openSUSE announces Community Release Team

The openSUSE Board announced today a call to action for a Community Release Team to assist with tasks associated to the development of the next Leap version 42.2.

The announcement was made in an email to the project’s development mailing list opensuse-factory (at) opensuse.org.

“In the past, these tasks were… distributed among the SUSE employed openSUSE team, which tried to incorporate community and in the end made sure that everything gets done,” wrote Tomáš Chvátal, a newly elected board member.

Contributors can help Leap’s new release manager Ludwig Nussel with a variety of tasks associated with the development of 42.2, but the opportunities for contributing are more than just development.

“We would like the community to be directly responsible for ensuring these tasks get carried out,” Chvátal wrote. “To accomplish this we intend to create a full team of people taking care about what needs to be done for the release. We expect the people in this Community Release Team to be the ones responsible for the tasks in their respective areas of responsibility.”

The tasks are split into several areas like marketing, design, infrastructure, documentation, translations and quality assurance.

Tasks for marketing include creating and following a marketing plan and taking care of social media among other things. Design tasks include making sure the desktops are consistently branded and the the look and feel is consistent. Infrastructure tasks include making sure critical infrastructure works.

The documentation tasks include updating content on the wiki and ensuring release notes are updated. Translations for 42.2 will be needed and QA tasks include creating a test plan for milestones, monitoring bugzilla and escalating important regressions to the release manager.

People interested in joining the Community Release Team should contact the board and Nussel.

A link to the action items from the last release can be found at //tinyurl.com/grg5szf and volunteers are welcomed to expand the tasks.