The day

There were some really interesting sessions today. I haven’t attended much, but I did go to the keynote about activists and journalists and the treats for them in an online world, and what the (FLOSS) desktop can do against that.
Another interesting one was the “GNOME 3 for your Application” talk. Some really interesting plans were shown. I can’t help and wonder, though, if a lot of this isn’t just duplicating stuff from Ubuntu’s Ayatana project, or at least touching it very closely. RedHat’s GNOME 3 and Ubuntu’s Ayatana seem to have a lot in common, but unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be much cooperation and so far the standards and APIs proposed upstream were declined and refused to be used. It would be really a shame if GNOME Shell — which seems to be the big chunk that is going to contain all the new neat functionality — would be using a new API, separate from existing projects. If it would be using standards, but not be using existing libraries for them, then we’d have just dumb duplication of code. I can think of a better way to spend resources.

I hope there will be more cooperation, or at least communication, between RedHat and Canonical on this matter.

T-shirts

I hope this will be the last time I mention those blasted shirts here. Finally we were able to hand out all t-shirts today after some of the organisation went to pick them up from the printer in Nijmegen yesterday night. The good news here is that the Igalia logo, which the printer somehow had made disappear from the final prints of the first batch of t-shirts, is on the newest batch. But still, with the Igalia logo missing from the first sponsors and the huge delays in the deliverances we’re of course not too happy with the service.

Social Media Livestream

The first view days there have been some issues with Identi.ca the UDStream based Social Media Livestream on the GUADEC website. At first the dents were shown with the time in GMT, whereas the tweets were correctly shown in CEST. After I had fixed this everything appeared to be right, but fortunately Stéphane Maniaci was kind enough to keep nagging me about it until I had completely fixed all problems with the microblogging system used more often than Twitter by the attendees. See, my hacky fix for the date problems (‘+ 2 * 3600′) was only working on Google Chrome/Chromium, but made all dents disappear in any other browser. After fiddling a bit with the date format I thought things were completely fixed, but they weren’t in all browsers.

Then I cleaned the code a bit up and by delaying the formatting the Date until after the Date class has been initialised the time is now correctly everywhere without hack, and Identi.ca isn’t broken anymore. This also means that the screen of the livestream in the venue is working at long last!
I’ll push my changes to the GUADEC 2010 Website’s Git repository next week(end) and will backport the changes back upstream to UDStream as well.

Collabora barebecue

Unfortunately, after two weeks of very hot weather, the summer started to fade a bit at the beginning of the conference. Now, this isn’t that bad for a conference, it makes being inside much more bearable, but it is a shame for beach parties. We were having a barbecue at “Beach Company”, but no swimming! The party was very well organised, and the vegetarians were happy with their own stuff and barbecue, and everyone had a great time. New to most of the international guests was the presence of large quantities of the Dutch version of satay sauce (or ‘peanut sauce’), which we seem to put in litres on everything, according to some of them.

Last words

Tomorrow will already be the last day of the conference! I can’t believe that after all these months of preparation GUADEC 2010 will be over! I can surely say that it has been a great fun so far and I’ve met some really nice people. Despite some problems with ordered goods (ahem, t-shirts, ahem), there weren’t any major problems and I’m glad that everyone seems to be enjoying the conference so much.

On to a great last day!

Several buildings, including the Maison de Bonneterie as seen from the tram stop 'Gravenstraat', near the 'Le Paris' cafe of the Canonical party.

Today was the first day of the main GUADEC conference and this meant that it was extra busy at the registration desk with many people checking in today. The day was marked by great talks, the first occurrence of WebM streaming for any event and the arrival of some more t-shirts.

I almost overslept this morning because I had worked until 3.40 in the night to make the streaming on the website ready for the first day of streaming. Fortunately Mart was there to wake me up and we made it to the venue just before eight o’ clock, in time.

Almost straight away the first attendees started to arrive and some of them still had to register. There are still some people not registered. We would ask them all to register still, so we can provide them with the necessary information and swag, but also for the municipality of The Hague, which sponsors us for every foreign attendee we have registered. (That is also why bringing the ticket is so important.)

I spent the morning trying to awaken a bit more, doing the regular tidying up, moving stuff, searching for and talking to people, answering questions and looking after the website. The afternoon I spent manning the camera of the Video Live Stream 1, in ‘Paris’, which gave me the opportunity to listen to some talks. I really liked the provocative humour of the ‘State of GNOME’ talk. No patronising, religion doesn’t need any more protection than other fantasies.
That was actually my day. Time does go quickly, but it seems a lot quicker when you’re writing about days you do loads of small things.

T-shirts
Yes, again t-shirts problems. We had hoped to have solved the t-shirt problems today, but unfortunately we haven’t been able to do so. Summary of today’s progress:

• There are no separate speakers’ shirt, they get a regular conference shirt;
• We have run out of men’s M, L and XL definitely;
• Tomorrow we will, at long last, have the women’s sizes and the volunteer shirts;
• Leftovers of the volunteer shirts, if any, will be handed out to the other people still waiting for their shirt;
• Unfortunately the logo of one of our sponsors, Igalia, is still missing from the t-shirts, after the company we ordered the shirts managed to get the logo dropped from the complete template we provided.

Looking at Riviervismarkt from tram stop 'Gravenstraat', near the 'Le Paris' cafe of the Canonical party.

Network
The network isn’t using VPN or any other kind of tunnelling after all, as far as I’m aware. Instead we’re using Google’s public DNS servers. Privacy pundits might not be happy with this, but then privacy pundits would be very stupid privacy pundits if they wouldn’t be using their own tunnel at conferences anyway.

The free GNOME stickers in the shape of the logo of our beloved desktop environment, at the information and registration desk.

This was probably the calmest day of the whole GUADEC conference. At the last day before the main conference there were just some BoFs and the second part of the GNOME Developer Training, and we had a lot of time to finish some preparation and clean up a bit.

Network
The people running the GUADEC 2010 network — baptised ‘Central Command’ by themselves — are less lucky; there are still a lot of problems with getting everything stable. The network set up by them is working correctly, but the uplink to the ‘Haagse Hogeschool’ network is going through a rather nasty firewall: SmartDefense. Its name is aptly like the names of a lot of trojan horses, since I’ve overheard several people with impressive firewall experience (including SmartDefense) saying all kinds of nasty things about it.

To sum it up: the firewall sees one IP address for all conference attendees and starts blocking some when it sees some things as an attack. The person who is able to and has the authorisation to change the firewall’s settings was only available to us Friday and is on holiday, like pretty much every one of the other non-powerless IT staff. The ‘Haagse Hogeschool’ doesn’t want to, can’t and will not fix this issue. This means that, despite the fact that the venue is connected to SURFnet, the Dutch academic internet connection capable of 1 Gbit connections (during testing before the start of the conference the download speed was around 30 MB/s), the internet would be borked…

…were it not for our heroic network managers to work on a solution: VPN. They’re working on setting up a massive VPN to get past the horrific firewall. We hope that this will make the network use bearable, and maybe even more than that.

Please don’t flame our networking staff, but give kudos instead. They’re working very hard and are doing their best to make the conference enjoyable for you. Make sure is enjoyable for them as well.

Every attendee gets this free bamboo USB stick. These 2 GB contain sponsor material, the video message from Neelie Kroes and the Ubuntu Wallpapers.

T-shirts
Any paying attendees — professional and employer sponsored registrations — receive the GUADEC t-shirt. Apart to that there are other people who get (free) t-shirts and there will be children sized white t-shirts with the GNOME foot (cute!) for sale.

However, unfortunately Tuesday we received just one box with t-shirts and are still waiting for the rest. We’ve got the children’s t-shirts and the men’s L, XL and XXL. Men’s S and M, women’s sizes and the other t-shirts weren’t available for the whole day.

We hope to receive those tomorrow morning. If you didn’t receive your shirt yet, please keep an eye on the social media and the registration desk.

Please try to take the size you’ve entered during the registration — if you pre-registered, of course — as we want to make sure everyone who pre-registered for the conference gets the size (s)he entered on the site.

Starting Wednesday there will be swag for sale!

The GUADEC 2010 Love/Hate Wall: hugs, tears you want to share? PostIt!

Love/Hate Wall
Inspired by FOSDEM and previous GUADEC conferences we put up a Love/Hate Wall underneath the huge GNOME banner in the foyer. You can share your hugs and tears with a simple PostIt. At the end of the conference we’ll photograph the result and will make the photos available online, but if you’re attending, please make sure to take a look!

It was pointed out that Love and Hate are strong emotions, and Hate is a strongly negative one. However, the reason we’re not using “I would wish…” and similar structures is because:

• We want to trigger a response, and strong emotions trigger a stronger response and result in more discussion;
• The Wall is nothing formal, it is just a fun way to share your frustration, ideas and thanks.

No flamewars please!

This wall is much more interesting than you!

My day
Comprehensive and concise!
±8.00: At the venue to open it
During the day(ordered randomly):

• tidying up the registration desk, adding information and removing clutter;
• helping with answering questions from participants, lost prospective students and interested Haagse Hogeschool employees;
• trying to keep sponsors happy with the website;
• preparing the website for the video streaming tomorrow;
• setting up the Love/Hate Wall together with Vincent and William
• having lunch
• playing IRC on with the walkie-talkies

18.00-19.00: working on making the website ready for video streaming and emptying the building of people, cleaning up for the day and preparing for the next one.

Registration-related note: if your name is written in a different alphabet than the Latin one and your alphabet is not Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian or similar we can provide you with a badge that shows your name in the correct way! Just make sure you mention it when registering.

The famous GNOME banner in the foyer of the Haagse Hogeschool, as seen from next to the registration desk.

Today we kicked off the pre-conference of GUADEC 2010 with the GNOME Open Desktop Day and several interesting BoFs. (None of which I attended.) However, for the organisation it was also the day everything came together: the hard work to prepare the conference now really resulted into something physical: all the enthusiastic attendees already swarming the place! Also, we spent the day setting up things and finishing the last preparations. The main conference will only start Wednesday, so there is still one day left before it starts!

These sand sculptures were located near the 'Binnenhof', the Dutch political centre, portraying famous (Dutch) paintings.

The whole morning — and, I have to admit, part of the afternoon — was spent trying to get the registration system up and running. The most problems were caused by the printer and the templates for the badges, but the first few hours were spent on getting the scanner to work. If you haven’t registered yet, you should be able to do so tomorrow. If you have been able to register already, but didn’t receive the GUADEC 2010 USB stick, please be aware you can get one at the registration desk.

The network guys (Yes, indeed I’ve only seen guys in ‘Central Command’ so far.) are doing a terrific job considering the limited time they had to prepare the whole network and the fact that this whole week the IT staff from the Haagse Hogeschool seems to be on holiday (timing!). Tomorrow the wireless network should reach its full capacity.
There are two different networks available: GUADEC-2.4 and GUADEC-5. The number in the name corresponds to the frequency of the network: GUADEC-2.4 is 2.4 GHz, GUADEC-5 is 5 GHz. The latter is the fast and everyone who can is asked to connect to GUADEC-5 because it is faster (and has got more capacity?). However, not all wireless cards can use the newer 5 GHz frequency, they can use the GUADEC-2.4 network and are probably not even able to see the other.

The Monday evening trip of GUADEC 2010 was to Madurodam by night. This is a park of miniature buildings and structures from the whole of the Netherlands.

This evening was the trip to ‘Madurodam’, the smallest town of the Netherlands where you can see the most famous buildings of the country on a 1:25 scale. There is no need to go to the rest of the country anymore, apart for the nature and the (water) sports and other activities! We went with a nice group using tram line 9 — you’ll probably want to take that line to the Collabora Beach Party as well — in the evening, which gave a nice view of the models with the lights. The night ended with an impressive lightshow using video projectors, laser lights and smoke and water to project on, as well as a regular type of projection screen.

A tip: if you want to follow what’s going on at GUADEC, take a look at the (JavaScript-heavy) Social Media Livestream! (Yes, that is an adapted version of UDStream. I’ll probably see what code would be valuable to contribute back ‘upstream’ from GNOME to Ubuntu after the conference.)

Maandag is de GNOME Open Desktop Day, een op overheid gerichte dag waaraan ook NOiV en het Ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken en Koninkrijksrelaties meewerken.

De hele week, van maandag tot en met vrijdag, zijn er ‘BoF‘-sessies. Dit zijn informele bijeenkomsten van teams in het GNOME-project en informele discussies over verschillende onderwerpen. Kijk eens op de agenda op GNOME Live! om te zien wat er allemaal te doen is!

Woensdag barst het echt los, dan begint het hoofdeel van GUADEC. Het programma ziet er veelbelovend uit! Allerlei soorten ‘talks’ zullen er gehouden worden: van een statistisch overzicht van het GNOME project door David Neary tot een uitleg hoe het geolocatieraamwerk ‘GeoClue’ gebruikt kan worden in programma’s door Bastien Nocera en een praatje van Sílvia Miranda over het verbeteren van de kwaliteit van vertalingen in GNOME.

Het is nog niet te laat om je op te geven! Heb je zin en tijd? Kom naar de Haagse Hogeschool, maar vergeet je niet eerst te registeren!

But we’ll have to wait until Wednesday for the main conference to start. From Wednesday 27 July 9.30 until Friday 30 July 17.30 the ‘Haagse Hogeschool’ — or ‘The Hague University’, as it like to call itself in English since the use of the English word for ‘university’ is not protected by law — will be filled with people from all over the world attending sessions of all kinds. A quick look at the GUADEC programme reveals a range of different talks: from a more philosophical talk on GNOME, the web, and Freedom to a more practical session about Best Practices in Maintaining Vendor Specific GTK+ Branches to what will probably be an interesting showcase of technology: the State of the GNOME 3 Shell.

There seem to be a lot of topics this year about bringing the web to the GNOME desktop; I’m curious what we’ll see back from that in the next releases of GNOME. There are surely some exciting talks coming up!

You can still attend! If you want to come, !

[GUADEC2010] Neelie Kroes on open source and the importance of communities

When uploading the video I wanted to make sure that everyone, even people with hearing disabilities or people who are not so proficient in English, to understand the video. That’s why I wrote a transscript and made subtitles available in English and Dutch. I also mailed the gnome-i18n mailing list with a request for more translations and soon I got a response from Samuel Goméz who had translated the subtitles to Spanish!

This was great, but of course the process could be easier. Other people at the gnome-i18n mailing list had suggested the use of sub2po from the Translate Toolkit to convert SRT files to PO or POT files.

Now I’ve made the subtitles I’ve got available in GNOME Git in the ‘video-subtitles’ module and have requested it to be added to GNOME’s Damned Lies translation infrastructure.

What next? Although there’s only one video in the repository at the moment we need more languages! If you can help to translate Neelie Kroes’ message to GUADEC to your own language, please don’t hesitate to do so! I’ll make sure they’ll end up on YouTube.

The Video Subtitles project can also use more videos. If you’re someone who’s hosting the GNOME videos on YouTube, or somewhere else, please contact me if you want to participate.

I, for the least, will try to make subtitles for as much of the videos I’m uploading to the GUADEC YouTube channel.

In addition to my post earlier today, The importance of an accessible community (Dutch), I would like to share the following with you. Maybe I exaggerate or simplify sometimes somewhere, but in those cases that it mostly to illustrate my point.

When a community is not focussed on contributing to the project around which it resolves, but on the talking about it, you get a completely different community than when the community is focussed on contributing to the project around which it resolves.

When a community is mostly preoccupied with talking about something and the asking and answering of questions about something you get a much more passive community, in which the talking (on the forums) gets the most attention, that’s around which everything resolves. People who want to become a part of the community spend their time hanging around at the forums and chat there.

We all know it is harder to just by text bring over exactly what you want to say. It is harder to understand the nuance and irony of someone without seeing their face or hearing their voice. When people, who might be a bit bored and are looking for something to do, hang around at the forums the whole day chances are that somewhere a misunderstanding occurs, resulting in an argument. That is bad for the atmosphere.

There will always be people who complain, no matter how perfect you do something. Consequently there also will be people on the forums who will complain; about Ubuntu, about Ubuntu NL, about the forums, about me, about you, about the colour of the grass, etc, etc, etc. Everyone always knows it better, the best steersman are indeed always on shore and never on the bridge. [And that, ladies and gentleman, is a Dutch proverb.] People who don’t agree [with the criticism] will rise up and react. Then you easily have an argument.

The two issues mentioned above naturally don’t have to occur everywhere a lot. However, when your community mostly seems to be a talk group [literally 'support group', but that would take away the focus on the talking] you quickly get people starting to look for things to talk about — because joining the discussion [about Ubuntu and Ubuntu NL] isn’t possible — en then those issues become a lot more visible and of frequent occurrence.

This is all because there isn’t much to talk about. People are bored and don’t have anything different to talk about or discuss.

When a community is mostly preoccupied with contributing to a project — in our case Ubuntu and Ubuntu NL itself — you get a much more active community, in which working on contributions gets the most attention, that’s around which everything resolves. People who want to become a part of the community spend their time contributing to Ubuntu and Ubuntu NL and that’s what’s being talked about on the discussion places.

You’ll always have people who complain, whine or are searching for something to do and start windbagging for a lack of something better to do. But if it’s mostly about contributing to a project in a community the talking will be mostly about that.

The passive whining of the first part of this piece gives a community in which negativity pervails. This isn’t pleasant, discourages people and scares them away.

The positive focus on contribution in the second part of this peice gives community in which it is about sharing and cooperating. This causes a much more pleasant atmosphere and attracts people, to the contrary. The focus on contributing encourages people to do something themselves, because only then you’re really a part [of the community].

Instead of the biggest whiners being the most important people of the community, the people who contribute the most are the most important. And that is much nicer.

Wanneer een gemeenschap niet gericht is op het bijdragen aan het project waarom het draait, maar op het praten erover, dan krijg je een heel andere gemeenschap dan wanneer de gemeenschap gericht is op het bijdragen aan het project waarom het draait.

Als een gemeenschap zich vooral bezig houdt met het praten over iets en en stellen en beantwoorden van vragen over iets krijg je een veel passievere gemeenschap, waarin het praten (op het forum) de meeste aandacht krijgt, daar draait het om. Mensen die bij die gemeenschap willen horen besteden hun tijd aan het rondhangen op het forum en het praten daar.

We weten allemaal dat het lastiger is om via enkel tekst over te brengen wat je precies wilt zeggen. Het is lastiger om de nuance en ironie van iemand te begrijpen zonder zijn of haar gezicht te zien en zonder zijn of haar stem te horen. Als mensen, die zich misschien een beetje vervelen en iets zoeken om te doen, de hele dag rondhangen op een forum wordt de kans groter dat er ergens een keer een misverstand ontstaat en daaruit een aanvaring volgt. Dat is slecht voor de sfeer.

Er zullen altijd mensen zijn die klagen, hoe perfect je iets doet. Er zullen dus ook mensen zijn op een forum die gaan klagen; over Ubuntu, over Ubuntu NL, over het forum, over mij, over jou, over de kleur van het gras, etc, etc, etc. Iedereen weet het zelf altijd het beste, de beste stuurlui staan immers aan wal en staan nooit op de brug. Mensen die het er niet mee eens zijn zullen opspringen en reageren. Dan kun je al snel een twist krijgen.

De bovengenoemde twee zaken hoeven natuurlijk niet per se overal heel vaak voor te komen. Echter, wanneer je gemeenschap vooral een praatgroep op het forum lijkt te zijn dan krijg je al snel dat mensen iets zoeken om over te praten — want meepraten heeft immers niet veel zin — en dan worden dit soort dingen veel zichtbaarder en veelvoorkomend.

Dit alles komt vooral omdat er niet veel meer te doen is. Mensen vervelen zich en mensen hebben niks anders om over te praten of discussiëren.

Als een gemeenschap zich vooral bezig houdt met het bijdragen aan een project — in ons geval Ubuntu en Ubuntu NL zelf — dan krijg je een veel actievere gemeenschap, waarin het werken aan bijdragen de meeste aandacht krijgt, daar draait het om. Mensen die bij die gemeenschap willen horen besteden hun tijd aan het bijdragen aan Ubuntu en Ubuntu NL en daar wordt over gepraat op de overlegplaatsen.

Je zult altijd mensen hebben die klagen, zeuren of iets te doen zoeken en dan maar dom gaan ouwehoeren. Maar als het in een gemeenschap voornamelijk gaat om het bijdragen aan een project zal het gepraat ook voornamelijk daarover gaan.

Het passieve gezeur van het eerste deel van dit stuk levert een gemeenschap op waarin negativiteit de boventoon voert. Dit is niet prettig, demotiveert mensen en jaag ze weg.

De positieve focus op bijdragen van het tweede deel van dit stuk levert een gemeenschap op waarin delen en samenwerken centraal staan. Dit zorgt voor een veel prettigere sfeer en trekt mensen juist aan. De focus op bijdragen moedigt mensen aan om zelf ook iets te gaan doen, want dan hoor je er pas echt bij.

In plaats van dat de grootse zeuren de belangrijkste personen van de gemeenschap zijn, zijn de mensen die het meeste bijdragen de belangrijkste personen. En dat is veel leuker.

In dit stuk wil in het hebben over het belang van een toegankelijke gemeenschap. Vergeet niet dat Ubuntu een opensourceproject is, en dat een daarbij horende gemeenschap fundamenteel verschilt van bijvoorbeeld een fanforum of een Windows-ondersteuningsgroep. Een opensourceproject hangt namelijk af van de bijdragen van zijn leden.

Ubuntu NL is ook onderdeel van het opensourceproject Ubuntu. Wij zijn de lokale tak van een internationaal project dat de hele aarde beslaat. Echter, op dit moment heb ik niet altijd het gevoel dat er in de gemeenschap ook altijd in die geest gehandeld wordt.

Want als je wilt drijven op vrijwilligers en volgens de traditie van de opensourcegemeenschap bijdragen van iedereen wilt accepteren moet je wel openstaan voor die bijdragen. Dat is een cultuur die je moet kweken, en iets waaraan sommigen eerst zullen moeten wennen, maar deze bewezen methode is wel noodzakelijk als je wilt dat de gemeenschap optimaal functioneert en door kan blijven gaan als er mensen stoppen.

Op dit moment is het zo dat veel teams nogal gesloten zijn. Voordat je ergens bij komt moet je eerst toestemming krijgen; iemand moet je uitnodigen. Veel subteams hebben een nogal scherpe scheidslijn tussen het subteam en de rest. Het is of wel, of niet bij het team.

Laat ik als voorbeeld eens het websitebeheer nemen. De discussie van die groep mensen is gesloten. Je kunt niet meehelpen of meepraten zonder dat iemand je over de scheidslijn laat. Zulke dingen maken het erg moeilijk voor iemand die mee wil helpen om mee te doen.

Opensourcegemeenschappen kunnen elke bijdragen, hoe klein ook gebruiken. Kleine bijdragen zijn een goede manier om langzaam betrokken te raken bij een (deel van een) project. Je wordt lid van een mailinglijst, reageert af en toe in een discussie en wanneer de webbeheerder een keer vraagt of iemand een klein klusje wil opklappen schrijf je dat je dat wel wilt doen. Zo raak je steeds bekender met het project en uiteindelijk kan je misschien ook wel taken overnemen van de beheerder als die het een keer wat drukken krijgt.

Deze manier heeft twee voordelen:

1. Niet iedereen hoeft natuurlijk na verloop van tijd ook, bijvoorbeeld, webbeheerder te worden. Echter hij of zij helpt wel een beetje mee, en alle kleine beetjes helpen. Al bespaart die persoon de eigenlijke webbeheerder maar tijd door vragen te beantwoorden die mensen stellen op de maillijst, dat helpt toch;
2. De opvolgers worden vanzelf klaargemaakt. Als er nu iemand uit mijn voorbeeldteam weg zou gaan dan zou er nog maar één webbeheerder over zijn, en een eventuele nieuwe beheerder zou alles nog helemaal moeten leren. Als je openstaat voor bijdragen en meedenkende mensen heb je daar niet alleen profijt van als je er nog bent, maar je garandeert ook de continuïteit van het team een stuk beter.

Alles gaat een stuk langzamer vanwege de vakantie, maar op dit moment wordt langzaam maar zeker het openstellen van de communicatie van het team voorbereid. Dit is al een stap in de goede richting, maar we moeten ervoor waken dat we ook onze cultuur meeveranderen. Dit houdt in:

• Communiceer alles openbaar, tenzij het écht niet anders kan. Geen privémailtjes om snel iets te regelen, maar gebruik een maillijst of het forum. Dan sta je anderen toe te reageren en mee te denken en kan de gemeenschap volgen wat je doet en hebt gedaan;
• Neem iedereen serieus, ook de mensen die niet al in je (sub)team zitten en luister ook echt naar nieuwkomers die iets inhoudelijks te vertellen hebben;
• Zorg dat mensen het makkelijk en leuk is voor mensen om bij te dragen, moedig ze aan;
• Laat de onderscheiding tussen Ubuntu NL team en Ubuntu NL gemeenschap zoveel mogelijk verdwijnen. Het team zou de gemeenschap moeten zijn, en anders is er iets heel erg mis, dan zijn we meer een fanforum dan een opensourcegemeenschap.

Ik heb in met deze blogpost niemand persoonlijk willen aanvallen en ik wil ook absoluut niet zeggen dat ik de bijdrages van wie dan ook maar niet waardeer. Echter, we moeten wel onder ogen kunnen en durven zien dat er een cultuurverandering nodig is als we Ubuntu NL een prettige en leefbare gemeenschap willen houden.

Het zou hypocriet zijn om een opensourceproject aan iedereen aan te raden als superieur, maar zelf de opensourcemethode niet te willen gebruiken.

I started to wonder about the use and desirableness of non-English posts on Planet Ubuntu after a comment from LoCo Council member Laura Czajkowski on my blog post Realise native English speakers are privileged. She said: We have many ubuntu members who do not post on planet.ubuntu.com as they feel it has to be in English which is unfortunate as I’d love to read them – we all can use a web translator.

That is something I personally agree with. I see Planet Ubuntu as a window into the general Ubuntu community, not necessarily just the English speaking part of it. After all, when you want language-specific content your LoCo can always provide their own Planet.

However, before bombarding the Planet with posts in a language that not everyone understands I would like to discuss this first and at the same time point at the lack of rules and guidelines there seems to be for Planet Ubuntu. We’ve seen how this can cause confusion and irritation lately when people questioned the appearance of notably Dell, but also other entities. It was their opinion that Planet Ubuntu should be for Ubuntu Members, on a personal title, only.

I’m in favour of allowing everyone to post in their favourite language on Planet Ubuntu. It would make it more useful for more people to read the planet, which would expose them to the rest of the community as well, and it would reflect the international nature of the community better. On top of that, it would allow us all to follow parts of the community that now remain ‘hidden’, by either testing our foreign-language skills, or by testing the quality of the online translation tools.

A possible downside to officially opening Planet Ubuntu for every language could be that it would be less clear what to expect when visiting it. Now people that can speak English know they can go to the planet and read everything. However, this requires mostly a change in behaviour and if people want an English-only planet they can always set one up, no?

What do you, dear (Planet Ubuntu) readers think? Do you want multilingual blog posts, like me? Or are you opposed to it? Please leave a comment.

Bug triagers! When you have a bug in a Debian package, please don’t hesitate to forward it upstream to Debian. They want the bug reports! Just make sure you’ve done all the triaging already before forwarding, so upstream Debian doesn’t have to do double work.

The Debian BTS is nothing like Launchpad and for many Ubuntu bug triagers it might take some getting used to. Fortunately there is a session planned in the Ubuntu Classroom.

DD Rhonda will teach you how to use the Debian BTS next Thursday, 22 July at 18.00 UTC in the #ubuntu-classroom IRC channel. Don’t forget to join #ubuntu-classroom-chat as well if you want to ask questions.

The days of Latin and French as the lingua francas of the world are long over and we all know that English has taken its place. Especially IT is dominated by the language. Virtually all documentation and function naming is done in English, as well as almost all the communication. There are not many languages that have their own words for ‘computer’ or ‘internet’, or ‘software’ and ‘hardware’ for that matter.

It is logically, of course, to use this language now. It makes no sense to try to get everyone to learn Swedish all out of the sudden because we like that better. If you want to successfully communicate online and participate in an open source community you’ll need English. However, this is the cause of a large inequality between native and non-native speakers.

It comes clear when you take a look at what happens when you’re not a proficient English user. When your English isn’t correct:

• people will take you less seriously and treat you more like a child or an ignorant person;
• you find it harder to express yourself and to make your intentions to someone else;
• using it takes more energy and is more frustrating, meaning you’re less likely to use it;
• you’ll be more often misunderstood and/or be considered harsh, causing negative feedback;
• you find it harder to understand documentation, HowTos, blog posts and other community-vital information.

These points all discourage less fluent persons to contribute to discussions, to speak up. This is very clearly demonstrated by the relative high amount of Americans, and other contributors of English speaking countries, in the community, especially in key roles.

The United States with 300 million inhabitants is smaller than geographical Europe with 731 million people, or the EU with 501 million. Still there are many more Americans visible in the open source projects. There are only about 70 million native English speakers in Europe, from Ireland and Great Britain.

But lets start about India, Indonesia and China. All these countries have populations of less or more than one billion people. That is huge! Ubuntu also seems to be very popular there. Still we don’t see as many contributors from those countries as we see from English speaking countries.

Of course there are many factors that have to do with the diversity and origins of the community members. However, this doesn’t explain everything. India, Indonesia, Brazil and China might still be working very hard on making broadband accessible to everyone, but (Western) Europe has mostly far better internet connections than a lot of parts of Northern America.

I think that one very important reason for this is the fact that not everyone speaks good English, and for a lot of people who do speak English using it is still not as simple as using their native language. You can never learn a second language as good as your native language and it does cost a lot of energy for many people to use it when reading, writing, speaking and listening.

That is a barrier to them to contribute to the open source communities, so they stay in their LoCos or hang around a bit in the international community, but don’t do as much as they could or would like to do, because they find it costs too much energy or it too hard to learn or do because of the language. For most voluntary contributors Ubuntu is something they do in their leisure time, as a hobby. When your hobby is mostly hard and not as fun as other things you could do in the same time, it is not hard to decide not to contribute.

This is probably costing us more contributors than gender or race inequality. It is also something that is harder to solve since you can’t take away all problems by simply educating people and raising their consciousnesses. There will always remain a language barrier.

Raising consciousness does help, though. First of all I would like to make all native English speakers realise that they are in fact — every one of them, including those with dyslexia — very privileged over non-native speakers.

Secondly I would like to ask everyone in the community — also the non-native speakers — to take into account someone’s proficiency when reading a mail written in bad English. It might be tempting, unconsciously, to dismiss the email and consider the author as someone who didn’t bother to write it in proper English. However, please consider that this might be the best English of the author. Give the author a chance regardless.

Thirdly I would like to ask everyone in the community to realise how important localisation and translations are, of the interface and the documentation. Americans are very privileged that they have their whole system, from the texts in some obscure application from universe to their default currency, localised by default. They never have to adapt when a certain application is only available in US English, or when a command line calendar is following their historic conversions. Others do.

Checking the Ubuntu community

I wanted to end this post with an overview of the different councils of the Ubuntu community and the countries of origin/native languages of their members. Just read the data and consider it.

Community Council

Forum Council

IRC Council

LoCo Council

Technical Board

Fortunately, after a tip from someone on IRC I had already managed to get hold of the ‘sense’ nickname on Freenode. Despite the fact that now I have to cope with everything that makes sense on Freenode, I’ve decided to move mostly towards the nickname ‘sense’. There is a pending request on Launchpad from me to get the person who’s currently using ‘sense’ robbed of his nickname (inactive since registration), and I’ve already moved my wiki page from Qense to SenseHofstede.

In case ‘sense’ isn’t available, like on Twitter, I moved to ‘sehof’. On Identi.ca I’m also using the same username for the sake of consistency. On social networks, where the length of the username doesn’t matter, I am now using ‘sensehofstede’.

Summary

• Mostly: sense
• Twitter and Identi.ca: sehof

Blog

I’ve also registered a new domain name: sensehofstede.nl, and set my blog over. The new theme is completely own work, and a bit of an experiment. It’s still very much Work-In-Progress, and any feedback would be very welcome. I’m keeping the ‘qense.nl’ domain name, but it redirects to the new domain name.

We willen het makkelijker maken voor mensen om mee te helpen en om te zien wat er gebeurt. Want het is eigenlijk te gek dat een lokale gemeenschap voor een opensourceproject bestuurt wordt alsof het een fanforum is. Het zou veel makkelijker moeten zijn om mee te praten, ook al is het niet veel. Dan krijg je sneller mensen die meehelpen naar hun kunnen. Alle kleine beetjes helpen, en iederen moet mee kunnen doen. Dat is wat opensource is, en dat is waar we naartoe moeten.

Het viel me op tijdens het overleg over het voorgaande dat veel mensen het forum van Ubuntu NL gelijkstelden aan Ubuntu NL zelf. Klaarblijkelijk lijkt het forum voor veel mensen zo belangrijk dat ze het gevoel hebben dat het forum alles is. Dat is niet zo, en deze blogpost wil ik aangrijpen om dat te benadrukken.

Laten we eerst eens kijken naar wat Ubuntu NL allemaal doet:

• Vertalingen
• Documentatie
• Releaseparties
• Ondersteuning op IRC
• Ondersteuning op een maillijst
• Ondersteuning op het forum

Dat is meer dan het forum. Sommigen zullen delen hiervan zien als een voortzetting van de forumgemeenschap. Maar besef wel dat een redelijk aantal van de mensen die bijdragen aan Ubuntu NL nauwelijks op het forum komen! Niet iedereen — en daar ben ik één van — vindt een forum een prettige manier om te overleggen. Het vertaalteam gebruikt al tijden een maillijst. Dat heeft echter wel als resultaat dat voor veel mensen ze nogal onzichtbaar zijn.

Als we eens kijken naar de aangeraden gebruiken voor LoCo’s van de LoCo-raad op https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LoCoCouncil/LoCoTeamsBestPracticesandGuidelines dan zien we dat ook weer terug. Je ziet dat het forum één van de manieren is waarop ondersteuning gegeven kan worden. Misschien moeten we ook maar duidelijker het forum losweken van het team zelf. Een appart forumbestuur kan sneller beslissingen nemen en zit dichter op het forum, en het zorgt er bovendien voor dat de rest niet mee hoeft te vergaderen over forumonderwerpen.

Het is zo gegroeid dat veel communicatie over het forum gaat. Jammer genoeg lijken fora te stimuleren om nergens anders dan op het forum te kijken. Veel mensen horen enkel aankondigingen als die op het forum geplaatst worden. Het forum is dus de centrale plek geworden waar mensen van de gemeenschap elkaar ontmoeten. Het totale monopolie dat het forum echter op de communicatie lijkt te hebben schrikt wel mensen af om bij te dragen. Ook ik ben lange tijd niet actief voor Ubuntu NL geweest omdat ik gewoon geen zin had om een forum in de gaten te moeten houden.

Het forum heeft alles een beetje opgeslokt, en samen met dat monopolie is het niet onbegrijpelijk dat mensen soms denken dat het forum alles is. Maar het is wel een verkeerde aanname, en een aanname die mensen weg kan houden. Het forum is één van de manieren om te communiceren, maar er zijn meerdere. Bovendien is het slechts een middel.

The definition is this:

“A paper cut is a trivially fixable usability bug that the average user would encounter in default installation of Ubuntu or Kubuntu Desktop Edition.”

The goal is to fix at least 100 paper cuts this cycle. Last cycle we had the same goal, but actually finished 103 — thanks to great upstream participation — and I hope we can break that record for Maverick.

There are ten milestones to which accepted paper cut reports are assigned. Each milestone has a theme.

• Round 1 File Management: Nautilus;
• Round 2 Office: Evolution, OpenOffice.org, gedit, etc;
• Round 3 Social Networking: Empathy, Gwibber;
• Round 4 Miscellaneous;
• Round 5 Photo Management: Shotwell;
• Round 6 Sound and Video: Rhythmbox, Totem, PiTiVi, etc;
• Round 7 GTK+ and Notify OSD;
• Round 8 Miscellaneous;
• Round 9 Software Center: package descriptions;
• Round 10 Software Center: applications from universe that don’t work.

This set of milestones may change and the lists of bugs assigned to them aren’t final. Please also note that you can only work on paper cuts that are on this list. The milestones are a guideline, but please feel free to work on any paper cut with the status ‘Triaged’, your work will be appreciated! A list of paper cuts with the ‘Triaged’ status.

When you have chosen to fix a paper cut, please make sure you check the upstream bug report if it is there. Once you have fixed a paper cut and have got a patch ready, please attach it to the paper cut bug report and we will be very happy to accept it.

We are also looking for stories. Have you fixed a paper cut? Tell us how you did! Blog about it, or send your story to Jorge Castro or Jono Bacon.

If you want to work on Kubuntu you can find a list of paper cuts by searching for the ‘kde’ tag.

The Ubuntu NL boot at the Ubuntu NL release party 2010 with demo computers of OS4Free can be seen in the background. The table in the front is the table of one of the many HCC! groups present.

HCC!platform Linux and Ubuntu NL organise a large release party every two years to celebrate the LTS release. Yesterday was the ‘Ubuntu NL Releaseparty 10.04‘ in hotel and conference centre ‘de Reehorst’ in the town of Ede. A large group of people assembled to tell visitors all about the new release and install it for them on their computers. Representatives of the different (Dutch) open source communities were present as well with their own stands and space was also available to the sponsors of the release party to show their involvement in the open source community. There were about 30 lectures and workshops on the day introducing visitors to a range of subjects.

Members of interest groups in the HCC! — the Dutch computer users’ association — showed their hobbies to the public: Unix, Music, Photo Editing, Gaming, CompUsers. There were also a few representatives of local HCC! groups to show visitors what there is to do in HCC! near them. There were also members providing support to visitors with computer problems.

I spent most of the day behind the Ubuntu NL table, which was also where the three demo computers kindly provided by OS4Free stood. OS4Free is the online computer shop of an Ubuntu NL member that almost always lends us demo computers for conferences and such. We gave answers to general questions from visitors. showed them some of the Ubuntu books available on the market and handed out leaflets of OS4Free.

The stand wasn’t the only place I saw that day. I attended two talks: ‘Ubuntu 10.04 Demo’ by Sebastian Schauenburg and ‘Changing the Linux Desktop Game’ by Fabrice Mous, coincidently both employees of Ictivity. The first was a nice and varied introduction to the new Ubuntu release, but since I have been running Lucid since Alpha 1 I was pretty familiar with the changes already. Therefore the most interesting one was the latter: Fabrice Mous — who has worked as a consultant for the Dutch government’s NOiV project — talked about the way the desktop has changed since 2001/2002 and why open source in general and particularly Linux never makes it to the desktops of governments. There have been many test pilots, but once those end and (in the typical Dutch fashion) twenty reports have been written about it everything stays like it was. The conclusion basically was: changing the way a government works is a terse, bureaucratic process that will take time. We’re not there yet, but some encouraging things were said in parliament and by (former) secretaries of state. Most of these pretty words didn’t lead to anything, but it does show that politics becomes increasingly aware of open source and its advantages.
Fabrice Mous said he would put his slides online at his LinkedIn profile.

I was also pleased to meet journalist Brenno de Winter, who has done a lot of work to open up local governments to the public by forcing municipalities via legal case to give information on their IT policies — that should be freely available (on request) to civilians — freely. The Dutch Federation of Municipalities fought hard against this. Brenno de Winter is also monitoring the Dutch government’s project to encourage and oblige the use of open standards and open source for government, the NOiV. When around 2004 the license contracts with Microsoft had to be renewed the Dutch Federation of Municipalities suddenly started to behave very evasive and aggressive to queries for more information about what was happening and how it fitted in the government policy that government and semi-governmental organisations have to use open standards unless a sufficiently compelling reason is given. It is still unclear what exactly happened back then.

You can read the Dutch news article from HCC! about the release party at their website. According to their estimates around 300 visitors came to the event.

The two new tags are ‘app-menu‘ and ‘trayaway‘. The first one is for problems that show up in applications when the Application Menu is enabled. Currently there are no bugs using that tag. The second tag is for the Notification Area transition; some applications still refer to the tray in their settings and dialogues, but that should be removed once the tray is gone as well.

Indicator Application

Another tag we’ve been using last cycle was ‘indicator-application‘, for bugs related to the Application Indicators. At first the tag was mostly used for applications that needed to be ported to Application Indicators — the tag still gives you a nice list if you want to do some work — but later in the cycle bug reports about issues with the implementation of Application Indicators in the users also ended up on this list.

Usage

I would like to ask everyone at the two lists to use the tags when necessary. But only when necessary, because if we want to make sure the list of bugs under a certain tag remains usable we need to tag with care.

This means: don’t tag bugs reported against the packages of the projects themselves; i.e. don’t tag bug reports reported against the ’indicator-application’ package with ‘indicator-application’. The tags are purely for issues with those projects in other packages.

Helping out

The tags are a great opportunity for those of you that want to help out with Ubuntu’s desktop experience. Most of the issues you’ll find with these tags are not too hard to fix and would be a great way of getting to know the Ubuntu platform by contributing to the cool stuff. There are still a lot of  applications listed at the overview page of the ‘indicator-application‘ tag that need to be adapted to use an Application Indicator. But once we’re a bit further in the Maverick cycle the other tags will also give you quick access to some bite-size tasks. Fixing those will make a real difference on the desktop!

The complete list of Ayatana tags can be found at the BugSquad’s tag list on the Ubuntu wiki. Please update the wiki page if you start using a new tag.

The forest path between Hoeilaart station and UDS hotel Dolce la Hulpe

I arrived at the evening of Sunday 9 May at the hotel after having walked from the Hoeilaart train station to the Dolce la Hulpe hotel, where the conference was located. Fortunately I had missed the bus in the Netherlands that brought me to the train station where I departed, so I managed to take a quicker bus (makes sense?) and got the earlier train.; the walk from the train station to the hotel was a lot longer than I had anticipated.

Canonical chose the hotel wisely, one could say, because it was completely surrounded by forest and even the village was at least a half an hour walk away. The only escape methods where the expensive cabs or the evening coaches Canonical kindly had provided for. This meant that we had nothing to do than thinking and talking about Ubuntu. Not that this was a bad thing, I enjoyed every minute of the week.

Wireless

Like every hotel upon which a swarm of geeks descends the wireless network of the Dolce la Hulpe lobby also collapsed under the weight of the almost(?) 300 attendees trying to access it at the same time. The routers just couldn’t keep up with the endless requests for new DHCP-leases. Fortunately the network in the conference centre and the auditorium was deployed by the Canonical sysadmins. If I heard it correctly there were about twenty access points flown to the hotel and set up in the auditorium and around the brick core of the conference centre. Those networks did not fail and provided a reliable connection with the outside world. Yay for them!

The design team

The design team was a great example for us all by showing how to learn quickly. During the Lucid cycle they received fierce criticism for some of the changes to the way Ubuntu looks and feels, but soon they started to improve their communication with the community. What the community members want is an explanation of why the change was made, a rationale for the decision. Announcements made for the Maverick cycle where much more elaborate, linking to design specifications on the wiki and showing examples, even before the Ubuntu Developer Summit. Creating a ‘planet’ for the design team has also helped with this by providing the design team with a channel for communicating with the rest of us. It must not have been easy to see your hard work for Ubuntu being rewarded with personal attacks on your blog post, I really hope the frequency will decrease over time as the community gets used to the concept of a design team.

Other teams can learn from this!

The sessions

Room at the UDS Maverick (Mahogany?)

There was a session about providing people wanting to write applications for Ubuntu with clear information on how to do so. At developer.ubuntu.com we’ll be creating a site that gives a comprehensive overview of the Ubuntu platform — i.e. the libraries that are used and recommended by Ubuntu — and links to more extensive documentation, like the yet-to-be-written Ubuntu Developers Manual. We want to make it very easy to Quickly write an application that scratches your itch and integrates well with the Ubuntu desktop.

During another session we’ve discussed the Bug Squad Mentorship programme, which didn’t work very well during the Lucid cycle. The people that had offered to mentor didn’t accept a lot of students, and the people that got accepted as a student didn’t always turn up. However, a mentorship programme has a lot of potential and we want to get this working. Therefore hggdh, Pedro Villavicencio, Charlie Kravetz and I volunteered to be the Bug Squad Mentorship administrators. Our task will be to couple students to mentors. At the moment we’re in the process of cleaning up, if you’re considering to request mentorship, please wait. All current students and mentors should have been mailed with a question regarding their current status and whether they are still interested. See the blueprint if you want to know more.

We’ve also discussed the status of the Adopt-an-Upstream and Adopt-a-Package projects. We’re happy to see that people are taking part in it, but we would like to see some more participation in the larger projects. Work will be done on making the documentation more clear, as well as adding more information when necessary. The blueprint contains the work-items.

In between or during the sessions I also found some time to talk with the sole Ubuntu NL and the Ubuntu BE members I’ve seen about Ubuntu NL. We had some nice discussions and I was really glad to meet them In Real Life. As a matter of fact I’ve met the same amount of people from New Zealand as from the Netherlands. To me that really is a powerful demonstration of the language barrier for participating in the international community. English is vital, but this is a disadvantage to non-native speakers. Not only will non-native speakers have more trouble eloquently selling their ideas to eloquent native speakers, but a lot of the non-native speakers actually never learn English good enough to contribute internationally.

Motivation

What can really motivate me, I’ve discovered at the UDS, are exciting new things. The prospect of Unity coming true, or even Scott James Remnant‘s awesome sounding plans for Upstart in Maverick make I cannot wait for those to become reality and I’m proud to be active in a community that produces this wonderful operating system. Maverick promises to become a great release already, imagine what 12.04 is going to look like!

Af en toe organiseren ze een wedstrijd om de aandacht de vestigen op de problemen die er zijn en om vrouwen aan te moedigen actief te worden in de gemeenschap. Nu hebben ze een nieuwe wedstrijd georganiseerd: ‘World Play Day’. Over het algemeen zijn het vooral mannen en jongens die worden afgebeeld als gebruikers van technolgie; het doel van deze wedstrijd is het verzamelen van foto’s waarop meisjes — jonger dan 12 — te zien zijn die met Ubuntu.

Er zijn twee prijzen te winnen: de winnaar wordt aangewezen met behulp van een verkiezing. Het meisje op de foto dat door de gemeenschap wordt uitgekozen als de beste wint een Dell Mini 10n. De andere prijs wordt verloot door een willekeurige deelnemer te trekken uit de inzendingen. Het meisje op deze foto krijgt een verzameling ‘Ubuntu-goodies’: een muismat, Silly putty, een Ubuntu notepad(gerecycled), een Ubuntu pen, een Ubuntu keycord en een Ubuntu t-shirt.

De volledige aankondigen — met alle regels nog even duidelijk op een rijtje — is te vinden op http://wiki.ubuntu-women.org/Events/Competitions/WorldPlayDay/Announcement.
Inzenden kan tot 1:59 op 15 mei. (23:59 UTC, 14 mei).
Dit bericht was een aangepaste versie van een onderwerp dat ik eerder op het Ubuntu NL forum opende. Zie http://forum.ubuntu-nl.org/offtopic/’ubuntu-women’-wedstrijd-world-play-day/.

It was decided after the last conference that instead of coming up with a new website every year we wanted something that would be reusable for several conferences. Koen Martens set up Open Conference Systems and the great designer Vinicius Depizzol made a beatiful theme for the website.

I’ve been working on maintaining the website, extending the functionality a bit and pushing the code to Git for everyone to access. You can download the code from the guadec-web module at git.gnome.org. All patches will be considered. We don’t have a product registered in Bugzilla, but of course mails are welcome.

One of the things I’ve been working on was adapting UDStream for use on the GUADEC website. You can see it in action at the ‘Conference lifestream‘ page. I haven’t pushed the code to Git yet, but that’s because I’m also working on integrating OpenStreetMap with the accommodation page.

I’m unsure whether to file a merge request with the changes I’ve done to UDStream. I have to admit that I didn’t change a lot, most of the changes to the theme and changes to the way the JavaScript is included in the HTML file. Does anyone know whether UDStream is going to be used again during the upcoming UDS in Brussels?

Lean menu, slick icon!

It has been a while since I blogged about giving Transmission an Application Indicator. In that post I said I was also working on giving Banshee an Application Indicator, bug #518171. Since then we’ve decided to not provide the indicator in the Banshee.NotificationArea extension, the default tray icon in Lucid still. Instead I’ve moved the code I already had over to a separate extension that has become part of the Banshee Community Extensions. The Banshee Community Extensions project, or BCE, is a set of extensions that are not part of the Banshee core, but shipped separately. The entry-barrier for new extensions is lower — useful if you’re submitting yours just before the 1.6.0 release — and they are hosted at Gitorious, which makes cooperation a lot easier.

Bertrand Lorentz accepted my merge proposal at 27 March and was so kind to clean up the code a bit and since then the Banshee.AppIndicator extension has been available from the BCE code repository.

Using Banshee.AppIndicator on Ubuntu 10.04 “Lucid Lynx”

Thanks to the hard work of Chow Loong Jin Banshee.AppIndicator was one of the community extensions that got packaged in Debian and later synced by Ubuntu. If you want to use the Application Indicator for Banshee you first need to install the banshee-extension-appindicator package. Install ‘banshee-extension-appindicator’. At the moment there is a small packaging bug in banshee-extension-appindicator, it should depend on the libappindicator0-cil package, but it doesn’t. You can work around this issue by manually installing libappindciator0-cil.

Once you’ve installed you first need to disable the Banshee.NotificationArea extension. Go to Edit->Preferences–>Extensions, scroll down and untick the checkbox for the “Notification Area Icon” extension. Now scroll up again and enable “Application Indicator for Banshee”. Done!

You improve your relation with a project if you invest in it, and that is good for the quality of the project and Ubuntu. I would like to make you aware of a great way of being nice to upstreams: Adopt-an-Upstream. Slick name! But what is it? It is part of something a group of people from the community team lead by Jorge Castro have been working on ince the last UDS. The goal was to make it easier for upstream developers to find out how Ubuntu works and to improve the relations and synergy between up- and downstream.

At the wiki a starting point was created for upstreams where they can find an overview of the information that matters to them. Furthermore, a guide was created for upstreams that would like to get included in Ubuntu, but would like an overview of the requirements, the dos and the don’ts.

For members of the Ubuntu community there is something else: Adopt-an-Upstream is a way of taking care of a specific project that is included in Ubuntu. It’s mainly about being the communicational glue between up- and downstream. A comprehensive list of tasks:

• watch what’s going on upstream
• make sure new releases get to Ubuntu
• forward patches from Ubuntu to upstream
• communicate release schedules and announcements from Ubuntu to upstream

Summarised: act like a bridge between Ubuntu and the upstream project. Do you have an application you really like, or you really know a lot of, please consider to adopt it. Of course you don’t have to do it all on your own. Especially for large — be it in size, functionality or the number of bug reports — applications this can be a burdensome task. Those applications can be adopted by a group of people.

Next week Thursday 11 March at 17.00 UTC and on Thursday 18 March at 23.oo UTC Jorge Castro and I will be giving a one-hour session in #ubuntu-classroom at Freenode about Adopt-an-Upstream. We will explain the project more thoroughly and show how you can help out. Also, we will mention the Adopt-a-Package programme, which could be considered a part of Adopt-an-Upstream. If you consider getting involved in either one of these projects, please join one of the two sessions!

Questions? Please leave a comment!

Are you still out there, lone Ubuntu Karmic user? You must feel quite deserted with all the awesomeness and shiny new stuff that draws everyone’s attention to Ubuntu 10.04 ‘Lucid Lynx’. I hope you can forgive us.

To make up for the lack of attention I decided to provide Indicator Application for Ubuntu Karmic. I’ve changed two dependencies in Indicator Application’s control file — back in Karmic we were still providing some pkg-config (.pc) files for Mono assemblies in their main package rather than in separate ‘-dev’ packages — and uploaded it for Karmic to a PPA: ppa:qense/appind-karmic.
If you want to add it you can add ‘ppa:qense/appind-karmic’ to your Software Sources in System->Manage->Software Properties=>Other Software=>Add and download the archive’s GPG key, or use the command sudo add-apt-repository ppa:qense/appind-karmic.

WARNING: I haven’t tested if it works, I just made sure it built correctly. Be careful and please report all problems here and not on Launchpad since Ubuntu Karmic isn’t supposed to run the Indicator Application.

Also make sure to reload your Indicator Applet after you’ve updated to make the service load.

Ubuntu Opportunistic Developer Week

OK, I admit it, I lied to you. I didn’t provide the PPA just to please those poor Karmic users. As you may already have seen in Jono’s blog post containing today’s UODW schedule — complete schedule at the wiki — I’ll be giving a session about using Indicator Application in your application at 19.00 UTC this evening. Because a lot of people are obviously still using Ubuntu 9.10 ‘Karmic Koala’ I wanted to provide a way for them to try it out without having to upgrade.

If you’re going to attend, are using Karmic and would like to see AppIndidcator in action on your computer, you can use this PPA to do that. If you’ve got any question, please don’t hesitate to ask here, on this website, or at IRC in #ayatana on Freenode; I’m ‘qense’ there.

When code is imported all contributors are not coupled to registered accounts by default, you need to manually claim a contributor’s role. Our beloved bot Launchpad Code Hosting frequently appeared in the list of contributors, but always remained unclaimed. I thought it would be interesting to collect all work the poor bot has been doing day in day out, night in night out.

I registered an account under the name ‘Launchpad Code Hosting‘ and claimed all contributors with the same name. Ohloh hasn’t updated the overview yet, but in time we will be able to see how much experience the bot has and how many that’s worth in dollars.

You can find the account at https://www.ohloh.net/accounts/launchpad.

It seems that Ohloh stops checking Bazaar branches after a while and that the import then keeps failing. It could be that the statistics are affected by this.