One particular article that is correlating to my experience working on openSUSE wiki is Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags or in short "how chaos is organizing itself".

In other words, we did not enough to organize our chaos and we have wiki that we made, and deserve. Are we, openSUSE users only to blame?

IMO, yes and no.

Users of openSUSE are not well aware of FOSS concepts, which include a lot of own involvement in creation and maintenance of distribution. There is no such thing as a free beer, you pay with currency or with own work.

Some 5 years after start of openSUSE, users reporting bugs is the major group that is contributing to SUSE. There is no many community members outside the SUSE GmbH that are software developers, packagers, document writers, translators, graphic artist, and many other specialists that can make complex product like software distribution.When I say not many I have in mind that as of today we have almost 12000 registered users, 4600 of them agree on Guiding Principles, but only 395 are members. The members are those that make significant contributions. For distro that offers thousands packages of software titles that is way to small.

The other party to blame is Novell and SUSE, that pursing own interest limited to have community as testers for new Linux related technologies did underestimated value of healthy community behind and all services that such community can provide. Until recent creation of Boosters, there was no organized effort to change nature of openSUSE community from consumers of free software to contributors in many more areas then bug reporting and packaging.

Ubuntu rise is not accidental. Mr. Shuttleworth based his project on relatively small company that complemented existing Debian distribution with final, user friendly, touch up. The other  services that one distribution provides to end users like packaging and security audits are, so far I know, done by Debian, and that is a lot more work as it multiplies with number of software titles that one wants to provide in a distribution.

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The experience of this year with openSUSE FLISOL this was very rewarding … Attendees were very interested in our distribution and of course “freed” a lot of machines with only openSUSE Installed.

A lot of happy faces after they see YaST and how easy somethings are.

Of course, the main character was our beloved “Gecko”, who captivated eyes, picking fights, tears and others because they all wanted a bit of it! xD

My premise was simple, free your machine and win a gecko or a DVD, or a t-shirt. Finally, I got one of my goals,  give a push to GoSVe and open people’s eyes to more options, as is openSUSE.

Some gallerys from the event:

Mérida:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/39953455@N04/sets/72157623811886803/

http://picasaweb.google.com/david.vzla/FLISOL2010

Caracas:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kamihacker/sets/72157623932324984/

More photos to come

Today free time spent on http://wiki.opensuse.org trying to create support portal and learning on the run properties of current portal design. Template:Portal that is used as boilerplate for new portals, even generalized as it is, has a great potential, but to use it to its full potential, one has to forget all the tools we used before, like navigational templates based on Template:Navbar. We can use it, but every child template require manual updates, which can be laborious undertaking when number of affected pages grows. Besides its capacity to take links is very limited if we want to have it readable.

That ... Aversion to Change applies further then GUIs, and suddenly you see your image in: or in other words "Me and the new openSUSE wiki development".

You can see preview on temporary development copy of the wiki at http://wiki.opensuse.org . It will be switched with http://en.opensuse.org later this year, so if you link to it, please make sure that your visitors are aware that fact .

At one of the project meetings, it was highlighted that our selected video service provider isn’t the easiest to reach from some parts of the world. So I was assigned the task of finding an alternative/complimentary service that would be acceptable.

The decision I came to, and confirmed with others that they were happy, was to use YouTube as a complimentary service to BlipTV. So yes people we now have an Official YouTube channel. I’d like to say a huge thanks to Leslie Hawthorn for enabling this for us, and the fine folks over at Google & YoutTube. There is very little content on there at the moment, but that will change shortly as I will sync the content from BlipTV across.

The rationale for keeping BlipTV as our primary provider is:
* They allow people to download the original video file without having to login etc. This is great as it means we can keep providing video in open formats for all to consume.
* It provides us with the means of centralising distribution of all the videos. We upload to BlipTV and they take care of adding it to YouTube and anywhere else we want (should we upload to Facebook too?)
* They’re a great bunch of guys & gals who are very responsive to support requests and general queries – their customer service is superb!
* Oh and last but by no means least, they’re big OpenSourcers using Linux (granted it’s Gentoo but we like the Gentoo community don’t we? ), and a wealth of open source software (ffmpeg, gstreamer etc).

This means that the likes of tube.o.o may well be removed in the near future, as all the content will be stored online and offered to the widest possible audience, without a strain on any resources on openSUSE’s end. If anyone has any issues with either service please let me know.

http://software.opensuse.org/stage includes now a little box to show what other people search for. It was a little idea The Boosters had, but I found the results so far pretty suprising. I didn’t really expect subversion in the top 3, but perhaps it’s only the moment.

The results shown are from actual downloads, for that every download url is a little redirect to save the query the download was for.

Area 1: Talks

For this year we have on schedule around 22 talks (splited in 3 tracks) covering different topics of FLOSS. This year, the talks track will be featuring Jossie, a FLOSS CMS to develop accessible websites that developed in Ecuador. Another main talk is given by  Luis Galarraga explaining his experiences while leading the J!Research project, which is a Joomla extension that is being used by an increasing number of research-related institutions. Following by the presentation of the findings on using FLOSS on education. Something that I am happy to say is that the number of talks is increasing every year, so hopefully in 5 years the FLISOL event of Guayaquil might scale to a higher level.

Area 2: Workshops

This area  is aimed for different users, but most of them are oriented to experienced users. This year we have on schedule 6 workshops.

Area 3: Demo/Gaming room

This is a must-visit place for the young ones and a proof that “Hey!!! it is possible to play video games on GNU/Linux”.  This area will be the home of small tournaments in the games Frets on Fire, OpenArena and Super Tuxkart, where participants will be able to earn small FLOSS related prizes. In addition to this, visitors will be able to test some desktop environments and cool apps.

Area 4: Installation Party

Last but not the least, and the reason that drove FLISOL on first place, the installation Party. The  installation party is complemented by a cross-distro stand were users are explained the main features of each distro in  order to ease their decision in the moment of the installation party. During the installation, the users receive a brief introduction to GNU/Linux and are assisted on its installation. This year, the available distros are: openSUSE, Fedora, (k)ubuntu, CentOS and Debian.

In addition to this, for those who are not so sure if it’s their time to move to FLOSS, KOKOA prepare the KOKOA Toolkit, which is a CD with Free Software and tutorials that can be installed on windows. This gives the users the chance to taste the power of FLOSS and help in their transition decision :D.

The time keeps going and that moment in the year when all Latin America joins to celebrate a FLOSS party has arrived.

More info at:

http://flisolgye.espol.edu.ec/

http://flisol.net/FLISOL2010/Ecuador/Guayaquil

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