UDS Copenhagen, Day 3

The day started again with the community roundtable and interesting discussions. To get ahold of the discussions had in the community roundtables, please look at the pad for the sessions.

Unfortunately, being able to see the pad needs you to have a membership in one of specific Launchpad groups. Those who are not members of any of those teams should apply to be a member of ubuntu-etherpad. You should be approved soon after which you are able to log in to see the pad contents.

In addition, you should be reading Planet Ubuntu and looking for community-related articles, like Jussi’s article on UDS for communities. Seriously, check it out now.

The Xubuntu plenary talk

The rest of the morning was intuitiously reserved for preparing the Xubuntu plenary talk. It really paid off, because I think the plenary went even better than expected, and I was able to communicate everything I wanted and even used all the time I was given. We’ll let you know when the video is uploaded online, but for now, check out the slides for the Xubuntu plenary.

Here’s my somewhat extended notes for the community slides as promised:

Focus on the community.

In the Quantal cycle, we focused on the community. We rewrote our Strategy Document to make it easier for new people to step in as they didn’t have to wander through pages and pages of documents to get to know what Xubuntu is about.

We also created an initiative to rewrite our offline documentation. We did that simply by asking people from our non-developer-community to step up if they were ready to help, and we got good results. Now we have a completely rewritten offline documentation.

We also created a Twitter account and started tweeting about the community and everything that is happening in the community. We also contacted people who had created Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ groups to ask them if they wanted to be the official pages or whatever for that social media with the condition that a member of the Xubuntu team should be made an admin for that group. They were all honoured to do so, and now we have three community-maintained social media outlets that they have themselves created.

Continue working on the community.

We should start doing the team reports again. (To empower the Xubuntu team as well as other teams, I’ve taken a work item to work on a web interface that allows easy reporting.)

We should continue engaging community members to write to our blog. We’ve done this before, and we want to continue doing that.

We will need to improve the ways we are working with all-technical issues, incuding trying to track Xubuntu-related bugs more accurately.

Afternoon sessions

In the afternoon, there was some quite interesting sessions about community.

The first of them was about improving the communication that goes outside the community, especially for journalists and people who are going to pass the news (or sometimes just hearsays and false information) forward.

The another one was a presentation by my roommate Pedro Perez Grande, who has been investigating the community cultures in open source software companies and compared them with similar data gathered from traditional companies. This is his masters degree, so it’s not going to be easy reading, but there will be some kind of summary about the most important and interesting outcomes of his study. I’m really looking forward to it!

After these two sessions, I went to be interviewed about Xubuntu. I don’t know when and where the video will be published, but I will inform you as soon as I get to know more.

The evening downtown

In the evening, we went downtown with my roommate Pedro and Christoffer from the Swedish LoCo to see another friend of mine from Helsinki coincidentally also in Copenhagen this week. After getting back to the hotel after varying amount of beer, we met again with Cristoffer who had left the city a bit earlier and went to the Sky Bar in the 23th floor. Nice views, even though it was quite dark already…

It’s now the morning of the last day of sessions, and we’re about to head for breakfast soon. More reporting later today or tomorrow!

This article is part of the article series Ubuntu Developer Summit R.

UDS Copenhagen, Day 2

After the breakfast, the second day of UDS started with the familiar Community roundtable which again had some interesting discussions. The one single thing that caught me that there wasn’t a roundtable in the room, not even a non-round-table… (There was one at the leadership mini-summit later though!)

Right after the community session and some bad jokes, I was up to some UTAH training. UTAH in itself is about automating some tests so you don’t need to go through programmatically easy things manually. It’s something the Xubuntu team definitely should look at for R and try to improve until the next LTS, which would definitely benefit from automated testing.

The UTAH training would have lasted for two sessions, but I jumped off the middle to talk about best practices, tips and tricks for LoCos. Even if I haven’t been (yet) active with my LoCo. The discussion kind of went from best practices to biggest similar problems, but it was still interesting and eye-opening session. Maybe I really should start working with the Finnish LoCo…

Finally, the last morning session for Tuesday was the first planning session for Xubuntu R. We went through most of the development-side issues in the session, including a few new things we would like to introduce for R. Namely, the new display dialog to control your monitors, MenuLibre over Alacarte and finally, better and more secure screen locking.

In addition to those new parts, we discussed about SRUing the new documentation to 12.04 with some needed modifications, fixing some long-standing bugs as well as tracking Xubuntu-specific bugs better. There was also some general discussion on the future of Xubuntu along with some considerations and concerns for the following releases, including GTK2 and Wayland stuff. We will definitely keep these discussions going when seeing each other, and if time allows, the other Xubuntu planning session too. In the end, we will (need to) move the discussion to the mailing list, IRC and other mediums as appropriate.

Last but not the least, we took a Xubuntu team photo!

Leadership mini-summit

The whole afternoon was reserved for the leadership mini-summit. In the summit, we discussed various topics, including but not limited to difficult situations in community teams, training successors to teams and encouraging as well as appreciating localness in the local community teams.

We also thought there should be a better way to collect the monthly team reports since as it is now, too many teams aren’t sending the reports. To be exact, some teams, including Xubuntu, haven’t been doing these reports in months, and that needs to change.

So, for the best of all of us, I promised to work on a proof of concept version of a simple web interface that collects team reports and outputs them in a nice format. I actually think we might want several output format, to paste on a wiki, text document and whatever else. Easy enough to do that when you’ve already gathered all the information.

Evening activities

After the sessions I planned to attend the Ubuntu Testing Extravaganza, but I stayed a bit too long in the hotel room relaxing that I missed the beer and pizza. I popped in to listen to the lightning talks, but soon enough we decided to take the metro downtown and grab some dinner. It was really nice to get out of the hotel even for a short while and acknowledge that yes, there is still life outside UDS as well!

Now I’m back to the hotel room and I’m about to start hacking a bit on the team reports web interface, or at least planning it.

Generally so far the athmosphere has been fantastic. I also think my expectations regarding productivity are in a reasonable level and there won’t be any major disappointments after getting back home from UDS. You will also have my word that I will do all I can to get the work items I’ve committed to done in a sensible timespan to get things actually progressing as well as to leave enough time for others to take their actions depending on my work items.

Until tomorrow, take care.