On Mon 2024-01-01, ish@sysadmin-journal.com wrote:

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Voting will end on 15 January 2024. I encourage you to ask the candidates questions about the project,

Gerald Pfeifer wrote: their

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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?

  1'. If you have not been on the board before, what do you think you might have contributed (or done differently) based on your recollection of those past years?

I don't really understand the question being asked here, but I'll try to answer what I think you're asking. In the terms of being a project contributor?   I think if I were to be a new contributor, knowing what I know now, I'd be far less concerned with "asking for permission" on a number of things, I would have just done them.   The relatively open nature of our development model can actually be a huge issue for new contributors, because I'm not really aware of another project out there, that *is* so unstructured, it can be rather intimidating to walk into the project for the first time, and ask "How can I help?" and be told "Have fun, and do whatever makes you happy!".    It's something that takes a bit of getting used to, to just jump in and start contributing.

  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?

From my perspective, one of the biggest issues we do have, as "The openSUSE Project" is what comes down to an almost total lack of unified communications, *as* a project.   This isn't an impossible problem to solve, even if I don't have any concrete ideas yet. It's both a strength, and a weakness of the project.   I certainly wouldn't want to get into a situation where we have some sort of "Official" communications team, and our developers and contributors have to run all communications through that team. I do believe we can be doing a better job of communicating internally though, and communicating with our community. Looking at the recent communications issues regarding the Logo vote, Leap and it's future, The renaming of Aeon and Kalpa out from under the "MicroOS Desktop" umbrella, as well as the ever present confusion over the relationship between SUSE and openSUSE, it's obvious that at best, our "messaging" is chaotic and all over the place.   And that is coming from somebody that is active in our communications channels (Mailing Lists, Forums, Matrix and IRC, etc.). As to the second part of this question, I don't actually have a good feel for what the required time commitment of a Board Member is. I have the luxury, personally, of not being on anybodies payroll, so my time is relatively open and unspoken for.   I don't really see that serving on the Board will impact that much, but I'm certainly prepared to be wrong about that.

  3. What are you biggest concerns about openSUSE (or you serving on the board) or risks for openSUSE? How would you tackle those?

Communication is probably my biggest concern, and potentially as the bigger subset of that *listening*.  As a consequence of our project's nature, where those are doing the work, make the decisions, at times, can cause a very "fractured" experience as a contributor, or user. Something you might do when contributing to $project_A within openSUSE that is completely normal and acceptable, when applied to $project_B is something the maintainers there consider to be completely unacceptable, and most often, you won't know that, until you try, which can lead to an awful lot of feeling like you're spinning your wheels at times. One of my personal concerns, as a project member that's involved in an opinionated project under the openSUSE Umbrella (openSUSE Kalpa), is that the things I might say as a developer, might be taken as something "Official" for the openSUSE Project in general, just by virtue of being a board member.   So this is something that I'm going to have to consider much more, should I be chosen to serve.

  4. If you had a blank voucher from the SUSE CEO for one wish, what might that be?

Funding for independent developers and contributors for the openSUSE project.   Not SUSE Employees, but some measure of a pool of money provided by SUSE for contributors to the project, Ideally administered by the Geeko Foundation or similar group. Our volunteers do an awful lot of good work for the openSUSE Project, whether it's folks maintaining the wiki, signing up to help with the Heroes team, packaging software, writing documentation, bugfixes and triage, Posting things to places like news.opensuse.org, doing artwork for the project, or sometimes just being moderators on our communications platforms, to keep things running. None of this happens without people putting in the time.  I don't really know what this system would "look" like, as I don't really envision "openSUSE Employees" when I rattle this around in my head, but as an ideal, I think there's merit in being able to compensate people for the work they put into the project, at a certain level.

Thanks, Gerald

Thanks for the questions, Gerald. I'm happy to try to answer any others, or clarify, if anything I've said here is unclear.