Czajkowski

I brought up this idea at UDS-M and with the help of the rest of the LoCo Council, I am happy to introduce some a guide to  best practices we think would be beneficial to all teams. The LoCo Council has drawn up this guide on ”’Best Practices and Guidelines”’ for LoCo Teams to follow while it’s not mandatory we do encourage its use.  It could also be viewed as a checklist. It has been created to help new teams set up and delegate tasks within the team and become more involved in the Ubuntu Community. It will also help teams when it is time for their Approval and Re Approval as they can show how they operate and by having continuous reports it is easier for applications.

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

Eh it’s Thursday already…. How exactly did that happen! The week is flying past and it’s been really interesting meeting new people and working on some really cool projects during the week. A topic in this mornings roundtable was how we can get do a community check for before a meeting to see who is coming so people don’t turn up and there is no council or board there. It’s frustrating for folks who’ve had to stay up for the meeting or take time out of their schedule.

The Fridge Calender is getting revamped and in future there will be 5 calenders on the fridge 1)Meetings 2) LoCo events on IRC  3) Fossevents 4)Classroom Events 5) Loco Events in Person

The LoCo Directory has come on leaps and bounds in the last few months! Thanks to the AWESOME Developers behind this. The LoCo Directory (LD) is starting to really shape up. Some issues such as there being multiple places to publish content has frustrated some teams, in the future all content will be in the LD and not on the wiki.

Future LoCo Directory Plans:
* Continent support for the front page.

Potential Team Profile Page Targets:

* Team profile picture.
* Flickr Feed
* List campaigns and whether they are participating. E.g:

Ubuntu Global Jam ./
Maverick Release Parties x
Project Cleansweep ./

If you click on an ‘x’ it takes you to the docs.
• Possibly Add Team Resources, Motu, Artists, (other contributor types) not individual names on the main page

Eventually the wiki will become redundant and all information will be on the LoCo Directory

At each UDS there is a session on Governance and checking to see which council will have members expiring during the next cycle.

* Check with IS to see if we can automate how current team council members join team-council-members@lists.ubuntu.com

From the wiki: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/CommunityCouncil/Restaffing . The announcement should go to the most appropriate team mailing list, so you get the attention of everybody who takes an interest in that particular part of the community. For additional effect (you might want broader feedback), blog about the nomination/election, get the announce on the Fridge and put a link to the announcement in the topic of the team channel.

* Launchpad votes are pretty straightforward, but a bit limited in its set-up, either you
- set up one poll for the whole election and see who gets the top <x> of <y> votes (5 of 12, when you have 12 nominees and 5 seats) or
- set up one poll per person and see who gets the most “Yes minus No” votes.
• CIVS makes use of the Concordet method which can be more suitable when you are selecting m-of-n candidates, for example if you have 5 candidates for 3 places.

Something I’ve been wanting to kick start since I joined the Ubuntu LoCo Council is a manual available to all LoCo teams.  It’s going to contain some Best Practices and Guidelines for Teams. This will help them when running a team, but also help the LoCo council when it comes to Approval and Re Approval of them.Getting Started. Running a team? – guidelines? List of loco teams that already do good stuff to mentor other teams?

• Doing useful things
• ISO testing
• Translations
• Advocacy – outreach
• Mentoring members of the team to contribute
• Usability testing
• Promotional Material
• Designing leaflets / posters / flyers
• Event Planning
• Marketing

So for this cycle I’m going to be working on the above as an action item and once it’s finished, getting it translated and then promoted to old teams and to new teams starting off. Keep watching as I’ll blog its progress.

Up early and down for breakfast and chats and the day begins well.  Breakfast is just as important not only to set you up for the day but also sitting with new people and talking to them.  UDS is more than just working on Ubuntu it’s about meeting more people and getting to know who is involved where and does what. It’ll help you and them in the future.

I predominately stay in the community track so the first morning for me is a Round Table discussion. We had some ideas from Monday but mainly the focus of todays disucsion was broken down into topics in and around Community and Canonical. Firstly,  Design in which we discussed the design and discussion about them infamous  buttons .  What it really boiled down to was this, the decision and thought process for the change was not communicated well. I think by now everyone is in agreement with this, so we need to move on, build a bridge and get over it and look at how we can change this for future decisions.

In future we need to increase blogging about the process, possibly explain from the start, these are issues we are considering changing, this is the reason why and possibly along the way here is versions 1, 2, 3 etc until we get the final result, rather than just showing us the final version, it’s hard to see how the logic was achieved and gotten there in the end without seeing previous attempts.

Next we moved onto the perception of  peopling thinking of - Canonical forcing stuff into Ubuntu .  Rightly or wrongly people jump to conclusions based on the facts they see even when they may not know the full picture, this just comes down to lack of communication.  We used to be better at communication, we really need to get back on track with this and increase the information from from Canonical to the Ubuntu Community.

This seemed to happen towards the end of the last cycle due to a few issues all of which from what I can gather people have nodded and accepted and want to make sure don’t happen again.  This was brought about flagrant disregard for UI freeze – stuff changed after the freeze, which rather upset folks a lot. Equally, it also teaches people the misunderstanding of freezes – people freaked out, and seemed very unwilling to learn more about “what a freeze is”.

Also just to note and many don’t seem to know this, and to be honest I was one of these people and it wasn’t till I listened to Matt Zimmerman recently on a talk saying this did I know that just because you’re Canonical employee it doesn’t give you access rights. You need to earn them just like everyone else does.   Also did you know that  not all canonical folks are ubuntu members.

The morning wasn’t over and I moved onto the NGO session, here we reviewed the work we did during the last cycle and tried to highlight more areas where we can work on getting more information on NGOs and how we can promote organisations using Ubuntu. Following this session I’ve a few to do items which I’m looking forward to working on with the team.

[czajkowski] more regular meetings – once a month:TODO
[czajkowski] Paolo  come up with specific questions for interviews: TODO
[czajkowski] Jussi to work on stats/interviews from the interviews  – find out what works very well – tools they’ve built on their own
[czajkowski]  See if NGOs would consider document their work – best practice

I attended a very interesting discussion session presented by Andrew from the British Consulate on Learning how Ubuntu can help support the UN’s millennium goal. The discussion for this session was about how best we could use an drive the use of Ubuntu and Open Source within the British Consulate community.  What would be needed and desired to get this up and running. What were the requirements needed to see this happen and using available networks already out there.

Tools – Global Network
1  Networking – embed social network
2 Collaboration – Incorporate an office suite, survey result, whiteboard/Diary/Meeting
3 An Information Store – Public face of what the network is creating, a window in, learning resource
4 A resource for participants – Place for CVs , Database of  Funding bodies, WIKI Definitions/Discussions
5 Training Materials, Use these to facilitate a global forum especially links to the British Consulate Community.

Encourage the Use and RE Use of material
We need to start from where people are already comfortable, sometimes that’s the first battle – If this is Facebook, Twitter, or Identi.ca use this and reuse these as people are in their comfort zone.
Where do they upload their work for collaboration. Give them an identity. – If you log into Launchpad and see your user id and click on the profile you can see the teams a person belongs to and what areas they are interested in.
Online tools to work with the community work very well for a large audience, for people attending and also for remote participation, at UDS we are rather spoilt and it works very well. We use IRC to keep in touch, use social media and track # tags. We create blueprints which are linked to wiki pages and the blueprints can be linked to a team or an individual.  It works very well.

A session I was interested in hearing more about was the Open Week/Developer Week feedback session. I ran a LoCo Council session to help spread the word on what we do and how we can help.  We have more and more specalised weeks happening and we need to make sure people know about them so they can take part. One issue highlighted was that we’re advertising on Ubuntu sites,lists and forums, we really should be looking outside the box as we want new people to come to these sessions. We discussed how we can better advertise it all better and the  pitfalls of the weeks. Lenrid is a great tool, and while I appreciate people wanting to use it, I don’t think it should be forced upon people as being the only tool, which for me is my only criticism. I like IRC and it’s a good tool, for me I find it distracting to see slides, but that’s just me and if I’m conducting a session I won’t be using them.

In the afternoon I attended the Create a localized help.ubuntu.com as I’m on the doc mailing list and have been following all of the mails. How we can create a unified approx for localised approach – from the loco side and not to fragment the way you can access the resources.  Should part of a site be translated or not at all.  I must say I was rather disappointed in this session. David did a great job in keeping the session on tack from the translations point of view, however I just felt it was the manual team and documentation team at locker heads so found it frustrating to be in as it just seemed liked digs were being made at the teams.

I’m really enjoying the design track at UDS this time and glad to see they are holding some great sessions ,Meeting Ubuntu for the first time your impressions. This was a jam packed session full of lots of great ideas. If you buy an OEM install from say Dell what is your first impression. Well firstly there are two types of people who are going to buy these machines, people who know and use Ubuntu a lot and know what they want, and secondly others who’ve just switched over or heard a little about it.

So some of the issues highlighted were what do you see on your first boot up, what do you read, see or look at.  How can we make it better, more informative and make the user experience more enjoyable.

- use a video of someone providing an awesome introduction of ubuntu to find out what sequence they introduce things
- first use wizard? introducing the desktop just like a person would do.
- Reduce About options to 1
- http://wiki.ubuntu.com/AboutUbuntu
• http://wiki.ubuntu.com/AboutUbuntuRevisited

Software center – it gives you all these free things – should there be a guide a direction and build up to explain what this is all about , cool, ubuntu apps, needs better marketing
applications. Group of apps that can help you depending on your area listed out and easy to access.

First boot only – something to help the user, where is it to go, and what should it have
Dell give support requirements – make a video of this to help ? Dell get asked support questions, it would be great to see the questions they get asked and do up a presentation answering these in a FAQ style format.

It was a long and very productive day and a few of us headed to Waterloo for dinner. Yummy dinner at l’Amusoir Great meal good value and excellent service!

Back for chin wagging and disucsions on the days events over beers, great way to spend an evening.

Whooo we’ve made it and UDS-M has kicked off here in Brussels. There have been some slight issues for folks getting here due to inconvenient volcanic ash causing flight issues for some guys.

The day kicked off with a once again energetic Jono Bacon,  not sure where the guy gets his energy from but I’d love some! For those who’ve not been to a UDS before Jono is the Community Manager and kicks off the session with a recap of what has taken place in the last cycle, the idea for the week ahead and an introduction to the platform managers.  They gave a brief outline as to what they were going to be working on during the week.

There was an amazing video show put together by Robbie Williamson show casing the Ubuntu Community and the cycles of Ubuntu over the last few years. If I get the link I hope to post it here also as it was AWESOME!!!!

Following on from Jono, was Mark Shuttleworth who gave a short talk onUbuntu and it’s plan for the future.  Announcing  radical changes to the desktop, along with Ubuntu “Lite” being installed Dual Boot by Dell and other OEM’s that boots to a USABLE web browser in 7 seconds, this is available today by installing “Unity“.

“The Perfect 10″ as Mark describes it will consist of UNE, new icons, the new font and many other desktop improvements. And he is pushing for a Release on 10 Oct, 2010 or 10.10.10 , for those of you geeks out there ( like me ) binary 101010 = decimal 42 ( HHGTTG Reference )

Thanks to Alan Pope we have video and Q&A from the session.

Moving onto the sessions the day kicked off  for me  with a UDS Community Roundtable  discussion, planning out the week ahead and introductions was a nice way to start the week as some people have never met one another before and also just to put the face to the names which really helps at times. Following onto a session I was curious about was Development Workflow Review, which was an interesting discussion, how can we make it easier for developers to contribute and where they fit into the grand scheme of things.

Next session for me was Team Project Planning Workshop, wasn’t really sure what this one was on about, but it was interesting and a topic of blueprints came up. Why we use them and we showed off the burn down chart which when you look at it  and the the progress made by the community team it’s pretty amazing the stuff that was achieved in six months. With the discussion of using Roadmaps and blueprints under way we also noticed the documentation for using blueprints was slightly unhelpful and needed to be tweaked and refined with that in mind the Maverick Project Planning Improvements Blueprint  the first of the UDS-M was created. So with that in mind I thought I’d share with folks how I keep track of stuff I’ll be taking on at UDS.  I’ve mentioned before I’m a list whore. Lists, taks and to do items make sense to me in my noggin.

I’m a MASSIVE fan of tomboy, syncing them to Ubuntu one is so handy and I can reach them whenever I want.  I’ve created a tomboy note – Laura  UDS-M action items, it’s just a simple way of breaking down the actions items and the session for me.

[czajkowski] Identify what topics should be documented in a quick guide for managing a project: TODO
[czajkowski] Produce a first draft of the project planning quick guide: TODO
[czajkowski] Announce the document: TODO

I’ll just add the session, link to the gobby document and link to the blueprint and any action items I’ve received, just a handy way to see at a glance come Friday.

Final session today for me was Heuristic evaluation and bug tagging, really looking forward to following this topic for this cycle and seeing how it is implemented.  There seemed to be some concern coming from the bug triages guys who would be following this so I think they’ll see how the design team approach this for the cycle.

It’s been a great long day.  Great to catch up with people who I’ve worked with the for the last six months and also to meet new people.

Just one annoying irritating thing. I’ve been working all day on my mini 9 and the tomboy note was on that machine, I wanted to synchronise it to Ubuntu one and onto my other machine. YES I’ve logged a bug in fact I logged it months ago! It’s still bugging me and driving me somewhat batty crazy!!! It tells you to click on details and when you do, it’s BLANK! how unhelpful is that!

That’s my rant over! Have a great uds !