SUSE: openSUSE Election and SUSECON

What if you announced a board election and nobody ran? That is the quandary the openSUSE project faced as recently as January 4, when the nomination deadline loomed and no candidates for the three open seats had come forward. The situation has since changed, and openSUSE members will have a wide slate of candidates to choose from. But the seeming reticence to come forward may well be a reflection of some unresolved tensions that exploded into a flame war several months ago.
The openSUSE board is not a hugely powerful organization. It serves as a central coordinating point for the project, and it commands a small budget that can be used to promote the project and its initiatives. The board is also the decision maker for conduct issues, with the authority to suspend or expel members from the project. It is made up of six members: a chair appointed by SUSE, and five members elected by the project membership for two-year terms.

The five-week nomination period for the current election began on December 11; it closes on January 13. After that campaigning begins, with ballots being returned in the first half of February; results are set to be announced on February 16. All of that, of course, assumes that candidates actually show up to campaign for those seats; at the beginning of January, that had not happened. The backup plan, as noted in the article linked in the introduction, is that "the three remaining members of the openSUSE Board will be tasked to choose new Board Members, based on their own personal choices, to fill those three vacant seats" (emphasis in the original). That doesn't strike anybody as the best way to properly represent the openSUSE community.

There are plenty of reasons why candidates for a volunteer board might be in short supply. People are busy and do not always have time available for that sort of commitment. The nomination period coincided with the holidays when potential candidates are occupied with vacations, travel, and finding the perfect gift for that impossible-to-please relative. Not everybody wants to take on the stress of campaigning for an office and possibly being rejected by one's peers. And so on. But it may also be that potential candidates saw a side of the board that they didn't like back in August and have chosen not to be a part of it.

My name is Sébastien Poher, aka sogal or sogal_geeko. I am 35 years old now and live in France, between Lyon and Grenoble, where I work.

I am a GNU/Linux system administrator, but this is a second professional life. Before that I got graduated in logistics and transport and I worked as logistician in the civilian world and, during several years, in the French army. Right after that, I wanted to do something different and went back to school for 2 years in order to study system and networking administration.

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