And on to day 4…

– Community Roundtable –

First off, Laura Czajkowski explained the LoCo Council healthcheck, a series of monthly Q&A sessions on IRC where the LoCo Council is available to answer questions from the community. The rest of the session was spent on smaller topics, including calendars on fridge, the idea of documenting “what they should be doing” with regard to monthly reporting, team meetings and other things that Approved teams are expected to do.

– Maverick LoCo Directory Plans –

On the LoCo Directory currently it’s a bit difficult to find specific events near you since they are all just in a big list, so we discussed some soon to be released improvements and other mechanisms for handling this. Also discussed were ways to make the team information page richer, perhaps having photos/flickr feed and an easy way to visualize special events the team is participating in (release parties, global jams, etc). There are also a lot of loco-directory bugs out there which have great ideas. Jono also proposed having a map on the front page to quickly get people to a list of teams in their continent. I’m really looking forward to all of this, the loco directory has a lot of potential to make things considerably easier for teams and attendees.

– Maverick Governance Changes And Needs –

The session began with a quick generation of the list of expiring members during the Maverick cycle so we could schedule restaffing. There was also a lot of discussion about handling leadership mailing lists since it’s a tedious process to keep them updated after restaffing and the way in which voting is handled within the community, as launchpad voting is pretty basic and the current methods of extracting information from launchpad for use in 3rd party voting software are not easy for a typical user.

– Maverick IRC Council Plans –

Jussi Schultink lead this session which began with a review of the Lucid RoadMap where he discussed the progress made in that cycle. I’ve been really impressed with the transformation of the council in this cycle and their willingness to tackle the tough problems out there, it was a pleasure to see every one of my questions regarding their status answered in a positive manner where they had either solved a problem or had plans in place. For Maverick they’ll be focusing on the issue tracker (they are asking for volunteers to help), working through the logistics of a “core ops” team and a policy on factoid changes. There was also a lot of discussion about bots, and the following were mentioned/proposed: Reminder that all Ubuntu bots should be added to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/IRC/Bots (including LoCo bots – oops, this needs to be done for California!), a request to be issued that all approved LoCo teams have an official log bot, and a discussion to begin on the policy of having all #ubuntu-* logged (with case by case exceptions). In all, a very productive session.

After lunch I attended the Plenary talk by the new Debian Project Leader, Stefano Zacchiroli, titled “Collaboration with Ubuntu (from the Debina point of view)” (video). It was an excellent talk and he was really keen on seeing the collaboration issues pointed out, discussed and resolved. Hurrah Debian!

I then had to scoot out to be interviewed by Amber Graner, the video is now up up the blip.tv site: UDS-M Interview Elizabeth Krumbach Community.

After the interview I headed back to the auditorium for the group photo, a “quick version” of which has been posted here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kwwii/4610334160/.

– Ubuntu LoCo Manual –

A couple of really key things came out of this session which was led by Alan Pope and Laura Czajkowski. The first that quickly became clear was that the wiki has a wealth of information which even key members of the community have a tough time keeping track of, discussions would begin and then someone would pull up some old wiki page which would begin to outline the ideas being discussed. This information will have to be found and improved upon. The second important thing that came out of this session was the need for a “Best Practices for a LoCo” which would be a simple checklist outlining the expectations for teams who are approved or seeking approval, since a lot of teams end up getting stuck at a “We have our LoCo set up, now what are we supposed to do?” position.

– Maverick LoCo Council Plans –

This session covered some of the work the LoCo Council has been doing in the past cycle, including embarking upon reapproving teams (which is planned to be done every 2 years). They also discussed the way that news is delivered to LoCo teams, as currently the information is sent to loco-contacts to be shared with teams, but not all LoCo leaders are not sending along that information. Possible solutions were proposed including more direct engaging of LoCo contacts with direct mailing (a lot of work) or having a LoCo Council email address which can email all LoCo team lists (could be controversial). In all, the LoCo Council is doing very well, it’s not easy resolving issues within the community and getting folks to sit down together and talk through problems, but they have been quite successful in finding positive resolutions.

– Ubuntu Manual, Docs Team and Learning project collaboration –

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from this session since we weren’t sure of the dynamics of the audience going in, and had a backup plan if the members of the Doc Team were unable to attend. To our pleasant surprise, not only was it a full room of folks interested, we had Doc Team representatives present! Currently there are three visible projects within the community seeking to write content for users, in three slightly different formats. It’s been difficult to sync these efforts and this session lead by Learning Materials Team member Martin Owens was a step in the right direction. Phil Bull from the Doc Team joined us via IRC and we discussed a proposal for a “content pool” which includes material from all projects written in the format the Doc Team releases in (currently DocBook, but Phil indicated that they’d probably be switching to Mallard, following Gnome). The Learning Materials project is seeking to continue development on tools for this content pool, primarily being Martin’s Ground control and a collaborative editor for materials, and I’ll be converting the current Learning Material documents to the new format once the Doc Team confirms their position on DocBook vs Mallard. The Manual project will be focusing on a content delivery system for the content they’re releasing in the form of the support and learning center that was discussed earlier in the week, this system will include infrastructure for easily accepting contributions. I have to say that I’m really excited about this collaboration, first because it’s so nice to see the teams starting to work together, and secondly because of the great potential these projects have to help each other.

The day wrapped up and we decided to head down to Brussels for waffles! We took one of the shuttles down into the city center and began our journey by stopping at a couple chocolate shops, yum! I was so close to buying to Duvel made out of chocolate (decided against it since it was unsealed and I wasn’t sure how I’d get such a thing home, darn!).

Then it was off for the actual Belgian Waffles! I ordered mine with strawberries and chocolate, but Martin Bogomolni ordered his with some liquor that was lit on fire when presented at the table, and two other guys followed his lead, and I took a video of it Wow, nice!

Afterwards, we too a walk through the Royal Galleries of Saint-Hubert, a long shopping arcade where everything was closed for the evening but the place was beautiful. Then I hit a local tourist shop for some little gifts and then headed over to get some frietes! I sure did look like a tourist at this point, much to the entertainment of my fellow travelers.

Where now? On our way to get beer I passed a shop window where they had a stuffed toy Delirium elephant, oh how cute! But the shop was closed! Martin gave me some tips on finding one in San Francisco, so we’ll see how that goes. We then got to see the Grand Place where I got some surprisingly good night photos from my trusty little pink handheld canon.

Sufficient number of photos taken, we then made our way to Delirium Cafe – yep, the same place we had spent the last night at. I had a couple new lambics, including the Floris Cactus, but I’ll cover beers in their own post.

We got back at the hotel by shortly after midnight – quite a bit more reasonable than the previous night!

Tuesday morning we were up bright and early for breakfast and the beginning of day 2 of UDS! As usual, the day for me started out over at the Community Roundtable.

– Community Roundtable –

In addition to being a general overview of the upcoming day, this roundtable really focused on the perception the community in general has of Canonical. In this last cycle the Canonical Design team really came under fire for making design decisions without keeping the community up to speed on the moving of window control buttons, and the now infamous bug report related to it. The rationale for this eventually came out in Mark’s blog and is generally supported by the community but it was felt that much of the community uproar could have been prevented by having some of the design team’s work be more accessible to the community. In response to this the Design Team over at Canonical have launched a really great blog over at design.canonical.com to work harder to engage the community and keep them up to speed with their ideas and projects. The design team was not the only team focused on in this discussion, it also expanded to other roles within Canonical, including those of developers. It turns out that it’s not well-know that for a Canonical employee to become an Ubuntu developer (or even an Ubuntu member) they need to go through the same process as anyone in the community seeking to fill the same roles, and indeed, there have been times when Canonical employees were asked to reapply for positions within the community when the governing membership boards felt they didn’t have enough solid involvement. The result of this session? Communication has to improve on all fronts to keep the relationship between the Ubuntu community and Canonical a healthy one.

– Ubuntu NGO Team plans for Maverick –

This was probably the most productive session of the day for me. The NGO Team has some really great folks involved who are really inspired to reach out to more non-profits and get them the help they need with documents, software packages and general tips for using Ubuntu and other open source applications within their organization. The result of this was several tasks defined for this next cycle, including some for me regarding php pear packages required for some of the webapps that the NGOs are keen to use.

– Ubuntu Support and Learning Center –

In this session Benjamin Humphrey introduced ideas for a Support and Learning Center website. The rationale behind this is outlined in the introductory paragraph of their wiki page:

The Ubuntu Support and Learning Center (USLC) will be an awesome, quality, dynamic website that acts as an online learning and support center for Ubuntu users to both solve their problems or work through tasks, and also to learn more about Ubuntu and how to contribute to it. The final site would involve material from the manual project, docs team, learning project and third party articles, split into well organized, topic based help using cutting edge web technologies like HTML5. The website would also collect information and feedback from the users on the usefulness of articles or individual paragraphs, so that we can constantly improve our material to make it the best quality we can.

It is primarily a portal for content that is easily accessible to users. Much of the discussion on this centered around making sure the team was going to work with the existing teams to develop content, and the hope is that initially this really would be a portal to existing content instead of a lot of content developed by the team itself. However, the grand vision was that of a moderated wiki where contributors would have an interface for quick edits to content that could be submitted via the web interface into the bug tracking system, as well as a full translations system that would be easy to use. As with many documentation initiatives lately the focus is really on working toward high quality documentation while maintaining a low barrier to entry and making translations as easy as possible. Just like the manual project I really hope to see some of the tools used in this project used throughout the community.

– Development Workflow Overview –

This was the second such session of the week (I didn’t attend the first), and focused mostly on how upstream developers and others could most effectively submit patches, including starting from a base of “how would a developer know where to begin?” and discussing whether attaching patches to bugs really is the most effective strategy. There are currently over a thousand bug reports in launchpad against Ubuntu projects which have patches haven’t been thoroughly reviewed and applied, so while the review team is now working hard to get through this backlog (and doing an amazing job!) the session was seeking to make this job easier by defining a set of simple steps that could be completed in bzr itself so that a patch and merge request could be made directly, hopefully moving the patch that much further along in the development workflow. The patch discussion will continue in some patch-focused sessions later this week.

– Open Week and Developer Week –

I really enjoyed this session a lot. Focused on Classroom events (Open Week, Developer Week, Opportunistic Developer Week, User Days), and general sessions), this session covered some of the strengths and weaknesses and best practices for all these. We also discussed timing of these events and how we can do a better job at promotion, as it was agreed that we could have done better for this latest Open Week and at getting our news out to non-techies in general. Out of this session I’ll also be modifying the Classroom docs somewhat to make it clear that anyone with a project within the community is welcome to use the channel, get their events added to the calendar and take advantage of the features of ClassBot.

– Create a localized help.ubuntu.com –

I don’t know a lot about translations (easy when you only speak one language, and that language is English!) but I do understand their vital importance to a project like Ubuntu, and see the value they present when proprietary and closed source software alternatives lack the international support that open source can provide. The translations of official help docs is an ongoing project that allows for documentation with each release to be shipped with installs, but the help on actual help.ubuntu.com is only published in English. Currently it’s the job of loco teams to maintain their own (like help.ubuntu-it.org) and Matthew East brings up some interesting points about the challenges of maintaining translations sites in his email to the docs list on Sunday. It was an interesting discussion, diving in to the resources the locos have and whether they should really be responsible for handling publishing localized documentation. Since I’m not involved with translations I don’t see myself being involved in this discussion after UDS, but I am certainly going to follow it as it develops.

– Live IRC Support In Apps –

This session covered a proposal (and live implementation with an app written in Python) for a “live help” client for the desktop which has an IRC back end. The initial stab at implementation is clever but probably won’t end up being workable because of the constraints of the IRC medium, since it creates a whole new channel for each support request, an idea which probably won’t scale (and might upset freenode). I was also somewhat concerned about handling quality of support, citing that when people use an app from their desktop itself they tend to think the person on the other end is a professional, but my doubts were mostly laid to rest when the discussion went in the direction of making it clear that it was free, community support, and perhaps they’d even add a link to paid support options. A very interesting session in all, it’s always exciting to see how people are innovating to improve the user experience.

Once sessions wrapped up several of us decided to take one of the evening buses in to Waterloo for dinner. It was raining so not the most beautiful night in town, but we were able to find a charming little restaurant, Restaurant L’Amusoir. Only a couple folks really knew French, so we were dependent upon them (this is steak with frites, right?) but it actually wasn’t too difficult, and the waiter helpfully knew enough english so that we were able to get by. So we ordered a round of beers and some amazing steaks.

First up was the Waterloo Triple 7 Blond, which was really nicely balanced, if a bit strong for a first beer of the evening. Then it was on to the Mort Subite, a lambic made by Alken-Maes Brewery. I ended up with a Kriek (in spite of the photo above being of a bottle of Framboise, the glass itself has Kriek!), which was quite sweet. Dinner itself was a generous portion of steak with creamy mushroom sauce, salad and frites, and was nothing short of spectacular, if a bit filling!

Around 10PM we caught the bus back to the hotel and settled down in the hotel bar where I picked up a Delirium Tremens. Now, Delirium Tremens is one of my favorite beers in the world, and it isn’t particularly hard to find in the US, but all of the beers server here at the hotel are familiar so I figured I might as well go with a favorite since new wasn’t an option. I ended up having some great chats about beer with Jan Claeys, continuing the dozens we’d had online previously, it was really a pleasure to be able to finally enjoy some beers and talk in person. I headed to bed shortly after midnight.

Now off to start day 3! Tonight Ubuntu Women is having a team dinner down at Drug Opera Restaurant, if you’re at UDS and reading this and would like to join us (no, you don’t have to be a woman, just be supportive), check out the signup section on the LocalParticipation page so we can get an accurate count for our reservations. Afterwards we’ll be heading over to the famous Delirium Cafe.

Saturday morning I woke up early to get to the airport on time and caught my flight out of San Francisco. The flight was slightly tense since I had to gate check my carry on (argh!) and further ash cloud problems were cancelling several flights out of the US that morning. I landed in Chicago to learn that my flight to Brussels had a 2 hour delay. In the end this didn’t end up being a big deal, I had a really tight connection in O’Hare planned so I wasn’t particularly looking forward to it anyway.

For some reason I couldn’t fall asleep at all on the flight to Brussels, so I got to zone out to terrible on flight movies, listened to some podcasts and played on my Nintendo DS for 8.5 hours. Finally around noon on Sunday Brussels time our plane landed and we were off!

I bought a local prepaid BASE SIM at the airport for 15 euros, 10 of which immediately went to data, the rest I’m saving for the unlikely emergencies when I may need voice. And quickly met up with some other Ubuntu folks, to catch a cab to the Hotel (turns out there was a shuttle we could have taken, oops). Once at the hotel I immediately bumped into Laura Czajkowski and Martin Owens.

Penelope Stowe’s flight arrived a couple hours after mine and Laura and I enjoyed a nice (if pricey!) hotel bar late lunch and enjoyed a couple Belle-Vue Kriek Extras (yum!). After food we headed back to Laura and Pen’s room to watch the latest episode of Doctor who, along with enjoying our Krieks, some gummy penguins and I got to enjoy my first Curly Wurly candy bar. It was around 6:30PM when I left their room to go to my own – and boy was I exhausted from not having slept the night before. I forced myself to stay up until 8PM before finally crashing, but it wasn’t easy!

Monday morning UDS began! The day started off with an Introduction by Jono Bacon.

Then a keynote by Mark Shuttleworth (video), where Mark discussed the “chasm” that Ubuntu still needs to cross to make it to the mainstream and talked a lot about Ubuntu on netbooks and other internet-ready devices where screen real estate, which he posted about in his blog today: Unity, and Ubuntu Light. He also announced that he wants us to shoot for a 10/10/10 release date of Maverick, because 101010 in is binary for 42, and there is a trend among us Ubuntu folks of having read The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (guilty here!).

From there we headed off to sessions.

– Community Roundtable –

I started out the session day in the Community Team Roundtable where we reviewed the plans for the week and discussed potential sessions, I’m looking forward to seeing the Community Learning Project Materials workflow session some Ground Control sessions scheduled.

– Configuration management tools and conffiles –

This was a really fascinating look at the current state of config file management via dpkg and the conflicts that come up during upgrades when using a config management tool like Puppet. A couple comments about config file management itself were made (dpkg’s config options leave much to be desired – it might be nice to have a better/smarter tool for merging config file versions between versions), but the core of this discussion focused on how and if a team should work with Debian to look into a way to selectively (you can already have dpkg not prompt for any config file changes, but not per package) take config file management away from dpkg itself for certain packages and tell the system that something like Puppet is handling it. I really do hope this happens.

At lunch I got to hang out with Bert Desmet, a local Fedora Ambassador who is attending the summit for a couple days. And we got a picture! …even if Martin Owens is giving him bunny ears (that’s how we treat Fedora folk. Wait, no it’s not! GUYS!!)

After lunch there was a series of Plenaries, starting with Ivanka Majic presenting for The Design Team (video) where she discussed some of their user testing of Ubuntu 10.04 which they’ll be posting on the design blog soon. Next up was Thiago Macieira presenting on QT Roadmap / Overview (video) and then Rick Spencer on Application Developers and Maverick (video).

– Team Project Planning Workshop –

This session ended up being a really great one that focused on the use of Launchpad blueprints in community projects. I’ll be honest – I don’t really use them. We were able to discuss how to make them better (and boy did I have a lot of ideas based on my own reluctance!). The idea ended up being to mostly do away with our traditional wiki-based RoadMaps and instead go with the launchpad-based blueprints so team members could more easily subscribe and keep up with changes – plus regular burndown charts which track progress can be generated easily from them. The end result of the brainstorming was looking into some launchpad-end changes, and some folks assigned to writing documentation for doing blueprints so it’s easier.

– Heuristic evaluation and bug tagging –

This was a session put on by the design team, and while my interests don’t typically lean toward user experience, after the Plenary by Ivanka Plenary I found myself interested in how the team worked. This session focused on discussions they’d had with the Mozilla team about having a common “language” to discuss usability issues and using similar tags on bugs to describe certain things. One thing I was really pleased to see was discussion about error messages sent to users. While I certainly appreciate the frequently easily Googleable, tech-nature of error messages that programs give, this is certainly not universal, and most of the newcomers to Linux these days will be put off by them. In all, a great session.

After that I decided to take a walk. This Hotel is in the middle of a beautiful Belgian forest and I had quite the nice walk down a couple of the trails on the property.

Last night was spent in the hotel bar enjoying some beers (I ended up with a mug of Stella Artois thanks to Benjamin Humphrey) and good conversation with Amber Graner, and several others throughout the evening. I turned in around midnight, my body still isn’t adjusted to the time zone difference but I am feeling much better this morning than I was yesterday morning!

Now off to grab some breakfast and start day 2 :)