Tag Archives: Brussels

May17

UDS-M Day 5

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UDS-M Day 5

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

May17

UDS-M Day 4

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UDS-M Day 4

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.

May17

UDS-M Day 3

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UDS-M Day 3

It’s a good way to start the day, a roundtable discussion.  I think we could possibly better have structured these to be honest. We laid out topics on the Monday and then discussed them when we attended the session. One topic today was the discussion of How do you set up a mailing list.  There seemed to be some confusion on the way it was it to be done.  Also clarifying that the LoCo Council deals with all Request Tickets (RT) associated with LoCo Teams and everything else is dealt with by the great Jorge Castro :)

Another topic discussed was how can partners of Canonical can help one another by exchanging case studies showing off ubuntu.  One way we looked at was a partner mailing  list – which could be used to send out press releases and let others know what events they will be attending.

A great initiative being driven by the Italian LoCo was a how they deal with testing ISO images in their team with guys who want to help out.  They broke down the images and continued to test the same image over the cycle. They created a table and showed who was doing what in a matrix style, ISO image and name associated with the image.

I run a lot of events back home and help others where I can.  So Attending the Conference Planning session was great for me as it’s always nice to hear how others conduct theirs and also gives me ideas for future events. A topic brought up was conference packs sent to approved teams and what items were sent to them. How can we cut down on flyers sent out in English to teams who don’t speak English as it’s a waste. The LoCo Council are going to look into  seeing if it’s possible if  banners for Approved LoCo teams is viable and also what is sent in the conference pack for events to LoCo Teams. Other things you can do for an event are  Contact local Linux hardware vendors – as them for hardware for demos? If a speaker from a loco team is invited to a conference, ask if the loco team can have a free booth. If loco members volunteer at an event, ask if the team can have a free booth.  Sometimes we focus too much on conferences, look at other areas! Booths at educational/college events.

The Global Jam session was a review on how we as a community participate at this event. We noted we didn’t promote it as well as we could have done. Also pointing out that some teams will have more experience members in their LoCo than others. What can they do.  Break down into groups of 2-3 people, have some lightning talks and work on things together.  It’s better to work together and meet up then not do anything at all.

The Accessibility Team had a reorganising and reviving meeting. It was really great to see this much enthusiasm and plans for the future. Regular meeting, and plans for the cycle ahead. How they can get more teams involved and  work on the project. They now have goals and  tasks for the cycle ahead. If you want to know more :


Links to things relating to the Ubuntu Accessibility team:
Bugs: ubuntu-accessibility-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com
Development: ubuntu-accessibility-devel@lists.ubuntu.com
Discussion/Team: ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com
Launchpad: https://launchpad.net/~accessibility

https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-m-accessibility-reorg

A few of us went out for dinner with the Ubuntu Women team.  Twenty of us in total went, some women and some men. Which for some new people they found rather odd. So the evening started off with me explaining why men were invited and encouraged and welcomed to attend.  It was a fun night out with a few hiccups