Board

From openSUSE

The openSUSE board was setup to lead the overall project. The main tasks for members of the board are:

• Act as a central point of contact
• Help resolve conflicts, communicate community interests to Novell
• Facilitate communication with all areas of the community
• Facilitate decision making processes where needed.

The board should provide guidance and support existing governance structures, but shouldn't direct or control development, since community mechanisms exist to accomplish the goals of the project. The board should document decisions and policies.

The initial board has been appointed by Novell -- in the future, the board members will be elected by the community and the chair person appointed by Novell. One of the missions of the board is to define a process to elect the next board. The chosen members are as follows:

Members

	Pascal Bleser lives in Belgium and works as a software architect and developer at a large European ISV in Germany. He contributes most of his time building packages for openSUSE in his now defunct Guru as well as Packman and openSUSE Build Service repositories. He wrote most of the current Packman website, contributes some bits to opensource projects here and there, and tries to support community interaction and communication. He is also a member of the core team that organizes FOSDEM, one of the largest and most appreciated opensource developer conferences in Europe.
	Francis Giannaros is a Mathematics and Philosophy undergraduate studying at King's College London. He is working on pulling together, along with many others, the openSUSE Community; a big part of this is demonstrated through openSUSE-Community.org. Other involvements include wiki handling, openSUSE News editing and further coordination tasks.
	Andreas Jaeger works for Novell now as director openSUSE and platform where he's responsible for the openSUSE project. He's been involved with the openSUSE project from the beginning and helped to launch it. Previously he was project manager for the openSUSE and SUSE Linux distribution. He has driven the port of Linux to x86-64 and ported the GNU C Library to the x86-64 architecture. Andreas has been appointed as chair person for the initial openSUSE board.
	Stephan Kulow works for Novell as project manager of the openSUSE distribution. Part of his duties there is the release management. Before changing into the project manager role, he worked as lead of the KDE and Usability team. He is also widely known for having served as release manager for the KDE project for many years.
	Federico Mena-Quintero is one of the founders of the GNOME Project. Before that, he worked as maintainer of the GIMP. In the early days of GNOME he was responsible for some of the original code and documentation for the GNOME libraries, games, and applications. He also worked on Evolution, the GTK+ toolkit, the GNOME platform libraries, and the Nautilus file manager. He currently works for Novell, mainly on hacking the GTK+ toolkit and the GNOME platform. He has also been a frequent member of the GNOME board.

Contact

You can reach the board directly via email board@opensuse.org.

The board invites everybody to start general discussions on the opensuse-project mailing list.