openSUSE:Strategy Community Statement
Proposals: Home for developer · Mobile and cloud ready distribution · Base for derivatives · The #1 KDE distribution · For the productive poweruser · The Linux distribution platform · Status Quo, and quantified so · Overview of proposals
Community Statement
We are the openSUSE Community - a friendly, welcoming, vibrant, and active community. This includes developers, testers, writers, translators, usability experts, artists, promoters and everybody else who wishes to engage with the project.
To grow the openSUSE Community, we will put contributors first and focus on the following activities:
- Build a lively and active community
- Increase contributor visibility
- Attract contributions by empowering our community to influence and shape the Project in all aspects
- Make contributing easy by eliminating or greatly reducing bureaucratic obstacles and having great governance
- Market the Project
This includes the following activities in order to excel in our goals:
- Create tools that support community activities
- Establish the openSUSE Foundation
- Improve visibility through announcements, news, blogs, tweets, etc
- Give presentations about the Project
- Establish Events: Conference organization
- Emphasize the value of communication and recognize cultural diversity within our community
- Foster governance discussions
- Mentor new contributors
- Praise contributors (Publicity, bounties, ...)
We will also do the following activities:
- Events: Attend shows, set up booths, have openSUSE Community rooms
- Raise funds for the Project through the openSUSE Foundation
- Helping new users and contributors
- Encourage technical discussions (via mailing lists and forums)
- Give presentations about the Project
- Publications, whitepapers, ... in journals
- Reaching multiplicators (journalists, key comm members, ...)
- Customer intelligence (Surveys, segmentation, update statistics, ...)
Note that we are very well aware that anything we do depends on the willingness of our community to drive it and make it successful. The openSUSE Community Board sees its leadership role in making coherent proposals and driving community decisions -- not in just taking decisions on behalf of the community.
Note that openSUSE has evolved from its initial launch with little participation to being now a real open source project. It has many sponsors including Attachmate Group/SUSE BU as main sponsor. The sponsors are part of the Project and will support it in various ways but not control the project. openSUSE being an open source project means that everybody in the community can contribute equally to it in all aspects of the project and should not depend on any of the sponsors doing everything.
We’d like to cite as well from the openSUSE Guiding Principles:
We value respect for other persons and their contributions, for other opinions and beliefs. We listen to arguments and address problems in a constructive and open way. We believe that a diverse community based on mutual respect is the base for a creative and productive environment enabling the project to be truly successful. We don’t tolerate social discrimination and aim at creating an environment where people feel accepted and safe from offense.