openSUSE:Board

Community> Board

Board - Meetings - Best Practices - Complaint Process - Elections - Election Rules - History

The purpose of the openSUSE Board is 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 SUSE
• Facilitate communication with all areas of the community
• Facilitate decision making processes where needed.
• Initiate discussions about new project wide initiatives

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.

Members

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

	Dr. Gerald Pfeifer (Chair) / GeraldPfeifer lives and works in Vienna, Nürnberg, and wherever his role as CTO at SUSE and his passion for diving and Yoga bring him. He has a doctorate in technical sciences and has been engaging with free software and open source before the latter term was even coined. Still recalling when he compiled a modern desktop environment on his Solaris workstation he has been using Tumbleweed (née Factory) for a dozen years and prides (and occasionally frustrates) himself being the trigger of most fixes in SUSE's/openSUSE's LibreOffice packages.
	Neal Gompa / Conan_Kudo lives in Norwalk, Connecticut in the United States. He's a Linux systems aficionado and FOSS developer. A Linux user since 2002 and using openSUSE off-and-on since 2007, he's been a happy user and strong advocate for openSUSE Tumbleweed since 2015. His focus is around enabling people to be successful in the Project, whether that's as a member of the Heroes working on the infrastructure, contributing to the openSUSE distributions and many openSUSE projects as a developer, or simply talking to users and potential contributors on the various real-time chat platforms.
	Douglas DeMaio / ddemaio is expat living in Europe and has been part of the openSUSE community since 2014. He has a Master's degree in International Business and does marketing, management and events for the project. He is involved in various open-source projects and attends several FOSS events. He works for SUSE and organizes the openSUSE Conference, writing articles on news.opensuse.org, talks about openSUSE at conferences and summits.
	Patrick Fitzgerald was born in Australia, and is now based in Germany after more than 20 years living in London. Having spent almost his entire adult life working with technology (except for about 7 years in the film industry, but that's another story), he has presented at multiple SUSE/openSUSE events and is keen to help the project advance to the next level.
	Simon Lees / simotek lives in Adelaide, Australia, Has a Bachelor of Engineering and now works at SUSE as a Senior Software Engineer within the packaging / maintenance teams. He is an upstream release manager and the openSUSE maintainer of the enlightenment desktop, he also maintains fish, conky and a bunch of other things to make your Linux desktop better. He is also known for frequently breaking various patterns.
	Shawn W Dunn / SFaulken lives in Bellevue, WA in the United States, and is the Lead Developer on openSUSE Kalpa, a Maintainer for the LXQT Desktop (and other assorted things), and a Moderator for various openSUSE Communication and Social Media platforms (Matrix, IRC, Discord, kbin.social, etc).

Appointed Positions

On occasion the Board appoints people to the Board to assist with specific tasks. These positions are non-voting, they can not take an active part in any Board decisions, but they are empowered to assist the Project in their area of responsibility.

All appointed position only last until the next Board election. In the first meeting of a new Board any existing appointees must be replaced, reappointed, or the position removed.

Currently the only appointed Board position is the role of Treasurer. This role is responsible for administering the Travel Support Program and liaising with SUSE & the Project's other Sponsors on all financial matters.

Contact

• You can reach the board privately via email [email protected].
• You can add items to the Board online meetings agenda by adding them in https://code.opensuse.org/board/tickets.
• [email protected] - The board invites everybody to start general discussions on the project mailinglist.
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