openSUSE:Board election 2012 platform manu
Platform
Introduction and Biography
I am Manu Gupta, also known as manugupt1 in irc as well as on the web. I am currently working as an Android Engineer at Samsung Electronics. I firmly believe that contributors as well as users are a part of the community and we should maintain a fine balance between the needs of both. I have been contributing to open source and the openSUSE project for quite some time like organizing Google Summer Of Code 2011 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.
Major Issues
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 in the present to communicate what the board 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?
One of the things the Board can do is report as of what is happening in various teams of the community to the community. A few benefits to this include 1. Interaction of the Board increases between various groups. 2. Identify key problems in various areas and work on them to solve it. 3. Offcourse, the Board becoming a more transparent entity
Finances
Currently, most of the sponsorship that openSUSE gets from SUSE but there have been other sources of sponsorships too like Google, openSUSE Shop, Donations during openSUSE Confereneces etc. I think these things are important and will increasingly important, when we start looking for new permanent sponsors etc when a foundation will come into being. The Board should start taking responsibility of the finances that come to it, apart from SUSE by maintaining accounts or ledgers.
Google Summer Of Code and other such programs
This has been love of mine and I should not even call this an issue just a proposal imo. 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. This year, we failed in organizing GCI, which I believe must not happen again.
Minor Issues
Please list any issues you feel are of a medium/low priority that could be addressed by the Board and how you would like to address them should you be elected
Role of the board
One of the things I want to see in the upcoming Board is for it to be
- Report Regularly what is happening between various teams in turn vouching for more transparency and connecting what is happening between various teams
- Take a keen interest in finance related and administrative issues.
Why you should vote for me?
I would 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 at least quarterly about the board's activities. To put it flatly, since we have been elected we are liable to answer.
Aims/Goals
Besides a successful Foundation, I envisage our community growing, learning and having a lot of fun together. I would love to see we have more successful projects like our distro, OBS, openQA etc as they are direct reflections of the success our community and the hardwork done by a lot of brilliant minds. We are all about collaboration, moving together and promoting free software in every little way we can.
Endorsements
Room for your supporters to leave a word about you