You have left until Saturday 12 UTC (see here what that means in your timezone) to vote for the openSUSE Board members. I strongly encourage you to do so if you are eligible. It would be a real shame if we don’t get a board that is supported by the majority of the openSUSE Members. So get off your arse if you haven’t voted yet and do so! To give you a hint for whom to vote i will make my third point now. Also be sure to read the first two about involvement and guiding. Oh and my platform too. So off for the third and last point i want you to take away from my candidacy:
Decision Making
Stepping up, making decisions where decisions can’t or won’t be made by other entities than the board.
Reasoning
Decisions are one of the hardest things to do. Especially in a group. If you don’t have a consensus right away it gets nasty, and in any case if no one feels responsible to make that decision. The best example I can think of is one I frequently experience: Finding a place to eat. Who has never experienced this? You wander around a city where no one in your group is local. There are a lot of restaurants but you seem to make it only as far as the menu display before someone has an objection. You usually end up in some mediocre place Italian place where no one is really happy. Only because no one cares anymore about the initial task of finding a nice place to eat. Everybody just wants some food and not walk another step.
I think this is a pretty accurate description of what happens frequently in the openSUSE project. This is the result of our rather open and loose structure. We are trying hard to keep the decisions in the hands of the people that are best equipped to make them. This is really nice because it allows easy entrance in the project and facilitates the right decisions. But this also means that sometimes you are walking and walking without getting your stomach filled.
This is something where the board can really help the project. The now to be elected board would be the first board with a electoral mandate. And with that comes not only responsibility to do the right thing for the openSUSE project. I think with it comes also some power to make decisions where nobody else will or can or both. Don’t get me wrong. The board should not be the central administration of the project. In no way every decision should go trough the board. But the board should step up in the situations where we desperately need someone that decides. Someone that summarizes the long mail-threads, decides based on the issued opinions and facts and presents that decision in a way that everyone understands why that decision was taken, or at least can comprehend why it was taken. Someone to conclude the one hour meeting with a decision one way or the other. I really think this is necessary and will bring the project forward.
Examples
There are some decisions we drag along with us because nobody wants to make them. For instance how we want to organize code contributions. And Contrib feels like this mediocre Italian place with the greasy pizza to me, sorry. There are some decisions we decided only after people where complaining too loudly like the forums. There are also decisions were the decision finding process could have been way easier with someone with a mandate stepping up, like the KDE3/KDE4 one.
With the third point made there is not much to say for me anymore. I will get on the train up north and have a nice weekend at home. Ischa Freimaak. So when I return on Monday I want to see 100% of the votes cast and a new shiny openSUSE board :)