Czajkowski

My weekend at FOSDEM

Laura Czajkowski — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 17:46:34 +0000

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

Ubuntu at fosdem

Laura Czajkowski — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 13:17:18 +0000

Well we’ve arrived, met up with more Irish guys over here at FOSDEM, had waffles and lots of Kriek beer. Six of us left Dublin yesterday from the Ubuntu Ireland LoCo, and we ended up finding a Debian guy on the place who lives in Dublin so he’s been with us on our wee journey. An early flight at 6:50am meant by the time we arrived, we’d been up hours and hungry, in search of waffles and coffee and checking into our hotels, we walked into the city dropping our bags off at different locations along the way. Who knew we’d find it so hard to find a place to sit down find coffee and waffles in the same place. We ended up a little restaurant and folks got their coffee and food and we started to sample the beer, at 12 in the day….

Should note I’m going to create a quotes page based on the groups smart ass comments, we’ve ubuntu, kde, fedora and Debian folks with us this weekend, comments in good fun and jest are flying left right and centre and it’s proving rather entertaining. Last night we went to the beer event, just sitting down and chatting to random folks, it’s great. I got to put the faces to the handles of the freenode staffers and go out for dinner with them. So all in all a great day.

Today the talks have started, great buzz around the place and a few sore heads. Looking forward to the ubuntu dinner tonight.

: some of the ubuntu ireland LoCo

: we really just want coffee

Sin é – You win some you lose some

Laura Czajkowski — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 12:03:53 +0000

Sin é You win some and you lose some.

On the planet we’re all Ubuntu members, at least I’m pretty sure that’s the case. We voted the CC into term by selecting them and voting based on our impressions and knowledge of them +/-, 1 or 2 you get my idea. So I fully respect their opinion, many have been around a long time, others are new and bring to it new ideas and a new view point to things.

Change is good in any organisation or group. You cannot function with the same people the whole time, the exception being possibly Mark Shuttleworth there on the team. However, even Mark shows the community that chage is good as he announced earlier this year than Jane Silber would be taking on the role of Canonical CEO. It can become stagnant and deadlock sometimes happens. Yes I also see the benefit for a decent length of a term. It takes time to get used to others opinions and gain from their experience and contribute back.

Recently enough I was appointed to the LoCo Council. It’s a learning curve for me, so I still run a lot of things past the others in the team as it’s good to sound ideas off them. The re-approval process is something I’m really enjoying at present as it gives me a chance to see how other LoCo teams do things, and meet more people. Everyone does things so differently, somethings work and somethings don’t. It’s how we learn from these that make us progress and offer solutions back to the community that really help.

At UDS Lucid the Ubuntu Women team asked for the CC’s assistance in selecting a leader for us. It was documented well, advertised and explained - questions were answered and dealt with. It was posted to the list, it was voiced on IRC.

Amber was selected and I think the CC had a tough decision, it’s not your every day request, but again we chose these people so we should trust them and their experience and knowledge of the Ubuntu Community. So thanks CC, I’m rather happy with ye!

As I said at the beginning, Sin é you win some you lose some. I applied for the EMEA Regional Board memberships and Jonathan Carter (see I can spell your name right!) – was successfully chosen. So kudos to him! So I have no qualms with the CC and not being selected, you cannot win them all.

Freenode and Fossevents

Laura Czajkowski — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 21:03:14 +0000

As folks are are aware Ubuntu channels are on Freenode as are many other organisations and groups. Last year I joined the freenode staff to help with community matters and how we can help people using their services to make them more visible.

One project that I’ve been working on is Fossevents. For people like me who like to go to events and more importantly organise them I need to know when others are on so I don’t organise one at a conflicting time or I can budget to attend. I’m not the only one who needs to know this information.

It was launched last summer and has had a few tweaks made to it, we still need some help with the feature requests we get in. But one we did work on was making it easier to submit information to us.

We want Lugs, meet ups,Ubuntu hours, conferences, unconferences, LoCo meet ups, all things open source related so we can have them under one site. We are going to subscribe to peoples mailing lists, if they have an ANNOUNCE List (we will email and ask you if this is ok) so when it’s announced it is picked up by Fossevents and it appears in the site as an draft item. For those who don’t announce via mailing lists, they can contact us and we can arrange for them to be given a BCC address so again the event is sent to us.

I am working on other ideas at present to make sure the word is spread on topics more, and people seem unaware of the freenode blog when there are issues, we do try and blog about them also. If anyone wants to help with fossevents join us on #fossevents on funnily enough freenode

Ubuntu Hour in Ireland

Laura Czajkowski — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 21:54:52 +0000

I forgot to update folks on how well the Ubuntu Hour is going here in Ireland. We held a poll to see what day best suited folks to meet up as we wanted to meet as many people as we could. The last Wednesday of the month was the winner, our venue . The Trinity Capital Hotel. It has free wifi, food, beer and cosy couches and great service. They don’t seem to mind a bunch of geeks with their laptops out, dragging chairs over to a table we have occupied as more and more people arrive.

Tonight saw 10 people attend the Ubuntu hour, I was there from just before 6pm as I came straight from work, one by one folks started to arrive, take out their laptops and chat and talk about Christmas the weather and you guessed it, Yahoo and Ubuntu hand in hand.

It was great to catch up with folks and make plans. There are 6 of us going to FOSDEM, all on the same plane on the Friday morning 6:50am flight so that should be fun. We started to plan out Global jam day also this evening, as we’re hoping to add an Irish slant to the event and call it Free Jam, we want to invite other groups here to take part in the day and work on their projects side by side. That way throughout the day we can give talks and hopefully some of the groups will to and break up the day a bit for us.

I also announced the next OSSBarcamp taking place in Dublin, on Saturday 17th April so I got some feedback on what we can differently this time as the room layout is a bit different, perhaps some hands on tutorials, more LPI exams. I’m still not sure, but I’m sure I’ll think of something.

All in all it was a great evening and nice to catch up with folks and plan things out face to face and bounce ideas off one another. Thanks for coming folks and see you next month.