Day 3!
– Community Roundtable –
Once again started my day in the Community Roundtable discussion. Not much noteworthy to the outside world came of this, mostly just administrative loose ends that needed to be tied up, including touching base with Canonical about some things, changing some of the scheduled sessions (oh no, conflicts!), making sure the lists.ubuntu.com mailing list creation workflow was being handled properly (it’s still a bit slow – but it’s much better than it used to be!), and chatted a bit about loco events and meetings as far as calendaring goes.
– Promoting LoCo Testing Teams –
The core of this session began with a great presentation by Paolo Sammicheli discussing the test case of Italy as a team who got heavily involved in ISO testing during the last cycle. Details from the Italian team’s initaitve are outlined on their wiki: http://wiki.ubuntu-it.org/GruppoTest, including results compiled from their big testing push in 10.04. Their main findings? It’s a good way to get new contributors, several of the people contributing in the Italian team test were new to contributing to Ubuntu. It seems that it gives just enough techincal work to keep new contributors engaged (bug filing and such), while also having a low enough barrier to entry that it’s not a problem for newcomers to give it a try. There were also suggestions from other folks in the room regarding how we motivate teams and individuals to do testing. Something like a 5-A-Day but for testing? Hooking Launchpad Karma into it (Karma is not a great metric, but people like it)? Perhaps being able to somehow tag tests with a loco team name so folks could see which locos are more active than others.
Aside from the basic ISO testing info, couple other links mentioned during the session for teams looking to do similar work may be helpful:
http://ubuntutesting.wordpress.com/
https://launchpad.net/testdrive
Looks like this could be a really valuable thing for more teams to take a part of.
Ubuntu at Conferences! I really enjoyed this session. It turns out that the link I just referred to hasn’t been updated in 2 years, which means a couple of things: 1) Amber Graner and others in the community had some really great tips about how you can submit the best application for a ship-it request, like including additional information about the conference itself 2) The conference packs haven’t changed all that much in 2 years. The former was only the first of several ways that Amber has come up with teams doing better at conferences in general, all of which will be released as a document in a few weeks. The latter also sparked a great conversation about how the Conference Packs could be better, Jane Silber (CEO of Canonical) was in the room during this discussion and said she’d be happy to hear a proposal from the LoCo Council on this, excellent! The session also discussed the types of conferences that teams get involved with, and the consensus was that we really don’t want to isolate our booths to just tech events, we want to present at events at schools and universities, attend events like SciFi conventions, and the North Carolina team has really run with this idea by planning to promote Ubuntu at a goat festival, an idea which came up after somewhat unrelatedly working with an organization involved with it to get their systems switched to Ubuntu.
– Community Maverick Mootbot –
Writing meeting minutes is a tedious and often thankless job, so the Scribes Team wrote MootBot. Alan Bell and the UK team have done some really great work based on the current MootBot to develop one which makes friendlier-styled logs like this which is output as wiki syntax for immediate placement in the wiki. There were a lot of great ideas during this session, like requesting the ability to change the chair in the middle of a meeting, automatic posting to wiki following the meeting, ability to process old logs, and further automate chairing a meeting. The decision was also made to convert the bot from an eggdrop to a Supybot.
– Plan for Moodle, schooltool and sugar in Edubuntu –
This session was a really interesting one to catch up on the health of these packages in Ubuntu (and Debian). Moodle turned out to be a tricky one since the current version in the repository is getting old and the Moodle team is needing some help with packaging and patching for security and bug handling. SchoolTool‘s status was considerably better, they have a PPA and they’re shooting for getting it into Maverick. The final one discussed was Sugar, and they’ll be following up with the Ubuntu Sugar Remix team, which has an active PPA and mailing list discussions.
– Community Track: Fridge and News Team –
This was probably the most productive session of the day from my own workload perspective. The Fridge will be moving to WordPress from Drupal and in a couple months we’ll have a test instance up. The Design Team has some time set aside for theming and we had a volunteer in the session who said she’d help with mockups. Amber and I will be doing content review and we’ll all be playing with workflow and are planning to set up a trial for non-editors to submit news directly to the Fridge. The calendar was also discussed, as the project has grown so much that we now have several heavily populated community calendars and the team wants to somehow display and link these to /calendar. I’m really excited about this redevelopment, should be an excellent cycle for the news team.
– Maverick Ubuntu Global Jam –
In this session we primarily focused on best pratices for Global Jams where we all related stories about our own successful Jams. Then there was a lot of discussion about how to better spread the word to teams about jams. Some of the ideas tossed around was direct emailings to loco mailing lists (may be a bit spammy), better promotion of loco contacts mailing list, getting into direct contact with contacts, a facebook group.
Once the day finished up we all met up to head down to Brussels for the Ubuntu Women dinner at Drug Opera Restaurant. We took the bus to the Metro station which we took into the center of Brussels.
Dinner was enjoyable, but ended up taking quite some time and we had to change our plans to the evening since we couldn’t get back to the shuttle on time.
From there we headed to Delrium Cafe, which was amazing, but I’ll have to write about that later.
On to UDS day 4!
Thursday, May 13th, 2010 at 9:45
When I was in the Navy and anywhere in/around Europe and we could make it to Brussels, we would go to the Delirium Cafe. Though a word of caution, I think it still holds, if you drink their one beer, which is a favorite because it messes you up quickly, you are bound to fail a urinalysis due to the use of opium. Yeah, we got busted in the Navy for it, but luckily we always brought back bottles to prove we didn’t smoke anything funny. Oh how I love Delirium! If you are lucky, some liquor stores in the US will get you the good Delirium with the opium, though I do think it is still illegal here.