Hi all. I have noticed the Strategy Discussion on the news: http://news.opensuse.org/2010/05/20/opensuse-strategy-meeting/ and would like to share some ideas. As I was off for quite a while (helping out on Fedora/CentOS as well, e.g. organizing this years FUDCon EMEA) I want to point those who don't remember me to my personal page on the wiki, first: http://en.opensuse.org/User:MarcusMoeller But now back to the topic. The SWOT doc already contains some useful information, but first question I would like to ask is what are you heading for? Imho there are two major points: the product itself and the community around it. I have picked up some imported points from the SWOT and commented below: W: Novell is not seen - like Red Hat - as Open Source friend `-> this is definitely true. Maybe Novell could act as Sponsor for more oS events. But first of all, Novell should communicate their aims clearly (besides 'We support Linux, as long we are making money from it', which is what a large part of the community thinks). Besides that, recently announced Novell products like 'ZENworks Application Virtualization' are only available for Windows and there are no clear statements if there will be a Linux version available, ever (which Red Hat clearly communicated to their community/customers with their latest virtualization product RHEV, where all components will be available for Linux, too.) S: decent .net support with mono (?) `-> this is only visible for a real small part of the community. Most of them does not really accept the joint-venture with M$ (which has not been communicated very well in the past) and see not benefits in Mono. We have to point out the real advantages of interoperability, here. Maybe some good example (maybe even commercial) .NET apps that work on Windows as well as on Linux would help. W: Bad QA `-> I once brought up the idea of an open QA group, where every interested contributor could take part. Afterwards it has been announced, but with limited slots (afair 30 ppl) Why that? If ppl want to contribute, please let them! Maybe: http://en.opensuse.org/Testing_Team has to be re-introduced, either in the news or in weekly newsletter. (which would be in general a good idea, to introduce team and is how we handle it at CentOS) W: lots of cool features are not documented, thus not used or integrated `-> At Fedora, the artwork team recently introduced the one page release notes, which contains the highlights of the newly released distribution. I would suggest to create one for oS, too (we need a good designer and one who has some Scribus knowledge for that, maybe gnokii or jimmac could help out there.) T: Distribution becomes a commodity and all distributions become more or less equal `-> yeah, it would be nice to only have one distro in the future, but I guess that won't happen :) S: no appstore `-> Gamestore could be taken as base. Pavol already did some nice work on that. W: factory not very usable `-> I would suggest to release less, but better tested milestones and RCs W: no openSUSE community manager even when there is an openSUSE community manager `-> I think that's not fair for zonker. He had some good ideas and spent a lot of effort in different areas. Maybe he was just not that known/visible outside the openSUSE community (and maybe even inside). I would also suggest to remove spotlight.os.org, lizards.os.org and only use the planet and the news. Besides that news should be also announced on social networks like identi.ca and linux.com. I spent some effort on that, but was quite alone, till now. (Besides that, if you like my ideas, you could try to hire me, but only part-wise as I like my main job :)) W: no organized (language-)local communities, nothing that connects them to the openSUSE.org project; Ambassadors not functional `-> the ambassadors project started quite chaotic. The main complaints where missing swag and support from Novell. But the groundwork has been done now and this is where the plants will grow. W: not enough presence on universities (but that applies for FOSS in general ...) `-> we are already doing oS install fests twice a year (on new students laptops) here at the ETH where usually about 40 ppl attend. Maybe we could just communicate it better, to motivate others to do the same. (Btw. asked for swag this year, but did not even get a reply since zonker is gone). O: alot of control ceded to the community in the past year and just need to be taken `-> this needs to be described clearly. Which are the areas where ppl can contribute? E.g. package maintaining is very unstructured. first of all there has to be a mentor process, clear package guidelines, followed by a review process. Every approved packager should be able to do package reviews, afterwards, despises which 'package group' he/she is packaging for. Mentoring is necessary for the Ambassadors project as well. T: next gen is not interested in low-level stuff such as OSes any more, so we'll get an old community ... `-> Maybe not an OS community but at least a Ruby one :) S: boosters team `-> clearly communicate what they are doing or hide it completely from the public. What's happening now is quite worse. (e.g. website updates not announced, will the wiki content be moved over via script or manually, as saigkill already started to move the weekly news manually, how is wiki i18n handled in the future). All that could be avoided with communication. If necessary, one needs to be hired blogging about what boosters are doing, regularly. A FAQ for the website renewal would also help. So nough said for today (which is only a minimal subset of my ideas :)) Best Regards Marcus -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help(a)opensuse.org