Czajkowski

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

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

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’ve been rather busy lately and not had much time to myself, finally getting some me time. Between moving house and getting things back in order and been busy at work I’ve neglected a few bits and pieces. So some housekeeping is needed!

I’ve been working with JonathanD on freenode with Fossevents for the past few week and it’s taken some tweaking, yes the orange is staying but has been toned down a bit ( I was vetoed on brown).  I have to say that I’m well impressed with the uptake from so many different communities from around the world submitting events. There are many different events on there at present, from Geeknics, general meet ups to conferences it’s great.  We’ve had a lot of feedback, and RSS feeds and mapping facilities are coming along as soon as we can figure out some bits and pieces and maybe a plugin or two.

I’ve also been working on my own little pet project which went live and has seen some folks already sign up so I’m pleased with that. It does however clash with another event Bizcamp in Dublin on the same day at the same time in a different location so it does mean start up companies will miss out on hearing about how useful Open Source software is. Shame….

I was asked recently on channel about the links I post as I shorten them and I thought I’d explain a bit further.  Firstly I like to support an Irish service or product wherever and whenever.  I use pix.ie for my photos, Blacknight for my hosting and short.ie for my urls.

But shortie has a really nifty feature which is why I use it, well two actually, 1 I can personalise a url like www.short.ie/geeknic and secondly I can keep track of them and view the amounts of clicks it has received.This is called the public timeline and you can share it with folks. I just find it rather neat. And the majority of these services all use open source

Screenshot-short.ie - Laura Czajkowski's public links

I’ve also just had one of the most productive IRC meetings so far for our LoCo.  We changed the day around to mid week as we had been meting on a Sunday for the last few months and it was just harder and harder to get people due to  travels. So this evening a load more new people joined and took on board new tasks, which is awesome! We used to just meet up and have a drink on the 1st Thursday of the month, but we’ve now decided to try and have a short talk before hand and see how that goes.  This will give people a chance to hear about a new project they are working on and also people a chance to practice giving talks.

I like going to events, but sometimes I miss out on hearing about them as I don’t find out about them till it’s too late. One has to troll the net or suscribe to multiple mailing lists.  Christel on freenode asked to join their team so I can work on community areas. One area I wanted to tackle was events and letting folks know about them.

There are so many groups and organisations who use freenode and who run meet ups, conferences, barcamps it would be great to know about them if you were travelling or just relocated.  With that we’ve been working on a new site Foss Events, I’ve added some events that I know of but would love to add more. So if folks have meet ups, geeknics, conferences, unconferences, giving a talk then let us know so we can have all of the events in one place.