Zonker wrote the following:

I’m happy to announce that the openSUSE Project has been accepted to Google’s Summer of Code 2008! Now the real fun begins!

We’re now in the “interim period” for students to discuss application ideas with mentoring organizations. (That’d be us.) Students will then have from March 24th through March 31st to apply to Google. See our ideas page, and Google’s SoC 2008 FAQ for more info and timeline.

Kudos to Google for acting quickly on this — applications for organizations were due last Wednesday, and I was notified this afternoon that we had been accepted. That’s pretty speedy, given the number of applications I’m sure they had to read through.

Discussion about openSUSE’s participation in Google’s SoC 2008 is most appropriate on the opensuse-project mailing list.

In order to provide a better service to the existing openSUSE Community and to our new users, we’re pleased to announce that suseforums.net, suselinuxsupport.de and the openSUSE support forums at forums.novell.com (the three largest English speaking dedicated SUSE forums) are joining forces to merge into the new official openSUSE Forums at forums.opensuse.org.

Behind the scenes, a project team consisting of Novell employees, openSUSE Community members, and existing forums’ staff have been working on this project since the beginning of 2008. The new infrastructure will be hosted by Novell to ensure the highest possible quality of service.
Current plans are to migrate the existing active members of suseforums.net and suselinuxsupport.de into the official openSUSE Forums, simultaneously implementing Single Sign On for the whole openSUSE Community. We hope to make the transition as seamless as possible, and will go live Spring 2008. More information will be posted as available.

All in all, a big gain for the whole openSUSE Community!

I’d like to give a warm welcome to Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier who joins the openSUSE project as “openSUSE community manager”. You can reach him directly at zonker@opensuse.org. He has his own openSUSE blog at http://zonker.opensuse.org, I advise to go over and see what he has to say himself!

He is a long time Linux user and does a lot of writing about Linux and open source for several publications and conributed to books as well. Prior to his new role as community manager for openSUSE he served Linux Magazine as Editor-in-Chief. His personal webpage is http://www.dissociatedpress.net.

The openSUSE community manager will act as community advocate and ombudsman thus relaying openSUSE community and users needs back to Novell. Therefore you will find Zonker on many community events. He will also drive marketing programs around openSUSE to make the project more successful and attract more developers and users.

Zonker will be travelling the next weeks and you can meet him and other openSUSE members at these two venues:

• at SCALE from 8th to 10th February
• at FOSDEM from 23th to 24th February

For those that wonder what happened with the “openSUSE Chief evangelist” position that was opened in October: this is exactly the position, we just found it more suitable to change the title of Joe.

I have talked a lot with Zonker through the last weeks and look forward to working with him - and look forward meeting him soon in person here in Nürnberg!

Andreas

We’d like to take this opportunity to wish all openSUSE users and contributors a very merry Christmas and an enjoyable holiday! Thank you all for the great work you’ve done this year and the achievements accomplished.

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281 contributors from the openSUSE community participated in a survey last month. The survey was part of a research project on the topic of firm-sponsored open source communities, hosted by the University of Oslo. Topics in the survey include:

• level of contribution
• reasons for participating
• attitude towards Novell

The results are now ready and can be found here:

• Commented version
• Simple presentation

The commented version includes some analysis of the results and statistical measures of correlation between questions in the survey. The simple version only shows the distribution of frequencies in percent, but also includes the answers to the open text fields in the survey.

Masim informs us that the Indonesian openSUSE Community’s (OpenSUSE-ID) Annual Meeting will be held in Jakarta on 8th December 2007. This is their monthly meeting that becomes the first annual meeting to prepare the project of openSUSE-ID in 2008.

Read on for some the facts about Indonesia and the opportunity he sees to increase openSUSE and Open Source adoption.

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The openSUSE-Education project has been setup to support schools and universities using openSUSE. The project will create additional software packages, additional installation repositories and give community based support.

The project members would like to invite everyone interested to the next IRC-Meeting in #opensuse-edu on Tuesday

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The GNOME and KDE teams have teamed up to provide two packaging days, from November 30th until December 1st (from any timezone to any timezone). It will take place on IRC in the #opensuse-buildservice channel.

We will help interested newcomers and already experienced packagers in learning all the little tricks and bits needed for creating good openSUSE packages of your favourite application with the openSUSE Build Service. A little existing experience in compiling software from source is recommended, and the wiki page also lists several other useful things to read.

So join our effort in creating more packages for your favourite Linux Distribution!

Dirk Mueller and Michael Wolf

openSUSE developer and Novell employee Cristian Rodríguez will perform 3 talks during an event entitled “Opensource : mas cerca del código” that will take place on Valparaíso, Chile at the dependencies of INACAP (Av. España 2255) between November 20 and November 22.

The current schedule, defines the following:

On Tuesday 20, he will be all day sharing and talking with interested people about the project as well giving away some nice t-shirts and hats

Wednesday 21:
11:00- 13:00: “PHP5 y el camino a PHP6″(”PHP5 and the road to PHP6″) unfortunately, the room is already full. no more participants allowed

Thursday 22:
11:00- 12:00: “openSUSE, presente y futuro” (”openSUSE , present and future”) at the Auditorium (capacity : 400 persons, still open for registration)

15:00- 17:00 : “Tutorial openSUSE 10.3″ already “sold out”, registration closed.

In case you are interested to participate on this or other interesting talks please visit http://www.infovalpo.os-solutions.cl/opensource and register yourself before is too late

As part of their openSUSE series over the next coming weeks, Novell Open Audio is taking a look at the YaST Improvements and 1-Click-Install in openSUSE 10.3. It features interviews with Thomas Göttlicher, Martin Lasarsch and Adrian Schröter. They talk about the YaST speed improvements, openSUSE updater improvements, and of course 1-click-install.