An interview with the new openSUSE community manager

Sure -- I stopped contributing to LWN when I took a full-time job with OSTG/Linux.com (now the company known as SourceForge), and had to stop freelancing. I was editorial director there for two years, and then joined Linux Magazine as Editor-in-Chief. I've missed contributing to LWN, but I still read LWN religiously.

Yes.

I will be working with the board, but I report to Justin Steinman at Novell. It's an unusual position, though, because my job is in large part to be an advocate/ombudsman for the community.

No -- we don't plan to have anyone actively policing the lists looking for violations. Instead, the board is working on a policy to allow community members to bring violations of the Code to the board to decide whether disciplinary action should be needed. I hope that it's something that won't be needed often, or at all -- and I don't think it will be needed often.

Right now, I'd say Novell is still guiding development pretty closely, but would like the community to have a more prominent voice in the direction of the development of openSUSE. I think the Fedora Project is a pretty good model here, and I really think Max Spevack did a great job in terms of helping Fedora come into its own.

The openSUSE Board appointed last November is a step towards giving the community more control over governance of the project.

Well, certain aspects of the job are already well-defined. For example, a big part of the job will be traveling to conferences to speak about openSUSE and also to organize an openSUSE conference. But there's definitely some room to define the role as well.

Yes, I do plan to contribute and help out with that where needed. I think it's very useful -- communication is vital to the health of a project like openSUSE. There are a lot of people contributing to openSUSE, and without something like the weekly news, it would be easy for contributors to lose track of what their colleagues are doing. It's also important to spreading the news outside of the openSUSE community so that other open source projects know what we're up to and possibly find ways to collaborate and help reduce duplication of effort between projects. Finally, I think it's a good way to show what various contributors are doing and help recognize the contributors that are having an impact on openSUSE.

Over the long term, I'd like to help foster increased adoption of openSUSE by a significant amount -- which means doing a better job of promoting the distro, as well as communicating with potential users and finding out what it is they need/want from openSUSE and working on delivering that. (I'd encourage LWN readers to check out the alpha builds for openSUSE 11.0 and give us feedback as we're working on the final 11.0 release that should be done in July.)

I also want to work on developing a recognition system so that contributors are acknowledged for their work, which we're doing more on already -- we just announced our membership program for contributors to be recognized. I also want to make sure we're providing a "roadmap" so that potential contributors have a clear path into the project and know where to get started -- whether that's development, artwork, documentation, quality assurance, advocating openSUSE, or supporting other users.

Also, organize the first openSUSE conference, make sure openSUSE is better represented at other conferences, and help provide potential contributors with a roadmap to becoming contributors. I'd like to make it as easy as possible for people to participate.

Finally, but not least -- I want to do what I can to help coordinate increased cooperation between Linux distros and reduce duplication of effort. While a lot of folks might like to portray the situation as openSUSE vs. Fedora, Ubuntu, or any other distro, I don't see it that way -- if someone is already happily using another distro, then I consider that a win. I want to focus on attracting people who aren't running Linux at all yet. There's plenty of work left to do, and I hope we can do a better job of pooling our resources to attract those people.

Just that I'd like to encourage LWN readers to visit zonker.opensuse.org and news.opensuse.org for updates on the openSUSE project, and to feel free to contact me (zonker@opensuse.org) with any questions, suggestions, and comments related to openSUSE.