Mandriva Assembly

Following the announcement of plans to set up an international committee encompassing Mandriva and its Community, here is the first update concerning the policies for this working group. We aim to define roles, targets and missions for this committee in order to motivate members wishing to take part in this adventure.

The Mandriva Community brings together many very different actors:

• distribution users, who promote open source and in particular Mandriva Linux, possibly grouped together in associations;
• testers for development versions whose main role is to help unearth bugs and submit suggestions to improve the general quality;
• packagers and developers;
• translators for all Mandriva Linux tools;
• and the Mandriva team of developers, webmasters and engineers.

The force of Mandriva is derived from this network of talents and in order to exploit our skills we felt it appropriate to unite all participants in a working structure.

Note: As some of you may already know, Mandriva Linux development is carried out by contributors and paid staff in a group called Cooker. And we have decided to extend the cooking analogy to describe the working group’s roles and functions.

Mandriva Linux Assembly

Mandriva Linux Assembly groups all stakeholders in an environment conducive to communication and permits an exchange of views across a broad band of subjects to enable a more comprehensive understanding of the logic underlying the choice of distribution and to promote a more collective approach to decision-making. The Assembly’s principal task is to sustain communication between users, developers and the society inside Community.

Keep in mind one basic rule: even if Mandriva Linux Assembly is a group of elected members who are the only ones permitted to speak, all discussions will be public. Everybody will be able to follow the debates, whatever technical solution is employed (mailing-list archives, forums, RSS feeds...).

Mandriva (company) proposes to communicate news and developments on a set monthly basis through a dedicated mailing-list (assembly-announce@mandrivalinux.org). The content will depend on current activity: products roadmap, research programs, global strategy, OEM and enterprise activity.. This mailing-list can be read by all. It will run alongside assembly-discuss@mandrivalinux.org which will allow Mandriva Linux Assembly members to submit their opinions and ask for further information on points raised during the discussions.

Who will be members of Mandriva Linux Assembly ?

As explained above, we envisage three main groups of members:

• Mandriva User Groups (MUGs): 1 representative per country or group of countries. We believe existing user associations could supply highly suitable candidates. The conditions for membership will be decided by users themselves in each country.
• Mandriva Cooker: five Mandriva Cooker Chefs will be elected by the Cooker community. Once again we leave the choice of Chefs to community members but we believe it would be useful for the different types of activity within the community to be represented (testers, packagers, translators)
• Mandriva company: Mandriva will represented by 5 members: 2 from the French team (Anne Nicolas, Frédéric Crozat), 2 from the Brazilian team (Gustavo Pichorim Boiko, Claudio Matsuoka) and Romain d'Alverny for all web infrastructure.

If we leave aside the function of packager, which requires a minimum of training, the follow-up of policies established for this type of contribution and a set number of technical skills, all testing, localization and user functions will be accessible to everyone subject to a minimum commitment to the Community.

We will start Mandriva Linux Assembly through 3 working groups.