Czajkowski

It went ahead even if it was a miserable wet and windy… Summers day! At least the rain held for the time we all met up and had some lovely food from the farmers market.  Well worth going to if you are in the area.  1st Sunday of the month there is a farmers market in people’s park  in Dun Laoghaire.

Thanks to those who came along and braved the cold it was nice to meet some new folks as well and exchange some ideas and thoughts on Ubuntu and Open Souce and what people were doing.  Big thanks to Jeffrey to organised the Geeknic also!  More photos here

What:
Geeknic?? Its a picnic for geeks and there family and friends. Please feel free to bring your family and friends.
This is a family friendly event and kids are more than welcome.

Where:
Peoples Park, Dun Laoghaire.
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=53.29015&mlon=-6.12834&zoom=15&layers=B000FTF
We will meet in the park at the band stand. See map.

When:
2.00pm Sunday 18th of July.

How to get there:
Dun Laoghaire Dart station is you best bet by public transport it takes about 25 minutes from Connolly. Here are some trains leaving Connolly around 2pm.
18/07 13:07-Arr13:30
18/07 13:29-Arr13:53
18/07 13:45-Arr14:01
18/07 13:50-Arr14:13
18/07 14:09-Arr14:33
It’s a short walk from the train station.

Parking
There looks to be loads of parking around the park , with a carpark at Newtownsmith Park Parking near by.

Cost:
Noting, we are meeting in a public park.

What to bring :
Its a picnic. Bring anything(but I think there is no BBQ in the park) Bring food , drink for yourself and a little extra to share. For those who forget to bring food, there is a farmers market on the day in the park that sells all sorts of nice food.

Backup:
There is a chance of rain, come on it’s Ireland. If there is rain on the day, keep an eye on the irc channel and twitter account
http://twitter.com/ubuntuie for updates. We will be still going to Dun Laoghaire but we might move somewhere in doors.

WIFI
Don’t know don’t care. Come on it’s a picnic, the internet will be still there when you get back.

We asked for your help to chose an event to do something during the summer! So we had a clear winner which was out to Dun Laoghaire and have a bit of  a Geeknic.  Every Sunday in the park the farmers market is on and lots to chose from. It’s easy to get to using public transport like the Dart which stops just 10 minutes away from the park.

What we need now is to decide on a weekend, please vote using the poll to decide on which day to meet up.

And just so we’re all clear, a geeknick is a picnic for geeks, and anyone else who wants to come along. Wives, Husbands, children, users of different distros  not just Ubuntu.  Everyone is welcome to come along and just meet up and have some food with friends as you can see from previous Geeknics.  Also thanks to Jeffery for organising this!

If you’ve not heard about the LoCo Directory by now, something is wrong! It’s a great site full of some really useful information for you, your team and also for anyone visiting places they can find out all about your team!

All of your team information is stored and displayed here.  You (admins) can edit your team page and list the resources your team offers, from an IRC channel, to wiki, website, help etc.

A great feature for the directory is the fact you can create events on here and keep a track of who’s coming and bringing along folks.  We’re really encouraging everyone to make full use of the directory, but we also know it’s still in its infancy and has some teething issues.

That’s where YOU COME IN, we need your thoughts and inputs. The developers have done an AWESOME  job in getting it up and running and ironing out the kinks but they need some help.  With that in mind Daniel Holbach has organised a meeting and wants YOU THERE!

The meeting will take place in #ubuntu-meeting(irc.freenode.net) on July 8th, 14:00 UTC.

Topics we’d like to talk about:

• explain the project to new interested contributors
• review the list of open bugs and reprioritise for the next 2 or 3 releases
• general Q&A

If you know anything about  Django, Python, Web development or are keen to learn about it and be part of a fantastic project that powers a great and fantastic part of our community, be there and talk to us.

We need your help now to help grow the directory and sort out any issues there are present.  Help now rather than moan about things not working afterwards!

FOSDEM 2010

Another year over and FOSDEM has come and gone.  It was an amazing weekend, full of interesting talks and meeting people.  With so many attendees on this subject, there are so many opinions on subjects, technology, languages and operating systems flying about it can get heated. It’s also rather entertaining!

Friday night I met up with the Freenode Staffers for dinner, I’ve only been involved in Freenode since last summer, and work on community areas, so nice to meet the folks who do a lot more work than I do.   Followed by the Friday beer event, leaves you set up for the weekend ahead of you!

Saturday morning consisted of me in the lightning talks room, nice way to ease myself into the day after the night before! I popped down to the Ubuntu booth, passing all the others and listening to what was being said, great chatterings.  I brought along some extra Karmic, Kubuntu , Server CDs and stickers as we’d some left over to give out to folks.  Nice to put the faces to the names and chat to people. Always great, even though I am woeful with names!

Popping in and out of talks, and finding people I chat to on IRC to wave hi, and grab a bite to eat with others was great.  I got to bounce ideas off others and get some feedback, which was handy. Saturday night was the Ubuntu Dinner, if there were folks going we asked them to sign up, most did.  Thanks to JanC who organised it, as to seat a large number of people is rather difficult. 18 of us went for dinner, nice to chat to people sitting down,Muharem Hrnjadovic from the Launchpad team joined us, nice for community and non community to meet up a these events. Went to the GNOME drinks meet up as it was close by, but I really needed an early night so homewards I went.

Sunday was the day I’d been looking forward to, more lightning talks, followed by Make your users happy, “cloudify” your app with desktopcouch which was interesting. Afterwards I ran to the Ubuntu Debian talk, but this was wedged packed, I got to hear the first 2 minutes before I had to leave due to the heat and over crowding.

Lucas is both a Debian and an Ubuntu developer and stated that at the beginning of the talk, followed by he had friends on both teams and the talk was being recorded, trying to lighten the humour I suspect as the room was very packed and a show of hands for Debian was rather over whelming where as when it was show of hands for Ubuntu maintaining, it was one other person.

It’s a developer conference so I must admit I found that rather saddening to be honest.  There was a distinct lack of Ubuntu developers there for what ever reason, it’s the largest OSS developer conference that I’m aware of, I could be wrong. You could see the sea of Red Fedoras and Debian kilts, BSD, Gnome, KDE and many more around the conference.  So it would seem Ubuntu should have a larger presence at it.

Afterwards I went to the short presentation from the Mozilla team on WoMoz -  Woman and Mozilla and  then chatted to some of the women involved and exchanged contact details once I explained my role in what I do.  I pointed out their ideas sounded great, and that other groups had done similar, we should pool our resources together. I was even shortly interviewed for the Mozilla team on women in open source, for those who don’t know me, I hate speaking in public on my own, in discussion groups I’m fine.  On my own, I tend to get rather embarrassed and speak even faster than normal, plus I also hate cameras and usually want to punch the person with the camera pointing it at me.

The afternoon was filled with more lightning talks, this time they were from the  Mozilla room, then finally the end talk for me was the Inside StatusNet: How Identi.ca Works.

It was a very enjoyable weekend, I’m glad I went, following the tweets/dents for #fosdem did help to highlight some of the other talks I didn’t get to, which was rather handy.  Lots of the talks were recorded for later viewing.  One tweet that caught my eye was – Debian’s conclusion about Ubuntu at FOSDEM, add that to google and you get the interesting views of the talk which features photos of slides of the presentation, and also a thread

Key Signing at FOSDEM

Patrick and Declan from Ubuntu-ie at Fosdem 2010

JanC talking to Alan from ubuntu-ie

I want the talking penguin

Met some folks and got some hugs

Art of Community on sale at Fosdem

Having a sense of humour at FOSDEM

Tux the friendly face of linux