Board Election/2008/Platforms/Federico Mena-Quintero

From openSUSE

Introduction and Biography

I am a co-founder of the GNOME project. Before that, I was maintainer of the GIMP for about two years. I worked on GNOME at Red Hat Advanced Development Lab for a while during the Lab's existence. After that, I worked for Ximian on various projects.

I started in the openSUSE community after working for Novell on NLD 9 and SLED 10, when part of the "GNOME desktop team" was reassigned to the openSUSE-GNOME team. This has been a lot of fun! I am proud to have been part of the team that took GNOME from being a second-class citizen in Suse to a first-class, equal citizen in the distro.

These days I work mainly on the GNOME platform and low-level details of the desktop shell: the file manager, window manager, display configuration, etc.

I served on the openSUSE Community Board during its first period in 2007-2008. My main contribution during this period was to formalize the Code of Conduct in terms of the openSUSE Guiding Principles and its related procedures.

My technical contributions to openSUSE are these: co-maintainership of gnome-main-menu, the GNOME bug triaging policy, helping organize the Summer of Code, maintainership of GtkFileChooser, and development of multiscreen support.

You can see my interview for People of openSUSE for more details.

Major Issues

• As much as possible, get Novell's management to acknowledge that there are concerns in the community with respect to the Novell/Microsoft deal, and to clarify the independence of openSUSE from this deal. We don't want people to refuse using openSUSE just because of Novell's actions.

• Identify the "little big things" that make it hard for people to enter the world of openSUSE.

• Keep opening ways of communication between traditionally-closed Novell teams and the openSUSE community, especially development teams.

• Identify areas which openSUSE could serve well, but is currently under-represented: low-budget deployments?

Minor Issues

Uh, no idea :)

Role of the board

I'd like the board to take on topics or tasks that people are afraid to do because these have caused controversy in the past within the openSUSE community.

The board needs to question traditional assumptions: are our development and testing processes as good as they could be? Why are convoluted processes (openSUSE has plenty of them) like that? Why is there so much moral or traditional ownership of things that should be more of a meritocracy?

And of course, the board needs to be mediator between Novell-the-commercial-entity and openSUSE, the community project.

Aims/Goals

Please list your aims and goals for both the openSUSE project and also the openSUSE distribution. You may highlight specific projects within openSUSE or sow the seed for new ones.