The openSUSE Project is awesome. We’re doing facinating stuff that is treading new ground in the world of Free and Open Source Software.

If you’re interested in how and why we’re doing this stuff, if you’d like to get involved, then this blog post is for you.

After reading you should have an idea of how we work and how to get started working with us.

How does the Project work?

The Project is a self-organised, self-governed, community working on the openSUSE Distributions (Tumbleweed & Leap) as well as various other Free and Open Source Software, including OBS, openQA, OSEM, Portus, Machinery, and more.

We have no Product Managers, Project Managers, or Community Managers.

We have no Technical Committees or Steering Groups.

For those who have read “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”, openSUSE is very much a “Bazaar” and hardly anything like a “Cathedral”. Whatever Teams we do have are self-organised by the members of those teams, with different ways of working together to accomplish whatever particular goals within the project they are working on.

The Project does have the openSUSE Board, who’s role is to ‘lead’ the Project by acting as a central point of contact and conflict resolution. In other words, they help keep everyone in the loop with what everyone else is doing, help resolve any conflicts that arise, and act as the ‘decision makers of last resort’ in situations where decisions need to be made and there is no one else available or willing to do so.

The Board is a little like the ‘A-Team’ - If you have a problem, if no one else can help, then the Board is there for you, either to help out, or help you find better help elsewhere. The Board is elected by the openSUSE Members, those contributors who have demonstrated sustained and substantial contributions to the Project.

SUSE are the primary sponsor of the openSUSE Project. All SUSE employees are encouraged to contribute to the openSUSE Project. These contributions are carried out as ‘peers’;

No special treatment is granted to SUSE employees, in fact the employer of a contributor should be irrelevant within the openSUSE Project.

In areas of particular interest or importance to SUSE, they may hire folk to work in particular roles within the openSUSE Project. With one exception (the role of Chairman of the Board), none of these roles should be considered exclusive to SUSE. There is scope for anyone to contribute to the openSUSE project at any level, assuming they are willing and capable to do the work.

Who decides what happens?

You Do.

We are driven by our contributions. If something is not being done, it’s because no one has decided to do it. We do our best to make openSUSE very accessible in order to make us the natural choice to be the Project through which you give your time & effort.

The openSUSE Project is structured the way it is to empower our contributors to really shape the direction of the Project. Also a significant amount of the tools we have as a Project exist in order to make those contributions easier. OBS and OSEM are obvious examples, but this is true in all aspects of the project, from the technical parts to the diverse range of other activities, marketing, advocacy, outreach, community, wiki, documentation, and more.

You don’t need to ask permission to get started, you just need to know what you want to do.

What do you need me to do?

You Decide.

Please don’t be terrified by this! To quote The Cathedral and the Bazaar:

“Every good work […] starts by scratching a […] personal itch.”

– “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”, Eric S. Raymond

Find things inside openSUSE, our Project, our distributions, our tools, our wiki, that you do not like, that affect you, that get in your way, and decide to change them.

While it may sound selfish, there is no better motivation than solving the issues which affect you first and foremost, the benefit of doing that as part of a community means your work ends up helping others, and others will in turn help you when they share that same itch that needs scratching.

Don’t expect someone else to do it. Don’t think it is someone else’s job to fix. It is your responsibility to help make openSUSE succeed in the areas that matter to you.

And don’t expect anyone else to tell you what to do or what needs doing - volunteers are rarely motivated when given orders from others, so that just isn’t typically the openSUSE way.

That said, I do believe we could do with having some indications of particular areas where we need help; The new openSUSE Mentoring website is a perfect example of something the Project now has to solve that problem.

In the highly unlikely event that you think everything is wonderful and there is nothing that annoys you, but you still want to give something back to the openSUSE project, then dig a little deeper, try something new, either technically in our products, or get involved in a new aspect of the Project that interests you.

I guarantee you’ll find something somewhere which could do with your help.

How to get started?

So, you’ve picked something to work on, how to get started. Here is my advice.

Do your homework

Make sure you understand the topic you are tackling. Dig through the problem to make sure you haven’t missed something.

Read our wiki pages on the topic. Use Google. Look at how other FOSS Projects deal with the problem. Is their solution better or worse than what you are thinking?

Talk to people who might know stuff about the topic, and bounce your ideas off them. Our IRC channels are a good place for such discussions, as are events like our openSUSE Conferences.

Plan your solution

You’ve decided what you want to do, now you need to decide how you intend to do it.

You don’t need to have all the details worked out, but you should have a clear understanding of the direction you want to go in, and how things should look when you are done

Do you need help?

Is this going to impact other people in a noticeable way? Do you want a second opinion?

If the answers to any of these questions are yes, continue to “Share with the Project”.

If no, skip to “Do It”.

Share with the Project

Take everything you have learned, and what you plan, and put it all together in a clear, succinct email for the mailinglists.

Avoid writing open ended questions. Despite everyone’s best intentions, coming to the Project with a question like “What do you think we should do about X?” will lead to either silence, or an almost infinite number of responses, many of which will disagree with you, often without proposing alternatives.

Write the email from the perspective of “This is what I think we need to do, and this is what I intend to do about it”.

Describe your findings from “Do your homework”, explain your plan. Include proof of concepts if you have them.

Post this mail to an appropriate mailinglist.

If you cannot identify an appropriate list, or you think the topic is deserving of a project-wide audience, then use either opensuse-factory@opensuse.org for technical changes, and opensuse-project@opensuse.org for everything else.

Once you are happy the email makes it possible for everyone else to understand the problem, and that this is your problem and you are going to solve it, fire away!.

Now it is the responsibility of everyone else in the Project to convince you that you need to do things differently.

Listen

The openSUSE Project is full of very clever people. Listen to their feedback, consider it.

As your proposal included your reasoning, their feedback should be equally reasoned and informative, and so even a ‘failure’ of a proposal at this point is a learning experience.

And that is a good thing, sometimes better than accomplishing the thing you set out to do in the first place.

Respond

Fast feedback drives innovation.

If people are giving you feedback, discuss back with them, tell them when you agree with what they’re saying, tell them when you disagree and why.

This is how you will find other people to work with you on this thing.

Decide

You do not need to accept all, or any, of the feedback.

If nothing comes up that convinces you to deviate from your plan, then carry on as you planned.

If something gets in the way, then work together to find a solution, either one that includes a compromise that everyone is equally unhappy with, or one where ‘both’ options are possible.

This is an aspect of the openSUSE community that we often overlook - when we have two sets of contributors wanting to pull in two different directions, our collective natural instinct is to often find a way of accomplishing both.

How else do you think we ended up with KDE, GNOME, XFCE, LXDE, Enlightenment, etc?

This is a good thing, makes our project reflect everything which our contributions want to work on, and something which really sets us apart from many other Projects out there.

Do it

You’re all set! Get to work. Start your engines! Time to inconvinience some electrons with your code! and don’t forget, Have Fun!

Talk about it!

Our statistics show that the openSUSE Project is on the up and up, and we are in many ways ahead of a great many similar projects who are often perceived as being more successful than us.

A big part of that is because we excel at doing stuff, and are lousy about talking about it.

So this is a call to action to ask that everyone reading this post keeps in mind the cool stuff that they’re working on as part of openSUSE, and talk about it.

Social media, conferences, meetups, whenever you get a chance, tell the world about what you’re doing. It is not just a case of being ‘Green and Proud’, but talking about recent successes often leads to conversations that reveal what the next challenge is, and so the cycle continues, but at least it’s a lot of fun ;)

You can start with this post. Please share it on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Reddit, Hacker News and anywhere and everywhere else people might be interested in contributing to openSUSE.

openSUSE is amazing, it can be even more incredible, and we want YOU to help us shape it and make it into something even more special.