 2.- Increase community engagement. 3.- Improve efficiency. We expect to provide a clearer view of how these changes can be executed during the openSUSE Conference. The idea right now is to use the event to collect as much input from you as possible. we will close our Action Plan afterward. [1] http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-project/2012-06/msg00258.html [2] http://www.suse.com/careers Saludos -- Agustin Benito Bethencourt openSUSE Team Lead at SUSE abebe@suse.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org