Czajkowski

I’m not entirely sure where the last 12 months have gone.  I drove over 5.5 hours yesterday back to Dublin, from spending Christmas with my family in Castleconnell, Co. Limerick.  I did the drive two years to the day moving myself to Dublin for my current job.

When I was leaving the mothership was asking when I’d next be home, and already looking at my google calender I can see an opening in February, and if not then March for Mothers day. That’s 3 months into 2010 or a quarter the way through. Which made me think where had 2009 gone.

January 2009 was a quiet month, I don’t think anyone really is in the mood to do things, everyone is exhausted after Christmas and waiting on pay day! I did get the brain fart of having my own event over in Ireland for OSS events as I  was tired of always having to travel to events, and wanted one in my own back yard, and so I created OSSBarcamp.

February kicked started nicely by waiting for 6 hours for a flight to FOSDEM due to 2 inches of snow in Dublin airport, the inability to cater for a bit of snow is  baffling.  It was my first year at FOSDEM, and it was well worth the wait, I’d tried to go in the past and always other events clashed.  I’ve booked to go again this year and looking forward to seeing more of Brussels this time. Towards the end of February, Ubuntu-ie had its first big event, taking part in Global Bug jam.  We had the help of DIT sponsoring us a venue and had students come along and learn how to take part in logging bugs and triaging them. Good day out followed by a few quiet beers.

March swiftly arrived and my brain fart of OSSBarcamp turned into a reality, turns out if you organise it, set a date, book a venue folks do come! Great day was had and lots of good discussion took place.  As with organising any event, it takes it toll on you and you clearly need a holiday ( any excuse really) and I went over to London for a few days as a holiday.  Great break away and saw London again for the first time in a long time and did all the touristy things and thoroughly enjoyed myself.

April saw Jaunty release party and the Irish LoCo in full swing burning cds in the pub and handing them out to people, having a pub quiz and meeting more people off IRC land and over a drink having a chat.  I should add that once a month we all meet up in Dublin for a face to face meet up, but we did have over 20 people turn up for the Jaunty party, dinner and drinks, and a late night.

May, Kick starting the month was our first Geeknic – a picnic for Geeks. Knowing Ireland you cannot always guarantee the sunshine, but we had a nice day out and people brought along their kids and it was nice to do something different. I sponsored myself to attend UDS Karmic in Barcelona, but before I got here I went via Edinburgh for the weekend to see the Heineken Cup final, at least an Irish team won!  I’d bought the tickets Months in advance!

I’d never been to a UDS before, and it was fantastic, to quote ubuntu folks  it was AWESOME! Getting to meet people you’ve spent time talking online about the work you’re involved in, to work on projects face to face for a week and come up with ideas, solutions and a way forward is remarkable. I got to meet some great folks and I’m really glad I went.

June saw the first MySQL meet up in Dublin, not sure more were planned but it was nice and great to see more groups starting to have more meet ups and discussions take place.  I came back so energised from UDS I went for my membership which I’d been putting off as was nervous.

July moved house, bloody stressful!  Summer months tend be filled with weekend trips home and to Lahinch and visiting mates.  Ubuntu Ireland became a recognised LoCo in July, so we were rather happy as a team!

August, we had our second Geeknic in Farmleigh Park followed by drinks and meeting some of the people behind Ubuntu who were in Dublin for a sprint!  My mate TC came home from Canada for 2 weeks so was back and forth to Lahinch and Limerick. Busy month.

September, I ran another OSSBarcamp, and 3 of the presenters from Ubuntu-uk Podcast, Laura, Tony and Daviey came over!  It was a great way to celebrate Software Freedom day and meet more people.  Pretty sure there will be more of these to come. I just need to work on a venue.

October I turned 30 and fled to Canada for 12 days to see what all the fuss was about.  I had an amazing time and celebrated my birthday in multiple timezones to keep everyone happy.  Ubuntu Ireland had another Bug jam day and release party, Karmic Koala  this month so all around a busy month.

November, I got sponsored to attend UDS Lucid which took place in Dallas, USA.  It was a fun packed week, with working on Ubuntu and night time events, from firing range, ice skating, and meals out to having an afternoon in the A&E Department at local hospital.  Y’all come back now ye’ here!

December is the month, of Christmas meet ups, and working crazy to get it all done so I could take a few days off, and catch up on doing diddly squat.  I did just that!

Cripes, I did a lot, and now I know where the time went. 2009 was amazing fun packed and entertaining, I hope 2010 is just as good!  Looking forward to working on more cool projects and helping where I can.

I sat down on one of the quiet evenings this week and went through all of the Gobby documents from UDS and marked off where I had items actioned to me and made a list. Now I’m checking it twice and going to start working through things and crossing them off or adding to them if I need more detail. ( I like lists)

LoCo Directory – Event Feature
* ”’OBJECTIVE”’: Implement an event handing feature.
* ”’SUCCESS CRITERIA”’: LoCo teams can add events to be displayed on their LoCo directory page and view event information.
* ”’ACTIONS”’:
* Ability to add an event with the following attributes:
* Event type (Jam, Presentation, Tutorial, Release Party, Installfest, Other)
* Time
* Location
* Description
* Name
* Events are visible on LoCo pages and a master list of events.

While I don’t have anything assigned to this I am following this as I worked on this last May at UDS Karmic and this week I’m seeing more developments in the progress of this. With LoCos getting involved asking how they can help.  I think this kind of feature would help more LoCos organise their events and keep track of them for approval and for re approval if they can see what has been organised at a glance.

The reason behind this feature is, it’s very hard to keep track of attendance, I can say 8 people came and it could have been 12 or 6, if the feature of replying and adding your name to it, like you do for attending UDS then you can see who came to the event.  It’s also a way of see all LoCo events across the board on the one directory.

Ubuntu NGO

ACTIONs:
- Liaising with NGOs: – I’m working on finding more NGOs for Interviews, and also this week I’ve had people mail me saying they are doing some with their Local NGOs and will mail me the interviews, so we can get these back up and running.
• document painpoints, transform into papercuts: file as bug reports, tag with ‘ngo’ (laura) -  Worked on this during the week and sent mail to the NGO mailing list.
• Advocacy (need leader for this role) - I’ve added my name to this since UDS as has Penelope Stowe
-  list of existing foundations, other organisations that already work with NGOs
- list of conferences that NGOs attend specific to gathering technical assistance
- talk to docs team about help.ubuntu.com export (and other loco documentation) (Laura talk to Jim Campbell, Milo Casagrande) – Need to start on this
- talk to Server team about PHP packaging  ( laura to go talk to ask) – this is going to come under paper jams

Ubuntu Women

* ”’OBJECTIVE”’: Clarify the purpose of the #ubuntu-women channel.
* ”’SUCCESS CRITERIA”’: A set of channel guidelines clearly communicated to #ubuntu-women participants.
* ”’ACTIONS”’:
* Discuss a set of guidelines for general discussion channel about the Ubuntu Women project (Laura Czajkowski). – This will be taken to the mailing list due to time constraints from meeting held on the 8th December followed by another meeting.
* Document the agreed set of guidelines (Laura Czajkowski). – Going to work on a draft so we can work against something to discuss, as no point in just waffling without having somewhere as a base line to work from.
* Communicate guidelines outwards (Jono Bacon, Amber Graner, Laura Czajkowski). – Can only do this when the above is done

* ”’OBJECTIVE”’: Appoint a leader of the Ubuntu Women team, complete with codified expectations around the role. – Well this was discussed at the Ubuntu women meeting held. And we’ve come up with a process.
* ”’SUCCESS CRITERIA”’: A delegated leader in place for a set term length, complete with documented expectations around the role.
* ”’ACTIONS”’:
* Documenting expectations of the role (Amber / Laura). – This has been done on the wiki and with input in from the team during the meeting.

LoCo Council

I was elected to the LoCo Council, and during UDS I said I’d look into drafting a document with outlining the re approval process. Working on that today, once I read some of the email archives  as this is all new to me.

So the above is keeping me very quiet and busy at the moment, but loving it all the same!

Very sad, it’s the last day, and it’s been an amazing week.  I really feel I got more out of UDS this time. Definitely more braver in saying I’ll take on tasks knowing if I get stuck or have an issue there is someone I can poke and ask. The participation levels have been amazing both in the room and remotely.  It’s been great having the IRC displayed on the screen in the room. We can see participants points and can include them in the discussion, which is what it;s all about.

Taking into account everyones opinion and helping to shape Lucid.  It’s also been great to hear about what other LoCos are doing, it’s given me some ideas and I encourage other LoCos to try new events out. Doing the same talk/demo handing out a leafet can get boring and hard to get people involved.  Doing something new encourages more activity, making it fun!

The big session that stood out for me today, was Ubuntu Women, our 3rd session.  We did need 3 sessions to get a lot of things out in the open and be able to tackle some of the issues.  It’s been interesting hearing the opinions  of people taking part. Many of the men said they wanted to learn more and felt they could do this by sitting back and listening, but wanted to know how to get their female members involved or how they can help.  Again, please pretty please show them the #ubuntu-women channel, or the mailing list, poke me! and I’ll talk to them, or Amber she’ll happily talk to the wall!  We want to make sure as many people take part and enjoy working on the channel.

From our 3 sessions, we have clear defined and attainable goals we can achieve during Lucid. I hope many people join and take part in this great team and make these goals happen!

I’ve no idea where this week is going, feckin’ hell second last day already is upon us. Getting to meet and talk to even more people this time at UDS as I’m not as shy this time and just jumping two feet in where I can.

Team Leadership Workshop – I’d been helping Amber out with brain storming a while back and she’s made massive improvements, leaps and bounds in the document.  The idea behind it is to help a loco leader, encourage them, and help them with getting set up and run a LoCo.  Yes sometimes you might think it’s common sense, and some of it is, but you often forget about the easiest things until someone points them out to you.  Also, sometimes the help is spread out over different wiki pages, and my most annoying gripe with wikis is they are case sensitive, so you may even miss reading the helpful document if you’ve searched using Upper case.

Progress was made in this session, the learning team are going to help get the document set up so more people can access it and help contribute to it, this will help get it going, and in the end, make it easier to be translated!

Launchpad Upstream Improvements -I sat in this as I hadn’t a clue and quiet frankly it was rather interesting and it’s great to know about these other community issues. Bugs sitting there and not being worked on due to perhaps upstream not knowing they were there, which isn’t really going to help anyone  The main idea is how can the charming folks over at Launchpad help make Launchpad even more effective for upstream projects. I’ll definitely be keeping more of an eye on this as I found it rather interesting.

Lucid Governance Changes Roadmap  -  This session was mainly clearing up and documenting all the councils that existed and listing all the members and the expiration date of members, when a call for new members should be announced and then when an announcement should be issued. Standardising the process.

Social outing, well this one was slightly unplanned, but rather eye opening.  I got to ride in a BIG RED AMBULANCE! To clarify actually, I was the passenger in the front seat, poor Grant was in the rear as he had fainted during one of the sessions and best to get checked out took a short spin up to the Trauma Hospital nearby.  I used to work in the Mid Western Regional Hospital in Limerick before I moved to Dublin.  I’m used to Irish Hospitals. I moved to Dublin and saw Dublin hospitals at 2am when my back had thrown a wobbly and needed to get an injection into my spine, you get to see some interesting people at that hour.  Nothing prepared me to having to walk through a metal detector or having armed guards on patrol in the wards.  The staff were very helpful and pleasant, but I still found it odd to see a prisoner being treated on a trolley nearby, I know from seeing prisoners treated in Limerick, they get brought in plain clothes, handcuffs are very discrete,to the point where you actually cannot tell who’s the prisoner or who’s the guard.

The hospital and medical staff were very pleasant and helpful, and a quick call to the hotel afterwards had a car come and collect us which was great, and Grant was able to go get some well needed rest.

Well, getting into the swing of things and smokin’ diesel! Half way though the week already can’t believe it’s going so fast.

Community Track Roundtable – going through our list from yesterday and marking items off that need to be address in priority, ones that need a full session were schedule and others that weren’t were discussed in the room.

Next steps for Ubuntu NGO- this is my pet project, it started off as a roundtable last May in Barcelona. Now we’ve a team, a plan and objective.  It’s a rather strange team in many ways, while there is some order, we kind of do our own thing, so this session was to firm up peoples areas, and what they are doing.  We’ve cleaned up the wiki making this clearer.  Identified areas we can work on or people we need to find and gain help from.

So Andrew Starr-Bochicchio, Daniel Holbach are going to be looking at the technical side of things, and I am going to be looking at the Advocacy with Penelope Stowe.  From the interview series I’ve been able to get feed back on areas where Ubuntu is falling down but these don’t just apply to NGOs so I spoke with Ivanka as I know her team had the Paper cut series which I really enjoyed reading.  Sitting down with her I wanted to learn how I could use this type of logging a bug for the NGOs and Andy Whitcroft who was sitting near by came up with Paper Jams! So I’ll be logging paper jams for NGOs soon!!

Hopefully by us increasing a little more order into the team we shall be able to showcase some of the NGOs who use oss and also help them with issues they find! That is my goal!

Next Steps For The Ubuntu Women Project – Session 2/3 involved more clarifying some of the discussions from the 1st session, the idea of a 2nd channel, to be used as a “safe space” should the need to have a discussion in there but not be used the whole time.  To introduce logging into the main channel like every other Ubuntu channel.  There seemed to be confusion that by calling one channel safe the main channel was not safe. That is not the case! The main #ubuntu-women is safe and inviting to EVERYONE!

Throughout the week I did clarify a number of times everyone is welcome, both male and female to the channel.  What I would like to see is that every LoCo team encourage it’s female members to join our team, join us online or on the mailing list, if they are shy joining, why not join yourself and introduce yourself to the channel and introduce the new member you are brining in. Ask questions! I would also encourage LoCo teams to add the topic of Ubuntu-women to your IRC meeting agenda, as there seems to be some confusion as to why the team exists, and I think if we start in our own back yard we can help improve the visibility of the team and highlight its work.

There were other streams going on today, but for me the above were the highlights of the day and I suspect many people will not want to read a day by day blow hour by hour! So trying to highlight what stood out for me

Social night out, impromptu ice skating and shopping spree – Turns out injuries happen on ice! We had 3 people fall, one concussion and one sprained ankle chipped bone! Told him to to go the doctors! stubborn!! So again I feel the need to highlight why social gatherings outside of the 9-5 remit of any day is worthwhile!

You get to meet people you normally won’t meet, talk to or interact with. The same goes at UDS.  I can be found in the Community stream, and for the most part that’s the only stream you will find me, short of Q&A and a topic I see I want to participate in.  The same can be said for any other stream and person at UDS. They may not interact outside of dev, foundation, desktop etc.  I got to meet Scott James Remnant and Colin Watson at ice skating, and to be frank, I’d never really have any other way of meeting them other than possibly walking up to them and saying hi, which could also be done. But this  way was more fun!

UDS Ice Skating team

UDS on Ice

UDS ice Skating night out

Accidents happen on ice!

• Tags: Dallas, ICE SKATING, ubuntu women, UDS, USA 
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