 My name is Dinar Valeev, I came from Russia. I am a community member of OpenSUSE. Today we are talking about community role in the whole OpenSUSE release cycle. During my session, Martin will join me to talk a bit more about the upcoming spokesperson program. So, what is OpenSUSE? OpenSUSE was created as a community program. It means enthusiasts all over the world should be able to have a significant role in the process of development and promoting OpenSUSE. As OpenSUSE is sponsored by Navel, Navel employees do their hard daily work to make distribution better. But to achieve the primary goal of the project, we need to involve more volunteers in the process of development. Those who use contribute to it and care about it. So, a bit more about community structure. We have users who use and have a lot of fun. About 2,000 of them have signed guiding principles. The principles where the project goals are described. We use a word number for persons who make continuous available contribution to the project and of course sign guiding principles. We have about 260 approved members. They got some perks and able to elect an expert. In order to get member status, you should make contribution in following areas like packaging, bug reporting, translation and so on. So, what the board is? The board are people who approve members while members vote for the board. The first board was appointed by Navel in 2007. The primary mission was to prepare election for the next board. The board was created to lead the overall project. So, the board succeeded in the board's central point of OpenSUSE. But it doesn't make any technical decisions. So, so much about community structure. Let's see in the product lifecycle. Basically, we can divide a product lifecycle into three logical stages. These are idea stage, testing stage and release stage. The community can make proposals on each of these stages. And each proposal or comment is of big importance for those who make the final decision. At the idea stage, community and members are brainstorming for new ideas, what are important for the project, what new feature it will contain and so on. So, in the beginning of this year, tools and services team was launched a new feature tracking system. This tool named OpenFate. We can create future inquestment requests, discuss any feature with interested people and developers. We can vote for features we like. A feature creation is allowed only for members. Usually registered users can only comment a feature they like. With help of voting system, we can gather a most of interested future and attract attention of developers to implement them. So, another tool for gathering ideas we have. In June 2008, the forum's team was created for OpenSuser work. A place where OpenSuser community can have support and discuss OpenSuser related topics. The forum was created by the three largest English speaking forums. This is Navel forums, Susalinox there, Support there, and SousaForums.net. The forum's team promised they won't stop working to implement new features to extend community importance. The most needed feature there is language subsections for forums, I think, because we need to consolidate local community groups to a central point to gather feedback from non-English speaking communities. So, about testing stage, the most of things done on this stage are done with help of OpenSuser build service. At this stage, community can test available packages, fill in bug reports, and so on. At build service, we have community extension repositories for KDE, GNOME, and other various projects. The main problem is now OpenSuser build service contains about 10,000 projects with about 60,000 projects. The current model working with third party packages is complicated to use. So, we plan to make an official central repository for community, it's called CONTRIP. Where we have only one package, only one version, because in many projects we have many, many duplicated packages which a bit confuses users which packet to choose. So, within CONTRIP repository, we introduce two new roles, it is maintainer and reviewer. Maintainer will create initial package, track changes in upstream, while reviewer team track package for security issues, stability of this. All of this, I think, will done with help of SUSE security team. So, with starting 11.2 KDE 3.5 will be created completely by community and supported by community. Tomorrow, Stefan will talk about it. At this stage is important translations we've made. We have translation for LCN, YAS translation, weekend translations. We plan to introduce language specific news portal where users from local communities can find out what happened in open source world. So, what about release stage? Release stage is the stage where we have the final stage. At this stage we prepare mirrors, most of mirrors are created by community. For example, in Russia we have now with help of community two largest mirrors. We watch surf Ukraine and some part of other Asian countries. At this stage we have marketing team who have hard work by preparing release parties. Some release news entries. So, to help with this we make introduce a spokesperson which can help to gather feedback from local communities and put this feedback to global communities to find new ideas and new Thailand and non-English speaking countries. So, Martin, are you talking a bit more about community? Spokesperson? Hello? One, two, three, four, five. More less working. Maybe should I use the other microphone or is it okay? Okay. Okay. There are my slides. So, okay, I'm on. So, we had the overview of the community from Dina and so a lot of stuff is going on. For me the most important thing which is starting right now is the spokesperson program. So, what do we want? We want a good name for it. So, at the moment we have voting. Spokesperson is really just a placeholder. So, that's why we don't have it in the voting. Spokesperson is for me it's the total useless word. It describes what he has to do but it's only one part of the job description. So, if you are an open user member go to the users page and vote. The voting time is pretty short. I want to start the program more or less next week. So, we will release the name at the project meeting at half past six next week on Wednesday. I'm coming to that here. Maybe. So, why we need somebody as a spokesperson? Mainly local communities are totally different. So, Dina also said it. For example, I have no idea what's going on in Russia. So, we need somebody who is in the country and talk with the people, try to combine the efforts of all the local people so it's much easier to do that if you have somebody who is working directly from this country. And most of the Susan and Noel stuff is coming from Germany or America. So, we have really no clue especially what's going on in countries like Indonesia for example. Another one, what we try to achieve is that helpers should be better recognized or rewarded. We have already some people qualified as spokesperson or ambassadors but nobody knows that. I know that because I work with them on a daily basis to get some DVDs, to get some t-shirts, stickers and all the stuff. But they're not really recognized on the OpenSUSA community. And of course we want to create something like an OpenSUSA network. So, we have a mailing list for example. We will have a mailing list for them. And for me, maybe the most important thing is that we have better redistribution. It's quite hard to get OpenSUSA in smaller countries. And even in technology countries like India, if you don't live in a big city it's quite hard to get OpenSUSA because you don't have internet or you have a very, very low bandwidth there. So, we need people who redistribute OpenSUSA with DVDs. And actually the people are making a lot of events in South America, India and all the countries. So, it's not a problem to distribute the DVDs. It's just a problem to have one central point where you can say, okay, here I have 1000 DVDs, just redistribute them. So, what should a spokesperson should do? Be a local contact for OpenSUSA, simply as it is. Promote OpenSUSA of course. And promote is not really the different things you can promote. You can of course make presentations because we don't have the money to go to India for a presentation. And so, if you have a local event, make your own presentations, make your own booths if you can. So, a smaller event like an event on Fostom is not a problem because we are here with 30 people so it's not a problem to set up a booth but we are probably not going every day to Australia or South America. Also very important for us is because not all of the events are part of the big Linux event tracker. So, if you have a small local event, it might be interesting for people but it's not on the big schedule. So, please take care of the events and let us know that there is something. Promote, you work of course. If you are a spokesperson, everybody wants to know what you are doing and bundles a small orders of promodivity. So, who can do it? It's a community job. Everybody can do it even but we have also some people from Novel, for example from Sweden we have a guy, I guess also from Indonesia who are doing the job but basically it's a community job. We want the community doing the spokesperson job. You have to sign the guiding principles which is for me pretty important and I'm not sure about this being open to the member. Actually there was a discussion on the mailing list about that should a spokesperson be an open to the member or not and was not really a conclusion about that. So, at the moment I'm not sure about that and if somebody says I want to be a spokesperson, I probably say, yeah, go ahead. Of course you need some communication skills. You need to talk with the people. You can see it quite good here on the first day for example. You have to introduce open to the user. You have to show some stuff, show KDE, GNOME, whatever. So, this is quite important and of course you need time because in the end it's still work. And it might be not that much work if you have many spokesperson for a country, maybe for Germany we need maybe four. It might be a lot of work if you are the only one in your country. So, what will you get back? Of course, fame. Many people I know here from foster, you know them because they are doing some stuff for open to the. So, doing stuff is quite important and that's also why people are doing it. For example, Andrew Rafa is here the second time I guess and everybody knows him. So, you will get fame back. You will get a special spokesperson package. For example, you will get t-shirts, you get posters, DVDs of course. But to be honest, at the moment we don't have it. So, we are thinking about it, what we can do. We thought that we do send out the package every time there is a new release. General spiffs like stickers, like tuxes, like all the stuff you can give away. We are working on to get some budget for travelling. Even if you are living in a smaller country, it's of course better when we pay for the travel. So, you don't have to pay for your own. And you get a direct Novel through the contact. So, if you have some problems, you need new stuff, you can contact us directly and don't have to go to some mailing list and wait for the answer. But I have to say, you know the economy right now. So, I'm not sure what we can do really, what we really can do. What we can do for sure, we have DVDs. And I will start on Wednesday with that. Calling for proposals, how to get rid of the DVDs. If you have a nice event, go to the marketing list and you will see what we can do. So, where are we now? The name will announce on Wednesday. I will start the same day so you can apply on the marketing mailing list. So, if you are interested in a spokesperson job, just send an email, we will discuss it. This is also one thing I'm not sure about how to separate it. So, probably in Germany we have a very, very strong community. It might make not that much sense that we have 20 spokesperson people in Germany because the country is not that big. So, we will figure something out how to limit it, how many people we need and we will see it next week. And yes, we have DVDs. So, if you need DVDs, just send us an email on the marketing list. That's all for the spokesperson program. I'm not sure if I really answered your question. You can compare it with Fedora Ambassador program and with Ubuntu local program, local communities. So, we need really more people coming outside from the community. It's nice for the company to send people to events, but A, it's quite expensive. B, we cannot go everywhere. And probably C, it makes more sense to have local people. For example, if there's an event in Russia, it makes probably not that much sense that we are going there with 10 people when we have a local community like Dina there. That's all on the spokesperson program. Any questions about that? Do you have anything to say? About some conclusion. So, in summary, you see at the slide, the community role is a big role in a whole release cycle. Community will take their job at idea stage, day stage and release stage. So, community is very important. Questions? So, how we involve more people? The problem is we need more tools to gather feedback from local communities. So, thank you for listening. So, we have now a short break. Is it right during the next talk start in 50 minutes, right? So, we have 50 minutes until the next talk and then we start with build service tracks. We have the rest of the day, most of the stuff is really developer related to build service like Contrib and like the upward system. So, if you're interested in that, come back in 50 minutes.