Now it’s time to thank everybody organizing the election, cheering and voting. Thank you!

As a funny detail, I heard the election results while running a Q&A session about Xubuntu at Happy Hacking Day. After the results were announced, there was a round of applauds from the crowd. I can’t think of a better place to be when finding out – surrounded by the community.

Get Involved with Xubuntu!

I hope we can improve Xubuntu even further during the two forthcoming cycles, but I can’t do it by myself. Join our team and help us building a better operating system! To read more about contributing, head to the Get Involved section of the Xubuntu website.

Most prominently Photoslider now supports even more options. In addition I’ve started to standardize the plugins in an effort trying to use the best possible practices.

Again, all feedback and patches are welcome!

The shoemaker’s children go barefoot

Ironically, the open source tools that are used to make beautiful things sometimes look ugly. To be more exact, the icons in the graphic applications usually come in various shapes, sizes and colors. There is few standards between different applications. Granted, some stock icons exist, but those stock icons exist outside the graphic applications as well and that’s why they are usually really generic.

Furthermore even the deliberately hand-crafted icons do not always describe their function well enough. Don’t get me wrong – in the right context and with adequate amount of knowledge about a certain application they probably make sense. However, there can be really vague and undescriptive for people who are not familiar with graphic editing – or these said applications. Finally, the same icon can show up in several applications for different actions and that isn’t helping anyone.

Due to all of the aforementioned problems, using open source graphic applications is painful, unintuitive and shameful for me. This is far from optimal, but fortunately we can do something about it.

Stop neglecting yourself!

It’s time to give our tools some love – thus, I announce Huego, a new undertaking by the Shimmer Project.

I have pushed the initial commit to the Huego GitHub repository today. We don’t have many things ready yet and the roadmap is still partly open, but our first target is an icon theme with some GTK modifications for GIMP. After that it’s highly likely that we will continue the work with Inkscape icons.

We would love any support and feedback on the project, so please be in touch! If you want to help us in a way or another, the best way to get started is come meet us in #shimmer on the Freenode IRC network – just ping either me or Simon Steinbeiß (ochosi) and we will answer when we get back (if we were away in the first place).

Until next time and more updates, let’s make beautiful things!

P.S. The Shimmer Project website should get a new look and update very soon.

In the announcement Jono lists openness, transparency and accessibility as the major goals of the Ubuntu Developer Summits (UDS). The decision to move to an online event is supposed to improve these.

In this article I will explain why I don’t think it will, and why the new format looks just another Canonical team sprint. I’ll also cover some of my concerns over the accessibility and equality of the new format and important things I think the online events will lack, but shouldn’t. I will also discuss some of my opinions on how this changes the nature of UDS and the meaningfulness to flavors as well as how this change affects the Canonical-community relations.

Openness, transparency and accessibility

I value openness and transparency very much. However, I’m not sure if the new online format will increase them in any way. Canonical is already making many decisions that affect the community in-house, behind closed doors. Unfortunately, these decisions and their results don’t always roll out as expected.

Until now the community has had at least some voice in the discussion, or at least have been able to react to changes, if they have been discussed in UDS. It’s a pessimistic view, but I can’t see why Canonical employees would start discussing and working more closely now with the community on decisions that have already been made. Now that the event is online, it’s much easier to have more discreet, even hidden meetings about things where community input would be largely unwanted or at least ignored à la the in-house pre-UDS sessions.

While it’s evident that a physical event has limitations when it comes to accessibility, so does an online event. One of the main reasons that made the Canonical-community communication so effective in UDS was that everybody got together, in the same place and at the same time. This means everybody participating in person is (ideally) always available and 100% focused on the sessions.

Now that the event takes place online, people will not be as committed to participating a session in every slot. Even when they are participating, the session might not get their full attention, because there are more distractions when working online.

When people aren’t participating in a session, they most probably won’t be available, which means there won’t be any substitution to the off-session discussions. This is sad, because this used to be one of the most powerful features of UDS for officially recognized flavors (such as Xubuntu) and I believe for numerous other teams as well. Even if people did have these off-session discussions, they are just as useful as contacting anybody via IRC or email any time, so there’s no real benefit of the centralized time. As a matter of fact, people might be even busier than usually during the online events, making it even harder to get a hold of them.

Concerns of equality

One of my worries is the level of openness UDS can create while being an online event. There are a few issues which are raised from the community already, but I want to repeat.

The platform itself is one of the major concerns for the community: many of us aren’t comfortable using a proprietary platform. While it’s an easy choice for Canonical to deploy, it’s also a weird move from a major open source project.

Due to the technical limitations of Hangouts, there can only be 10 people who are videoconferencing at any time in a given session. While there are some similar limitations even in a physical event, I think the online event makes the thresold to join those 10 people higher for a few reasons. First, not all of us are comfortable with videoconferencing for various reasons. Some of the people in the community don’t want to be on the spotlight or are too afraid to do that with total strangers, others might not want to be streamed live.

While 10 is more slots than the amount of chairs we had for important people in UDS Raring, these slots are now assigned by the session leader to people in order of importance that they think the specific people will have on the meeting. My concern is that this might make it harder for some people to be given slots, including those that are not generally well known in the community or people who are known to strongly disagree with the session leaders. We will have to see how this works out in the forthcoming online UDS, but before it’s over, I’ll keep my reservations.

Naturally there are other ways to communicate as well, namely IRC and Etherpad. To be fair, the communication via those mediums worked well enough in UDS Raring, if the session leader simply wanted (think: remembered) to use them. Taking this into account, I don’t really think that taking the event online really makes it any more accessible for anybody. On the other hand, it still doesn’t offer a feasible alternative for taking part physically or being one of the participants in the videoconference.

As written by Jono in the announcement, Canonical wants to make the event as accessible for anybody with a decent internet connection. However, based on the facts above, the equality is ironically mostly virtual. The format change might bring accessibility and some real equality between participants, but in its entirety, I think it’s a step backwards. Those who participated in person got unbeatable benefits and even if they paid for their flights and accommodation themselves, a fair substitution to their money.

Letting the social aspect go

As I mentioned before, off-session discussions with a variety of people were one of the best features of UDS. Those who have attend UDS know that these discussions go on even after the actual conference for the day has ended. Making new contacts and having interesting and important discussions went on all the way to the last drinks of the evening. It’s silly to expect people to take this much time off of their normal schedules and try to socialize online in any way that resembles the socializing in a physical event. This feature is gone.

Losing the social aspect of UDS doesn’t only impact productivity in during the event. One of the unwanted side-effects is less and worse human relations between Canonical and community teams. Meeting people face-to-face and getting to know them behind their IRC nicks and email addresses makes communication in the future smoother. When these personal relations do not exist, cooperation will be much harder and slower in the future, including ever-so-important dispute resolution.

Ultimately, I believe these changes will lead to lower work morale and loyalty towards Canonical in the community. Whether it happens in critical parts for business from the Canonical point of view is a different story.

For many of the volunteers in the community contributing is also about fun. There aren’t many better things than seeing an old friend after a long while, chatting about something you both are passionate about and then have a drink. As mentioned, the new online format is taking lot of this fun away from the community. One of the things that I predict to happen is an influx of people to other conferences like DebConf, especially amongst those people for whom Ubuntu is only one part of their open source ecosystem. It’s impossible to foresee the actual implications for UDS and Canonical, but ultimately one participant lost is one opportunity lost.

Business before community?

As several people have said, this change along with a rolling release are probably good decisions for Canonical as a business, but not Ubuntu as a community. Making UDS an online event will not only cut quite a lot of financial slack, it also lets them focus on the things that make sense to them financially. Ultimately Canonical gets more control over which matters are discussed, which opinions are given voice and who communicates about them in their own events.

In addition to losing the social aspect and Ubuntu being the thing that made the people come together, there are possibly some caveats to Ubuntu development as well. In the worst case scenario, Canonical will lose a lot of contributors from the community, and I can’t see how this wouldn’t affect Canonical’s business too.

The last cautionary sign for the openness, transparency and equality is the lacking and too late communication about changed plans for UDS. Because of this, the first online UDS arrives too early and unexpected for the majority of the community. The fact that majority of the sessions are going to be revolve around the controversial discussion about moving to a rolling release makes the situation even less bearable for the community. The chosen way of communication backs up the vision that these changes are purely business-oriented. Unfortunately, it isn’t very fair for the community.

Furthermore, this is not the first time the communication from Canonical has been lacking. Numerous people have expressed their concerns and distrust in the past about Canonical’s way to communicate about changes in the infrastructure. So far Canonical has avoided the worst damage, but the atmosphere is starting to get tighter. It’s more likely than ever that people will part ways with Ubuntu in a way or another. If people leave now, it’s going to be really hard to do significant damage management and regain trust from the (former) community members.

Impact on flavors

Due to the various reasons mentioned before and becoming a way more Canonical and Ubuntu OS-centric, UDS is becoming borderline irrelevant and useless for flavors. From what I’ve read in the last few days, I believe this is the unanimous response from the flavor teams. This is worrisome for the flavors and the community at large because it is possible that the taken direction excludes the community from decision making that concerns its own infrastructure as well.

It is too early to say what kind of actions several flavors will take and what their position will be, not least because the uncertainty about a rolling release model and its implications. However, there is one thing that will most probably happen: since the flavors are slowly and involuntarily sliding off of UDS, it will be less and less meaningful to organize their sessions parallel to the “main” virtual UDS. Once this happens, the future of the flavors is even more full of justified fear, uncertainty and doubt. The only thing Canonical can do to reduce this effect is start communicating and discussing about the changes that affect the community truly openly.

What’s in the future for us?

The future for UDS is still partly out of sight. In the announcement Jono somewhat vaguely says that after two online events Canonical will “review the success of the next two online events” and “assess whether to continue the online format”. Whether it means Canonical will either get back to the physical format or drop UDS for good if the online format fails remains to be seen.

Until the first online event is over we can’t evaluate how the new format works. However, it is clear that Canonical needs to get the community involved in the event if they wish to keep the community close to them. To be succesful in this, Canonical needs to make sure UDS is equal to all participants. If they can truly integrate the community to the discussion during the first event they will be able to regain some trust and hope in the community to their communication. Ultimately the community can only consider the event succesgull if Canonical is able to achieve all the aforementioned goals as well as the major goals they have set for UDS.

At the end of the day, we have to remember Canonical is a business trying to make money with their product. Keeping this in mind and as an entrepreneur myself, I can empathize with many of their decisions. In my opinion the partly harsh criticism is justified though. Since Canonical has promoted Ubuntu as a community-oriented project from the beginning, it would be only fair to actually involve the community in the decision making and discussions well in advance. If they do not wish to do this, they should clearly communicate this to the community and their users.

Thanks

I would like to thank the following people for their support, numerous discussions and influence to this article: Elizabeth Krumbach, Scott Kitterman, Micah Gersten and Jussi Kekkonen. Thank you!

This article is part of the article series A day in an open source project.

Long story short, the command that supports all non-deprecated WordPress translation functions or semantically speaking, gettext keywords, is:

xgettext -o OUTPUT.pot -L PHP -k__ -k_e -k_n:1,2 -k_x:1,2c -k_ex:1,2c -k_nx:4c,1,2 -kesc_attr_-kesc_attr_e -kesc_attr_x:1,2c -kesc_html__ -kesc_html_e -kesc_html_x:1,2c -k_n_noop:1,2 -k_nx_noop:4c,1,2 *.php

You might want to add the --no-wrap argument depending on your needs. After running the script, go edit OUTPUT.pot and edit the information in the header.

In the foreseeable future, I’m going to finish a simple script that automatically updates the .pot -files for plugins as well as edits the header files automatically based on the plugin information on the main PHP file. The script will be available in my WordPress -repository on GitHub. Until that, happy hacking on WordPress and translations!

In about:config, edit keys in the following way:

1. Set layers.acceleration.force-enabled to true
2. Set layers.acceleration.disabled to false

After doing that, restart Firefox and you’re ready to go.

Thanks for juanbaez for the tip!

If you don’t want to edit your configuration, I read that this is fixed in Firefox 19 as well. Downgrading to Firefox 17 reportedly works as well.

On the other hand, every project needs leaders. In the ideal situation a leader is somebody who is able to empower the team to reach its goals, and more.

Leaders, let others take responsibility

Giving people responsibilities doesn’t mean you can’t be involved with the process. Ultimately, it comes down to the leader to define how important a feature is for the project at this time. The importance should roughly correlate on how much direct involvement the leaders or others in the team should have with drafting and implementing the feature.

Major features usually take longer to implement and need constant communication. Minor features might not need even any monitoring from all parties before they enter the discussion and polishing phase.

In both cases, people need to have the feeling that their work is both appreciated and that it can make a difference. Essentially, people need to feel accepted. Engaging people within a project is much about balancing the management. Too much micro management on minor issues or too little management on major issues will both eventually lead to the situation where the leaders end up doing everything by oneself.

Getting things done

Deadlines are important. Essentially, deadlines allow projects to release, and ultimately, improve the products for the users.

When setting deadlines, define them clearly. If you don’t specify deadlines, you can’t expect people to meet them either. Define how critical different deadlines are. Finally, specify what the implications of not making the deadline are. In open source, this usually means your work isn’t going to be included in the release. While it’s self-evident it’s good to say it aloud.

When taking work items and engaging with deadlines, keep it real. Don’t try to change the world in one release. If you can, share and delegate work items which aren’t critical (for you). If the release schedule still looks unrealistic, simply postpone some items for the next release. Finally, if and when others take release-essential work items, make sure they acknowledge that.

Deadline days are a good time to learn something. Review how you did with your work items. As a leader, review how your team did. Don’t be angry to people for not finishing things, if you couldn’t have done them yourself. If somebody had a release-essential task and didn’t deliver on time, something undoubtedly went wrong. Before expressing your disappointment, think if you could have given support that enabled finishing the work item.

Together, individually

Keeping an open source project running many times equals to keeping people feel like their work is worth something. Some people will need more or less reminding their work is appreciated to keep them contributing, some people will have this feeling without encouraging because their work is valuable for themselves.

Whatever the case, we all need to remember that while individuals ultimately make or break the project, we’re doing it together. A nice word here and there doesn’t take all your time and it might be just the thing somebody else needed to keep up the motivation. For more reasons to be nice to each other, read On Hackers and Depression by Christopher Webber.

How can you improve your community?

I’m interested in hearing your thoughts about improving communities and steering them to be more democratic when beneficial.

Do you agree or disagree with me? How do you think communities can be improved? Is there something you think the Xubuntu team should do to improve our developer community? Share your views!

This article is part of the article series A day in an open source project.

(Useful) brainstorming

Submitting ideas is fine especially when it has been asked for. There are times when feedback and new ideas are expected or more welcome than usually. For Xubuntu this means the first weeks of a new release cycle, when everybody is planning their work for the next 6 months and discussing ways to achieve their goals. The somewhat blurry timeframe is about to end for Xubuntu right now.

A good submission is something that contains a proposed goal with a rationale with a brief comparison and arguments against the current situation (if applicable) and some (at least) half-baked thoughts on how to reach the goal.

Even if you have all this, a proposal is still not always viable. To be able to discuss certain features you need to have a variable amount of knowledge about the issues from different points of view, including but not limited to technical and social matters. Most developers won’t expect you to have all this knowledge, but please don’t be surprised or feel offended of the sometimes tight-lipped “wontfix” -style comments. They have most probably heard the same idea before…

Discuss!

When the ideas start to flow in, it’s time to start discussing them. Counter ideas are fine, but please note that they should contain the same ingredients as the original submission.

Discussing is something where all parties are free to express their thoughts. Since the amount of time to use for discussing is limited, it’s better to consider a few things before speaking.

Whenever you post, there’s a single most important thing to keep in mind: try to add to the discussion. If you can’t, even after  thinking twice, don’t post. Irrelevant noise slows the progress and sometimes leads the discussion to sidetracks. If the discussion seems to keep rolling without your comment, you’ll be able to chime in if you have something that adds to the discussion. If it doesn’t, there’s most probably a reason for that.

When you make an argument against or for something please make sure it has a rationale, even if it was just your personal preference. To be more exact: always try to be objective. Being totally objective is really hard (especially if it involves any emotion), but everybody should strive for it.

All the things mentioned will save time, frustration and useless work. Saving time means there will be more time to work on the actual features. Just being loud doesn’t get things done – quite the opposite.

About realistic expectations

The ugly truth: Only a small part of ideas actualize as features or changes in a product. This doesn’t mean most of the ideas are bad. Since the ones who contribute and deliver have limited time, motivation and resources, it isn’t possible to implement all the ideas even if they were all top notch.

The other thing to keep in mind is that open source is not a democracy, it’s a doacracy – those who do, decide (what they do). This is self-evident, but saying it aloud is a real eye-opener and reminder for all of us – especially for those who are unfamiliar with open source. Anyway, here’s wishing for more patience for both sides of the discussion.

The 5-point wrap up

When submitting an idea, think it through and rationalize. Does it make sense for the project? What’s the cost in man hours and how many are you willing to submit? If you propose to replace something, be ready to compare.

When developers say something, listen to them. In most of the cases, they know better than you. This doesn’t mean they’re always right (definitely not!), but there’s a lot to learn. If you think your idea is worth discussing further, do more preparing work and propose it again – don’t expect others to.

Try to add to the discussion. If you don’t think your comment adds anything to the discussion, abstain. People don’t appreciate snarky comments to mediums exclusively designed for development discussion. If you want to have fun, there are other places for that.

Keep objective. This will be hard, especially when discussing something where you mix emotions in, like default applications. Subjective opinions are fine but even then, come up with a rationale. When discussing further, again abstain from posting unless you can add to the discussion.

Finally: those who do, decide. The majority of open source contributors are doing it for free, without any financial compensation. For many of us, time becomes the biggest obstacle; and when we only have this much, our efforts are most focused on things we like to get done. In many cases, patches are welcome: as long as you got the time, patience and ultimately skills, you can make a difference.

This article is part of the article series Communication in the community.

Rather than the specifications, this article is about redefining need, happiness and ultimately, life.

After I bought the new laptop I began noticing that I don’t really want that many electronic devices around me. Especially devices that I wasn’t going to use ever again. In fact, some of that stuff was something I’ve never needed but I’ve kept it because I might need it. Well, not any more – it’s time to get rid of that cruft and if possible, let somebody else enjoy of it.

It’s not only about stuff I already own or have owned. It’s about new temptations and new gadgets around. I – and we – got to realize that all the new gadgets aren’t something we need. The world we’re living in doesn’t need us to need them either.

At the end of the day, it’s about understanding that less is more. Not just in computers and gadgets, but in life.

There’s yet another a channel for the geeks to rejoice their geekness in Freenode…

If you’re interested in designer board games like Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne, Ticket to Ride et cetera and/or are interested in learning about them, join us on #boardgames on Freenode.

For starters, we’re seeing how the channel grows and gets along, so please pop in to show your interest!