An interview with openSUSE community manager Joe Brockmeier [LWN.net]

By Rebecca Sobol
June 3, 2009

The openSUSE project held a Community Week, May 11 - May 17, 2009. Community Week provided a chance for people from around the world to get together and focus on specific topics, to transfer knowledge about openSUSE to users and contributors and to help build teams.

We talked with openSUSE community manager Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier about Community Week and the upcoming openSUSE Conference.

This was an IRC conference, with different sessions on different channels. Was it possible to attend all sessions? How many sessions were there?

That's correct. It probably wouldn't be possible to attend all sessions, since some were held simultaneously and they were also across all different time zones. Since we have to accommodate people from all time zones, it would have meant being up ridiculously early or late to be in all sessions. However, we repeated many of the sessions so that interested contributors didn't have get up at 4 a.m. or stay up to 11 p.m. to get the session they wanted to attend.

How many sessions did you attend?

I was in quite a few. I was actually logged into several channels at the same time, sort of watching one session while being more active in others.

I read somewhere that this was the first annual event. Are there any specific plans for next year?

I don't think we said "annual," just first. We are discussing doing this again, probably in a more limited scope, maybe one day a month and one session a week.

How much participation was there?

Quite a bit. Some of the IRC channels had about 50% more users/nicks than usual while sessions were going on, I'd guesstimate that we had several hundred people turn out that aren't usually in IRC for sessions.

Do you think it was a success? What was particularly successful about it?

I do think it was a success. It got people talking about how to contribute to the project and gave us a chance to focus on new contributors. What was really good in my opinion was that we had several community members step up and plug in sessions where they felt there was a need and take leadership to run their own sessions.

What didn't work as well?

The only real reservation I have looking back is that we probably should have only run one session at a time, and that we bit off quite a bit going a full week. The organization required to do it was fairly heavy, and it'd be better to have a more lightweight process and shorter schedule in the future -- but more often.

Was there a specific highlight or two of things that were interesting, useful, unexpected, etc?

Most of the sessions were useful, so I don't know if I'd call out any as being more useful than others. As I mentioned, I was very pleased to see some of the community just taking initiative and setting up sessions on their own. That's great to see and I'd love to see more of it.

For people who didn't participate, but are now interested in getting involved, where is the right place to go for info?

It's a bit outdated, but this is the best place to start: http://en.opensuse.org/How_to_Participate

The mailing lists are also a good place to start. It can be a bit intimidating, asking a first question on a project mailing list, but we're happy to help people get started. If you're not sure which list to start with, then an introductory mail on the openSUSE-Project mailing list would be a good way to get started -- just say where you'd like to be involved and we'll help you get started.

Tell us about the upcoming openSUSE Conference.

Sure. We're going to be running a four-day conference for openSUSE contributors in Nuremberg, Germany from September 17 through 20th. This is a free event, anyone can attend. openSUSE has contributors from around the world, and this is a chance to get a bunch of contributors together, meet face to face, and get some work done together.

Befitting that, the conference will be partially dedicated to presentations and talks, but also have a huge amount of "unconference" time where attendees can plan their own sessions or have hacking/working sessions rather than just attending presentations. The call for participation is still open, so anyone who'd like to lead a session or give a presentation should sign up: http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_Conf_2009/Call_for_Papers

It's open to anybody who is interested in contributing to openSUSE. We'll have sessions for newer contributors on packaging, etc. as well as a lot of hands-on activity.

We'll also have an "Open Day" Saturday for new Linux users with some content for people who are new to Linux and openSUSE.

Is there anything else you would like to add?

Sure - we just released openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 2 today [May 28]. This is leading up to the openSUSE 11.2 release scheduled for November. This is an ideal time for anybody who would like to start contributing to the project. The release announcement is here.

Thanks for taking the time to answer our questions.

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