The board has 2 seats open for this election as Pascal Bleser and Henne Vogelsang terms are expiring.

One of the restrictions for the board is no single organization or company can control more than 40 percent of the electable board seats. Currently elected are Pavol Prusnak with Novell, Rupert Horstkötter with openSLX and Bryen Yunashko with no company association. According to the election announcement what that means is. "In this election, if two candidates from either Novell or openSLX score a first and second place, only the one with most votes will have a seat. The other seat will to go to the third candidate in line (provided of course that person is not also affiliated with the same company."

The seven candidate running for the two seats are ambassador(United States)-Chuck “PUP” Payne, open-slx user experience expert-sebas, ambassador (Greece) Kostas Koudaras, OSS IT consultant-Peter Linnell aka mrdocs, Booster, currently Board Member, Novell-Henne Vogelsang, Programmer, Hacker, FOSS Enthusiast, Novell-Sankar P, Programmer, and contributor- Nelson Marques.

Those who are elected to the openSUSE board will be for leading the overall project and their main responsibilities will be to act as a central point of contact, help resolve conflicts, communicate community interests to Novell, facilitate communication with all areas of the community, and facilitate decision making processes where needed.

According to Board Election rules, members can only be elected by official ‘openSUSE Members’ with and the chair person, currently Alan Clark, being appointed by Novell.