Novell has joined the trend in appointing a community manager for its SUSE Linux distribution. Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier spells out what it is all about.

As a journalist, Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier had a job he loved. Since 1999 he brought passion to his coverage of Linux and open source. Now, he's taking his advocacy to a whole new level. His new role as community manager at Novell will enable him to further the cause of openSUSE, the Novell-sponsored community project to develop and maintain a general purpose Linux distribution.

Tell us about your new role. What do you see as the purpose of a "community manager"?

First and foremost, I plan to advocate the community's needs to Novell. I'll consult with users, openSUSE contributors and the upstream developers who work on projects that are rolled into openSUSE to discover pain points and what's working well. Novell can use that information to create tools the community can use to solve problems and improve openSUSE.

We'd also like to provide a roadmap into the community for potential contributors

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