User:Manugupt1/Sandbox
Platform
Introduction and Biography
Please introduce yourself and your background. It is also recommended to create a userpage in the wiki and provide a link to your blog. Because of the election rules we need to know your company/organization affiliation.
I am Manu Gupta, more popularly known as manugupt1 in irc as well as on the web. I am currently a student at Manipal Institute Of Technology, Manipal and will be acting as a Software Engineering Intern at Samsung Electronics from January onwards. I firmly believe that contributors as well as users are a part of the community and we should maintain a balance between the needs of both.
I have been contributing to open source specially the openSUSE project for quite some time amongst which the ones I am most happy are
- I was instrumental in organizing both Google Summer Of Code 2011 and and am currently organizing Google Code-in 2011. With this effort, we have seen a lot of interesting projects coming up and a whole bunch of new contributors to our community. Examples are SaX3, Oyranus which have landed into the openSUSE Distribution itself and some projects like Appstream has continued.
- I have also written SaX3 which as I see was a major requirement by openSUSE users.
- I am also involved with the Marketing team, where I have helped it in distribution releases starting from 11.3. Along with Bernhard and Jos, I took the lead from the marketing team to have a public release of openQA. Along with this, I help the team with the various news articles, social media attempts and giving talks at various places in and around my college about the project.
- I was also part of the ambassador welcome team from 2010 - 2011.
- I am very proud to say that openSUSE Users around my place have also started contributing to it in any way they can besides just using it.
- I was involved during the transition of the wiki when the new wiki came up and did quite some work there too.
Major Issues
Foundation
The need of a foundation is of utmost importance as we are moving forward. Since the last February, there has been absolutely no discussion on how to move on the foundation. So while a foundation consists of a lot of legal stuff and by-laws, it will also be a fundamental representation of our community. Thus, in my opinion there are two requirements we need to satisfy for a foundation to truly take place.
- Identify the needs of the community, we should not just speak in the metaverse but rather identify the needs that the foundation has and of course what the foundation has to offer. Some of the immediate benefits from the foundation that I see are
- Empowering the community and the direction of the project
- Inclusion of more corporate sponsors.
- More sponsoring at regional levels. With this we can finance our ambassadors more often to go to events or with the materials they create.
Communication
This is a very serious issue. The level of communication with the community is an area in which we need to work harder. Since, the board is not a technical body, it becomes quite difficult for the board to communicate what it has been working on. Effective communication is the very ingredient of trust and respect. With the new board, we will try to make sure
- The Board is approachable easily
- The Board regularly gives about what it has been doing through channels like opensuse-announce and news.opensuse.org or personal blogs. So even if we have done nothing, anyone in the community has the right to ask the board, what has been done till now?
The other aspect of communication is our usual mediums of communication is irc. I believe its more of a psychological thing but a few people have the feeling we have too much bike shedding or non-sense going on in theses channels. We need to identify a plausible means to get rid of this mentality.
Finances
This is a lesson from the past. Until now, the board had very little role in maintaining the finances that was offered to us by our sponsors. I had like the board to have a very prominent role in maintaining those records. This is very important for us as our sponsors would like to know where their money is being spent. One of the major reasons that the creation of foundation is hindered in the past we did not maintain where we were spending our money. Alan Clark is working on it but from now on, we must learn from our mistakes and not repeat it again.
Minor Issues
Google Summer Of Code and other such programs
This is a love of mine. In my honest opinion, programs like this have reaped great benefits to the community. We have gotten lots of our work done and also gained a lot of new contributors. I would like to see this as a board role in the future as this would ensure such events keep on happening. If it is not, I am sure we have people like me, Vincent, Pavol, Matt who will keep on doing it.
Role of the board
Please describe your vision for the Board and how you would like to see the Board shaped under your tenure
During this term, I would like to see the board turn into a very much more functional body than any of its previous terms. Expediting the process of forming a foundation will be of top most priority to the board. This board has to be a board of actions. The board needs to clearly maintain an account of the expenditures made by the community. Also within the next two years, the board must have the foundation and all its by-laws are in place and we are independent of a single sponsor.
Second thing I will like to see is that the board is more approachable not to say that the current is not but the actions of the board are not presented to the community at large. The board is in my opinion is an accountable body to the community. It needs to deliver and also regularly communicate on what it has been doing till date. I had like to see we inform everyone atleast quarterly about the board's activities.
Thirdly, continue with the existing board duties like protecting our trademarks is also a priority for the board.
Why you should vote for me?
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.
Endorsements
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