openSUSE:Board election 2023 platform simotek

My name is Simon Lees, I commonly use the alias simotek in many parts of the openSUSE project thougnj, I live in Adelaide, Australia, Have a Bachelor of Engineering and now works at SUSE as a Senior Software Engineer within the packaging / maintenance teams. I am the openSUSE maintainer of the enlightenment desktop, and also maintains fish, conky and a bunch of other things to make your Linux desktop better. He is also known for frequently breaking various patterns.

Most recently I have been working on building a Leap replacement based off SUSE's ALP, messing with synthesizers and circuit bending Video Mixers.

Platform

Having previously spent 4 years on the board between 2018 and 2021, I know that large parts of the board's roll come down to conflict resolution this is something that I feel I can do reasonably well and am happy to do so.

Alongside that the new geekos.org finally provides openSUSE with a level of financial freedom and independence and I'm looking forward to looking into the best ways that we can leverage that to grow and improve the openSUSE Community.

One of my passions of the last year has been how can we continue the success that has been openSUSE Leap Post the end of SLE and this is something that I'll continue to work on although i'll still do this even not on the board.

The reason I started using openSUSE 10+ years ago was that there was no gatekeepers around what could be included in a Linux distro and everything was supported equally. What kept me using openSUSE is that I discovered soon after how easy it was to contribute. In my time on the board previously one of the things I enjoyed most was helping connect like minded people so they can work together to achieve the best possible outcomes. However while the project has been easy to contribute to for people like me who know what they wanted to contribute, we haven't always done the best at guiding people who may not know how or where to get started into roles that fit and suite there talents. This is something that i'd like us as a project to continue working on.