openSUSE:Strategy discussion comments

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Off Topic Discussions

  • There seems to be a huge gap between forum and mail users. How can we unite those?
  • openSUSE does not recognize gender diversity - considered hostile to women. Katarina Machalkova gives these examples:
    • "lack of female role models within the community (female contributors are invisible)"
    • "lack of mentoring program (it's not easy to start contributing if you don't have long history of working with computers, which is many women's case , AND finding a mentor to help you get started is not incredibly easy)"
    • "hostile environment (sexist comments, jokes & blogposts, and nobody protesting them)"
    • "Please find some more in this wonderful paper:
  • Who is an openSUSE member? Is "member" the right word to use for the concept?
  • Discussion about opening up the mailing lists so that people that are not subscribed to a list could subscribe. A proposal was made to change this for some groups.
  • Greg Freemyer asked to get our lists archived at markmail

5/27/2015: The opensuse bug reporting system is broken. This is the only place I could find to leave this message. Please fix.

Thank You,

Cliff Kennedy

Summarized feedback to the strategy discussion

openSUSE Strategy Discussion: Community Statement

  • Statement in general was well received, several ideas on how to improve single items (see talk page of the statement)
  • Cornelius Schumacher: We should put users first instead of contributors.
  • Pascal Bleser: "This isn't just about creating software. It is also (and even prominently ?) about having a nice, friendly, productive (in a positive sense) atmosphere and group of people where contributors can do stuff they like to do."
  • Do we want to reach different world regions that uses slower internet, older hardware etc?
  • Peter Linnel: "We as a community value diversity of skills, talents and cultures. This is a strength and encourages tolerance towards other ideas and opinions, even if we may disagree at times. We value honest forthright discussion when it begins from a basis of mutual respect of all members of the community. Moreover, we wish at all times to be inclusive of other languages, cultures and opinions. ". This could be added as value.
  • talk page

openSUSE Strategy Discussion: Home for developers

openSUSE Strategy Discussion: Base for derivatives

  • Might force users to install many many repositories - this is the wrong way, We should reduce number of repositories users need to add.
  • talk page

openSUSE Strategy Discussion: Mobile and Cloud Ready Distribution

  • talk page
  • Vincent Untz: "If we remove the "private cloud" part of this proposal, then most of this strategy would actually be integrating various bricks together. I think we should do it, but it feels more like a specific feature that will go with something bigger (like, say, "having openSUSE used as the base OS for Meego" or something like this)."
  • Vincent Untz: "I think we'll need to have a good mobile integration story to stay relevant in the future, but for this, I'd focus on teaming up with other communities: this will make the result much stronger and more solid in the long term, for everyone. So I'd keep this part of the strategy and integrate it with our final strategy, if possible."

openSUSE Strategy Discussion: another proposal (KDE #1)

Link to forum: [1]

General feedback

  • Guido Berhoerster: "while I don't consider any of the three proposals "niche cases" they inevitably imply specialization and this in turn has the potential to alienate both existing and potential new contributors and users."
  • Guido Berhoerster: "All of the strategy proposals in the wiki seem to somewhat clash with the Guiding Priciples of openSUSE:...Actually, after looking at the "We want to..." section of the guiding principles I think this already provides a reasonable framework for team-based strategies as I've outlined above."
  • Jan Engelhard: "All these recently proposed statements makes me wonder what people see being wrong with how things are currently done (besides the process not being explicitly documented). ", answered by Martin Schlander with: "The lack of "documentation" is a big part of the problem. Novell employees, volunteers, marketers etc. have a tendency to pull in all kinds of different directions because noone is quite sure exactly what the identity/mission of openSUSE is/should be."
  • Carlos Ribero: We should target government, there's a huge market and benefit for targetting government use.
  • Each thread had many off-topic discussions, we need to find ways to better discuss on topic.
  • general fear to alienate anyone with any of the proposals
  • The style of discussion was not considered friendly and inviting to new users.
  • Martin Schlander: "One thing that I thought was to be taken for granted from the beginning, is that openSUSE is supposed to be a general purpose operating system for server, desktop, laptop and netbook. What needed to be done was to decide how to diversify ourselves from other general purpose operating systems and define a target audience. But 'developers', 'derivate makers' or 'cloud lovers' are all extremely narrow, niche target audiences. I can't support either one of those in their current form."
  • oldcpu: "One thing I would like to see, as a volunteer for providing support, is some sort of guidance provided by the developers (and the packagers) to the support volunteers, in providing guidance so that the support volunteers can document the way things are done for basic user support."
  • FeatherMonkey: "IMO the biggest problem is the devel clique,...Improve the dev clique and maybe you'll be able to reach the tech savy on the forums to."
  • Jim Henderson: "Education and Training" should be done for the project:"1. End-user training; 2. Contributor training (for example, how to write effective bugs, code style conventions, things like that); 3. Community training (where to ask what, what to expect, that sort of thing)."
  • Vincent Untz: "A random thought related to this is that, with the build service, we can make it easier for upstream to create packages for all distributions. If we really pushed this, we could potentially change the way software is distributed on distributions (not all software, sure, but that can work for applications at least). That's a game-changer thing for the whole free software world, and not just for the openSUSE distribution. I'd like to see this happen."
  • Thomas Thym: To follow the strategy discussion I summarized and structured the main points I read. This work was done for me because it helps me to have the information in a very structured way. Not everyone likes that. But I though I share it, perhaps it has value for anybody else (esp. "openSUSE strategy discussion / my content"). Link to my wiki.opensuse page: [2]

Notes

Looked at the following threads on the openSUSE mailing list opensuse-project:

  • "openSUSE Strategy Discussion - Introduction"
  • "openSUSE Strategy Discussion: Community Statement"
  • "openSUSE Strategy Discussion: Home for developers"
  • "openSUSE Strategy Discussion: another proposal" (KDE #1)
  • "Possible strategy discussion topic: Education and Training"

Looked at the following discussions on the openSUSE forums: