On Friday 06 August 2010 17:15:46 Egbert Eich wrote:
On Thu, Aug 05, 2010 at 02:11:34PM +0530, Sankar P wrote:
On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 3:35 AM, Jos Poortvliet
wrote: On Tuesday 03 August 2010 14:34:13 Pavol Rusnak wrote:
On 08/03/2010 12:28 PM, Egbert Eich wrote:
- Had a longer phone discussion about the openSUSE strategy discussion, the sentiments of the SUSE Labs developers and how to overcome the disconnect of people at SUSE Labs (and other divisions inside SUSE not directly involved on openSUSE) and the openSUSE project.
I'm looking forward to a written summary of this discussion :-)
That would indeed be interesting. The SUSE labs developers are supposed to be community leaders, after all, and their input is/should therefor be valuable...
Right :) See below.
With so much noise in the project mailing list, I will be surprised if any of the kernel folks were even following the threads, instead of mark-all-as-read. I will also be eager to know what their opinion is.
This is exactly the point and actully what's happening. It is one of the issues I brought up talking to AJ: there are simply too many communication channels (fora, MLs, IRC, ...) for those people to follow. Some kernel folks read kernel@ but this is a topic ML and sufficiently focussed and low volume to follow. Most people from the Labs are active in their own communities (kernel, gcc, samba as example) already while at the same time they working for Novell, where their duties cover a assignments totally unrelated to openSUSE. These two areas alone already consume a great amount of time. Thus participating in yet another community is nothing that seem to be very feasable.
AJ mentioned that to be informed about what's going on in the project people should at least read news@ and announce@ - still these are hardly lists where one can chime into an ongoing discussion. I also explained to AJ about my impression that several people I met there seem to feel a discomfort to voice their opinions on an opensuse ML being Novell employees at the same time. When I was talking to people at the Labs Conference and asked them why they did not bring up a certain topic on an openSUSE ML I heard more than once: 'Isn't this a discussion that should be had internally?'. (I strongly believe that this is a feeling that's shared by several other Novell employees working for OPS.)
How can we overcome this?
Indeed for someone working at a company like Novell for a while it may feel strange to discuss things with collegues in public: - Should one really openly 'flame' fellow Novell employees (AJ, Michael, coolo, the Boosters, ...) or decisions made by them?
Flaming is always wrong ;) In general, decisions are not made ad-hoc, so they get discussed first and everybody is welcome to discuss that. And if then a decisions is made that you don't agree with, I really suggest to decide whether it's important for the project to discuss this again and whether you have something fundamentally knew to say - and if that's the case, go ahead. If you feel the need to flame anybody, do it privately in a friendly way first ;)
- What things can a Novell employee say in public? How much are the things one says influenced by internal knowledge that's not ment for public digestion?
Regarding openSUSE, there shouldn't be internal knowledge. ;) I'm really struggling to see examples that hinder you and would welcome some examples via private email.
[...] Maybe one step would be to bring the SUSE Labs conference and the openSUSE conference together, an idea that has been tossed around for quite a while already.
Yes, an idea that we want to discuss for next year again.
The change in structure of the Labs conference especially that would be required seemed to have been the major obstacle that kept it from happening so far. Now since there is about a year before the next Labs conference there should be sufficient time to make this happen.
Andreas -- Andreas Jaeger, Program Manager openSUSE, aj@{novell.com,opensuse.org} Twitter: jaegerandi | Identica: jaegerandi SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany GPG fingerprint = 93A3 365E CE47 B889 DF7F FED1 389A 563C C272 A126