My Candidacy for the openSUSE Board

¡Hola openSUSE Folks! I’d like to announce my candidacy for openSUSE Board Elections 2009.

My name is Pavol Rusnak and I’m 25 years old. I was born in Kosice, Slovakia, but for the last 7 years I’ve been living in Prague, Czech Republic, where I graduated from computer science at the Charles University.

You might recognize me from various openSUSE related mailing lists or IRC channels, where I use nick prusnak, or from my blog, which is syndicated on Planet SUSE. Some of you have met me during conferences like openSUSE Conference in September and I’m looking forward to meet you all at FOSDEM in February.

I’ve been at Novell for 3 years now and at the same time I became a part of openSUSE project. I started in the Czech Packagers Team, where I was responsible for lots of networking and XML packages (e.g. wireshark, libxml2), game libraries (e.g. the whole libSDL stack) and Xfce desktop environment. Times has changed since and now I maintain (with a great help of you, community maintainers) countless number of packages all across the Build Service (with Contrib and Games being momentarily my favorite repositories :-)).

In July 2009, I was happy to join the openSUSE Boosters Team, a “team which is pushing the openSUSE project forward as a part and for the benefit of the community”. During our brainstorming sessions we managed to create a list of nearly 40 projects or ideas worth pursuing.

I applied for the board, because I think it should consist of both technical and non-technical people. Currently there is a lot of discussion, but less of actual implementing things. As a person with great technical overview I can steer the community members around particular topics they choose to work on. I can bootstrap their activity, give them helping hand in the beginnings and try the best to develop their project into a fully independent one. A great example of this is inclusion of LXDE into openSUSE.

There is a huge amount of work ahead of us and I would be glad to drive the effort not only from the openSUSE Boosters Team perspective but also from the openSUSE Board point of view.

Thank you!