Czajkowski

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.

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

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.

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.