open-slx end-user platform opens

open-slx Community Platform opens

We are happy to announce the start of a new community platform for the German-
speaking openSUSE community:

		http://community.open-slx.de

open-slx GmbH, who have contributed massively to the reorganization of the 
English and German openSUSE wikis aims at increasing quality standards of 
support and documentation of openSUSE and to improve interaction between wiki 
and forum communities.

As a direct result of these efforts, and after deeper inquiry of German 
openSUSE community members, it has become clear that the german openSUSE 
community is the by far largest end-user community of the openSUSE Linux 
distribution in the globally targeted openSUSE project, and that it is, as 
such underrepresented in the global community. It has, until now, missed the 
opportunity to come to full bloom and realize its full potential. We have 
found that documentation, which is for the most part content translated from 
English documentation, neither suffices as central part of the end-user 
support, nor does this strategy support the dynamics of the German-speaking 
openSUSE community.

open-slx GmbH has conducted market research, indicating that the German Ubuntu 
community platform "ubuntuusers.de" excels in quality of their support and 
documentation offerings. Following this, we have contacted the people behind 
ubuntuusers.de, and have started cooperating with its team to create a similar 
high-quality platform supported by German openSUSE community members to 
address the shortcomings we see with existing platforms. The following efforts 
are part of our approach to solving existing problems:

- Quality control of documentation (wiki) thanks to a clear editing-and-r
  reviewing process
- Unified Syntax through all media that are part of the portal in order to 
  make content usable across the whole platform and to ease contribution by 
  the community
- Usage of a webforum to discuss newly created content
- Clear separation of the webforum as support-centric area, and the wiki as 
  documentation-centric part
- Strong interconnection between media to increase the flow of information
- Usage of original German-content (no translations from English), orientation 
  of the texts towards end-users, including useful additional information

Starting in June 2010, a team of German openSUSE community members, open-slx 
employees and from ubuntuusers.de has worked on the introduction of the new 
community portal, which consists of three parts: Wiki, Forum and Blog 
aggregation. In the wiki, more than 2000 articles from ubuntuusers.de's 
knowledge base have been imported, almost 500 of which serve as the base for 
the new open-slx platform, the team's goal is to finalize all 2000 articles 
within this year. The webforum can be used to discuss these articles or get in 
contact with other openSUSE users. The blog aggregation ("Planet") has a news 
feed which gives insight into newest developments and articles covering more 
specific topics.

For questions, suggestions and support inquiries, you can reach us on IRC 
(#open-slx on the FreeNode network), or by email (team@open-slx.de). Of course 
you can also use the forum to get in touch with us.

The open-slx end-user platform would not have been possible without the 
restless efforts of the following people (in alphabetical order):

Christopher Grebs (EnTeQuAk)
Dr. Stefan Werden (swerden)
Ferdinand Thiessen (susnux)
Jens Köke (jkoeke)
Jonathan Rocker (Jonathan_R)
Karl-Thomas Schmidt (}ls{)
Rupert Horstkötter (rhorstkoetter)
Sascha Manns (saigkill)
Sebastian Kügler (sebas)
Sebastian Siebert (Freespacer)
Thomas Ernst (Tuxilla)
Uwe Dittmann (Linuxsusefan)
das gesamte Team von ubuntuusers.de

Have a lot of fun, and thanks for your interest in community.open-slx.de!


About open-slx

open-slx is the official distributor of the openSUSE Box. The openSUSE Box 
offers a modern and easy to install Linux system and professional technical 
support for german and english speaking users. The Linux experts at open-slx 
contribute with software development, documentation, quality-assurance to 
various Open Source projects. open-slx differentiates itself with its focus on 
the end-user by combining user-friendly software with helpful technical 
support. Following the key values of convenient, easy, secure and complete, 
the open-slx team currently works on the next version of the openSUSE Box, 
which can be expected in March 2011.