Czajkowski

I moved back home to Limerick from Dublin and I thought I’d start up an Ubuntu hour here.  On Thursday 29th July, we’re going to have the first one down here.

The idea of an Ubuntu hour is to just chat, meet new people, put a face to a name and talk about Ubuntu, Open Source, other distros what ever you really fancy.  Just makes a change from doing it via mailing list/IRC.  Everyone is welcome, you don’t have to be a user of Ubuntu. We encourage discussion and interaction, but if you just want to come along and listen you’re more than welcome. You can sign up using the LoCo Directory

WHEN: Thursday 29th July

WHERE: Absolute Hotel Limerick  in the Bar area

TIME: Pop in from 6pm onwards

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bracjun/1968911296/in/set-72157603094085314/

Who knew in a short space of time we could go from 24%  -  92%

So I’ve been listening to people talk over the last week about this proposal, why they are for it and for others why they don’t support it. I do support it and it’s very simple why.

A lot of people use IRC – But some don’t

A lot of people use the forums, but they can get noisy and hard to follow a topic – But some don’t

Many people use Mailing lists, but finding an answer in a thread can get convoluted and hard to process – But some don’t

Some folks use launchpad Questions and Answers – But some don’t

We cover all of these areas and have a presence in them, here is another avenue people chose to use and we should try and help them there also if we can.  I am not saying abandon the above ways we communicate but lets be open to looking at new alternatives.  We are now one of the fastest growing proposals on Stack Exchange. We’re ahead of Apple, we’re ahead of the Advanced Unix and Linux group and I think that’s something we can be really proud of in a short space of time we’ve accomplished this much!

I found out about this from Evan who works on the design team and he’s been pushing this with Jorge to make sure we have a presence there.  Hence this post in the hopes we can get more to push us closer to 100%

Sign up here

Firstly for all those who turned their noses up at Leeds, you’re wrong it’s really pretty and very nice.   Last week I went to Leeds to take part in the National CLC – (City Learning Centre) Conference in Leeds.  I was asked to take part by Robbie who runs a CLC in Leeds to talk about Ubuntu Women and the great Ubuntu Community.

I knew diddly squat about CLCs before going over there, I had done some back ground reading on them but nothing really prepared me for what I learned over there.  They were a form of school for children/young adults that were different and taught children through different means.

Many of the CLCs in the UK are facing large budget cuts due to lack of funding available to them.  Having events like this covering a multitude of topics was rather interesting.  Even better was having an open source stream! It’s great to see conferences doing this as it gives people an opportunity to learn more about a topic they may have only a little knowledge in and a chance to learn more about an alternative solution that may be available to them.

Here is where I stepped in. My talk title was Ubuntu Women, but we’re more than just a team.  We are a part of the Global Ubuntu Community.  Having a large vocal presence on many committees, such as the Community Council, the LoCo Council and all of the membership board!  We are are also active in other teams, Accessibility, Learning, UWN and many many more.  We even offer a mentoring program and run some rather cool competitions open to everyone. This is something  that wasn’t happening 6-10 months ago. So we are growing and becoming more active.

While explaining where we are in the community and also the uniques of the community that Ubuntu has above most other groups I also showed how we operate.  From a virtual Community to a real life go give someone a hug community.  I think, trying to get people to understand the many types of people we have in our community to others is interesting, as something they assume Geeks don’t socialise and in fact we’re a rather sociable bunch of people and very approachable.  Which is easier for them to relate to if they know they can approach and talk to people find someone with a real face to ask a question to at an event or know there are people out there with varying degrees of knowledge able to help them.

It was slightly ironic seeing everyone with their iphones, ipads, macbooks and ipods all tweeting and taking notes and in some cases explaining how they give ipod shuffles to students as a reward for when kids reach a certain level of being able to read in a class. All of these things cost a lot of money, surely if your budgets are being slashed people should be looking for alternatives.   In the middle of my session I showed how easy it was to download software from the Ubuntu software centre.  I downloaded Quickly, and while I’m not a good programmer I do think it’s a great idea and can see the benefits of it for young students who may want to learn and it’s a good way to teach people.  Showing off the Software Centre I did get a few people sit up and take notice, explaining all the free software and applications that are available to them and for their students.  I’d brought over  some Live CDs and handed them out and others took some to bring back to their students so I’m hoping others are interested in looking at alternative solutions.

I did get a chance to talk to some teachers, and asked them why some were so reluctant to move towards using open source as an alternative, was it fear of not knowing about it, fear of it’s use or what? Many said it was to do with integration with other CLCs so if one CLC did it, more would seemed to be the consensus. More did ask about the software centre, which I think is a positive sign.

It was interesting to note that some CLCs do use Ubuntu in their centres, some of the teachers use it in their homes, so they do know it is out there! Some of the CLCs are pushing for it to be used more, again issues such as administration and training are the key obstacles they face in order to make a full switch over.   Every time during the talks when speakers gave a solution or software they used they seemed to only chose applications that worked on windows only or Mac only.  (I did try as much as I could to tweet an open source alternative #clcs10)

I’ve posted my slides here if anyone is interested in them.  Thanks again to the lovely folks at the CLC Leeds who were excellent hosts and again great to see a stream on Open Source making it’s way into the timetable.

Another interesting note, 18 speakers spoke over the two days.  There were two women and both of us spoke on Open Source,the other was MáirínDuffy

I mentioned a while back  I gave a short talk on “To Ubuntu and Beyond, how I got involved in it all” to a group of Masters Students at DIT on a very early Saturday morning.

I found it interesting at the time these were masters students studying Project Management and some of them hadn’t even considered using an Open Source alternative in their businesses. They also didn’t realise by using some applications they were in fact using Open Source. So I wasn’t very hopeful of any follow up.  I was wrong!

Two students Barry and Niall contacted me recently, they have chosen Open Source topics for their thesis. I met with them last week for a general Q&A session, I wanted to see how I could help and they had questions on Ubuntu.  After about two hours of me firing information at them about the Ubuntu Community, Launchpad, IRC, Wikis and how I got involved, I showed them how IRC worked.  They were very polite and took lots of notes and asked for clarification on comments and followed up with questions.  I explained the layout of the community from top to bottom and about the different teams that are working towards making Ubuntu what it is.

When I left I went over the stuff I had said, basic information I knew as I’d been using linux for a number of years. To me it’s common sense, but looking back at the conversation I had and the remarks that were made made me realise sometimes in the community we take a lot for granted and sometimes we don’t have patience with new people. An example being HTML and top posting in email threads. Both drive me bonkers! Namely as I’m so used to them now doing it the other way is utterly wrong to me. But Niall did wonder why all of the mails I replied to kept replying at the end and it wasn’t till I explained why did he realise.

I went back the following day for Day II of Introduction the Ubuntu community as both of the lads have chosen to focus their areas on Ubuntu. Clearly I made one or two good points in my talk!  This time I got both of them to sign up to the Irish Team, and the mailing list. For them to log into Launchpad, they had to create an Open ID which again resulted in a small explanation.  I also go them to log into the wiki and show them around.  IF you think about it, most people would never have to go near a wiki or edit it or even log in, so this was all new to them.  I also encouraged the two of them to mail the team list and introduce themselves to us as they will be coming along to the Ubuntu Hour and looking for people to interview.

So this first post is going to be on Barrys topic – “The Motivational Drivers and Barriers of Volunteers in Open Source Communities”. I asked Barry what his level of OSS background was and what he had done before, just to explain to folks, this is where he has come from and his level of expertise.

I’ve not done any work in OSS at all. Although thanks to you i’ve started using it

General info, I’ve an honours degree in computer science from Griffith college. I’ve work in IT for about 8 years in various IT roles, system administration, QA, Bug development and for about 5 years as a business/systems analyst. I worked on point of sale software for Arklife AIB and then later Hibernian. My last potion was in Bank of Scotland where i worked in the corporate banking application development in a system analyst role. I’m also a qualified financial advisor and I have a cert in Prince 2.

So with that in mind, Barry has a lot to look into and learn about Ubuntu and our community I hope folks will be helpful and advise him if he is stuck or needs a hand.

Step 1 Knowledge Elicitation: In order to best analyse the motivational drivers, and understanding of the open source communities is needed in order to ask questions that will elicit the most appropriate response from participants. Therefore after initial research and observation into the communities, semi structured interviews will be held with experts from that community. Using Knowledge management techniques such as card sorting and triadic method, a knowledge map will be built of the domain. It will also be decided through this process as to what communities will be involved so that a more rounded and accurate reflection of communities is represented in the data.

Which is where Barry is at now, as well as learning about the Community and how Ubuntu works! Why we all help out where we can and get involved.

If anyone wants to ask Barry more questions he has said drop him a line

What an amazing week it’s been, it’s true the week flies by when you’re having fun, but you’re also working and yet it doesn’t feel like work.

Last day of the roundtable, besides reviewing the week and the topics we’d covered at UDS, we also  mentioned how the LoCo  Council will be pushing the use of the LoCo directory and not the wiki any more for events.

Following on was the Ubuntu Women session. We had a jam packed cycle for Lucid. Many action items were crossed off our list and we really started to function well as a team. I’m not saying it’s perfect, but it has come a long way.

There is once again a roadmap for the cycle.  We will be looking at 3 key areas such as the Mentoring Program:  Reviewing and Rewriting our documentation to reflect the program. Update and reference existing programs within the community that we can point women to who want to get involved.

Ubuntu Women Logo Redesign: A new logo which is consistent with the Ubuntu branding guidelines

Redesign Ubuntu-Women.org website: We will also be moving much of the static content to the wiki.

We also have the  Leadership Election coming up and an reviewing and evaluating the success of our new IRC channel infrastructure.

One stream I kept trying to pop in and out of was the Design track. It was really interesting and had some great discussions in it. Their team seems to have grown and adapted to the Ubuntu Community really well.  I found myself in the Ubuntu Usability session as I was curious about it having read about what they were doing.

What we do now

* different ways to involve users input                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        *usability testing: showing people an interface asking them to try it out, see what they can do and see where they fail
* We have been thinking about the way we use the methodologies and we have been using them in a very traditional way.

They are designed to help designers make decisions. We have started to challenge our methodologies and look at how we can feed findings into the open-source community. We did some work with Empathy and showed them a traditional report to look at how we can make it more dynamic. How to communicate in a way that helps make it more useful

* conceptions of Ubuntu community
* Usability liability—unfamiliar terminology
* Important to manage first-impression
“How can I make this mine? I want to use this tool, this tool has to be mine”
* Desktop background
* Screen-saver
* Photographs

We sit beside them, we have a script, we guide them and we ask them clarifying questions. This is more exploratory than testing: we avoid leading them. We want to understand.

* We are testing _the software_, not testing _the participant_.
* New question: can we put clips of you online
** Opposite to traditional “don’t worry, this won’t be seen” approach
** During session, only document facts, don’t draw conclusions
*** Not always suitable to share transcript, eg. includes introductory rapour
** Avoid leading questions, but can be useful to extend conversation

Community Team Process We’re a bit all over the place and need to clean up our wiki! So this cycle is going to be a massive spring cleaning session with some pruning and merging pages together.  We’re going to start on the Building a Community page and work around those pages for the teams

[czajkowski] Review and improve the ‘Team Resources’ BuildingCommunity section: TODO
[czajkowski] Update and refresh https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BuildingCommunity/RunningCommunityStands: TODO
[czajkowski] Update and refresh https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BuildingCommunity/Contacts: TODO

LoCo Council had two sessions this week. One reviewing our achievements of the Lucid cycle. We started the re approval process and did 22/30 teams, why didn’t we do all 30. Simple. Some teams did not reply to mails either on time or were not able to commit to a date/time. Also it did take us some time in getting started, creating the wiki page, having the content up and then translated, selecting the teams and getting started.  For the next cycle we are going to do the following:

[popey] investigate beneficial benefits for approved teams:TODO
[czajkowski] follow up with jane and canonical re loco banner for approved teams :TODO
[itnet7] create mail to locos and send to council to work on before it’s sent out:TODO
[popey] Ensure locoteams page on wiki is in sync with loco teams listed on launchpad:TODO
[jono] Set goal for number of re-approvals this cycle:DONE
[huats] Select more teams for re-approval:TODO
[huats] Update wiki page with new teams for re-approval:TODO
[czajkowski] Mail Teams which are up for re-approval:TODO
[huats] Archive re-approvals to /archives : DONE
[popey] Update locoteams-approved team to have correct dates for approval to calculate correct re-approval:TODO
[itnet7]policy and guidelines for the ubuntu loco council :TODO
[czajkowski] Write up a guide for Best Practices for a LoCo:TODO
[popey] sign up to first 8 teams for reappvovals mailing list and then send the mail :TODO
[popey] mail loco counil on how we deal with irc conversations with teams :TODO

Finally the closing of UDS with the summing up from the platform teams and then onto UDS All Stars!  It was a great week and I’ll be sorry to say goodbye to folks! but I’m really looking forward to working on projects during the next few months! I’ve all my photos in the usual place