Updated§

So my friends actually don't like the idea that I have a self-deprecatory section. I don't see it as self-deprecatory as I was being realistic. But I don't want to disappoint them so I guess I'll have to be performative despite the dire situation I currently am experiencing in my personal life while writing this.

I actually read the governance proposal and I think it should be moved forward but that's a collective idea and not really my own.

So what are my own ideas?§

I believe openSUSE is already a popular distribution. And it is really thanks to the collective effort of the community, volunteers, and contributors.

But I also believe we can do more. My experience with volunteering and still developing software to improve OpenBuildService packaging have shown me that it is possible to increase adoption and contributions.

More Asian Representation§

But I want to tackle another problem, I haven't seen so much visibility of openSUSE in southeast Asia. Yes, there exists an openSUSE community Asia summit held in Indonesia, and I also see some openSUSE members in Discord that are from Malaysia, Indonesia and Philippines. We may exist but we are few. And I think if I became an openSUSE Board, I would gladly help out promote openSUSE in various places e.g. encourage them to join conferences, workshops and the like.

A need to improve our communications§

openSUSE so far has low barrier to contributors, and I experienced the same thing when I first joined because of very welcoming members such as Firstyear, LCP, and sfaulken. I also made communications albeit uncommon from and to some openSUSE contributors, mostly about fixing some bugs in packaging and also improving the packaging situation. That in itself does not need improvement, after all, open source is a collective effort and we spend our free time improving things whenever we can, hopefully not to the extent of burnout.

Blackbox nature of certain infrastructure§

However, we do have a communications problem, and I think it's not really unique to openSUSE. Old infra, sudden change of infra etcetera, you get it. A major issue I have with openSUSE is the "blackbox" nature of OpenBuildService itself. It is open-source but it's also something that even I have a problem with. When the new git workflow was introduced, a lot of it wasn't clearly stated. It was suddenly been given to contributors to adopt this workflow, especially to devel projects where they are maintaining some software packages. I was able to adapt during that change but my problem was not if I was able to adapt it but what changed.

• missing devel projects?
• namespaces such as with home projects
• git itself

I do have a blog post on it and why I was able to create my own namesspace and "branched" project in here.

But how? How do we improve the situation? I am not a SUSE employee nor I have been involved internally. That can be solved by letting stakeholders know ahead infrastructure changes and introduce testing and asking them for feedback for the sudden change. Not all are actually welcoming the new workflow but it has happened and I don't think that it is planned to be reverted as it seems this was the new workflow in the future.

Conclusion§

If you are going to vote me, I'll find ways in the best of my ability to improve communications and increase number of contributors we have in our community. I'll find ways to ensure that some changes should be relayed to contributors ahead of time without leaving them confused.