Board

From openSUSE

The openSUSE board was setup to lead the overall project. The main tasks for members of the board are:

• Act as a central point of contact
• Help resolve conflicts
• Communicate community interests to Novell
• Facilitate communication with all areas of the community
• Facilitate decision making processes where needed.

The board should provide guidance and support existing governance structures, but shouldn't direct or control development, since community mechanisms exist to accomplish the goals of the project. The board should document decisions and policies.

The board members are elected by the community and the chair person is appointed by Novell. The current chosen members are as follows:

Members

	Pascal Bleser lives in Belgium and works as a software architect and developer at a large European ISV in Germany. He contributes most of his time building packages for openSUSE in his now defunct Guru as well as Packman and openSUSE Build Service repositories. He wrote most of the current Packman website, contributes some bits to opensource projects here and there, and tries to support community interaction and communication. He is also a member of the core team that organizes FOSDEM, one of the largest and most appreciated opensource developer conferences in Europe.
	Michael Loeffler (Chairman) is now more than 5 years with Novell/SUSE and is the Product Manager for openSUSE. In this role he is already kind of an interface between Novell Executives, the openSUSE community, engineering, marketing and other involved in the openSUSE Project. Michael was strongly involved with the creation of the the openSUSE Guiding Principles.
	Federico Mena-Quintero is one of the founders of the GNOME Project. Before that, he worked as maintainer of the GIMP. In the early days of GNOME he was responsible for some of the original code and documentation for the GNOME libraries, games, and applications. He also worked on Evolution, the GTK+ toolkit, the GNOME platform libraries, and the Nautilus file manager. He currently works for Novell, mainly on hacking the GTK+ toolkit and the GNOME platform. He has also been a frequent member of the GNOME board.
	Henne Vogelsang cares since a long time at Novell for the SUSE base system. Henne is one of the packman seniors, runs the #opensuse/#suse IRC channel and maintains all of the opensuse mailing lists and the corresponding server. Trough his work he is also involved in various free and open source projects.
	Bryen Yunashko is a consultant based in the United States specializing in Novell products. Since joining the openSUSE Community, he has been an active contributor in the community by founding the openSUSE Helping Hands project and becoming co-editor of the openSUSE-Tutorials website. As the first known Deaf-Blind member of a Linux-based board, he is also a strong proponent of increasing accessibility through computing and is an active member of the GNOME A11y (Accessibility) Team and maintainer of the Planet A11y aggregator site.

Contact

You can reach the board directly via email board@opensuse.org.

The board invites everybody to start general discussions on the opensuse-project mailing list.

Past Board Members

• Francis Giannaros (2007-2008)
• Andreas Jaeger (Chair) (2007-2008)
• Stephen Kukow (2007-2008)

History