I’m thrilled to announce the availability of the Ubuntu 12.04 Online Tour for local community teams to localize and use on their websites. The tour has been the result of the stunning work done by Ant Dillon from the Canonical Web Design Team and should provide a web-based first impression of Ubuntu to new users, now in their language.

It’s a great opportunity to showcase Ubuntu to your local community to celebrate release day tomorrow.

Where is it?

• Go to the Ubuntu Online Tour  on Launchpad
• Translate the Ubuntu Online Tour

How can I use it for my LoCo website?

First of all, you’ll need to get set up with the right tools before you start.

Getting set up:

• Bazaar revision control system Install bzr
• Polib library Install polib
• Terminal. You’ll need to run the commands below on a terminal. Simply press Ctrl+Alt+T to fire up a new terminal console.

If you’ve already translated the tour in Launchpad, you can build a localized version in 3 easy steps:

1. Get the code:

bzr branch lp:ubuntu-online-tour/12.04

2. Build the localized tour:

cd 12.04
cd translate-html/bin
./translate-html -t

3. Deploy the tour:

• This will vary depending on your setup, so simply make sure you copy the chromeless, css, img, js, pie and videos folders along with the videoplayer.swf file to your site. In addition, you will need the en folder and the folder for your language created in the previous step.

If you haven’t finished the translation for your language in Launchpad, you will need to complete the corresponding PO file before you run step 2. Just ask on the Ubuntu translators mailing list or on Launchpad in case you need help or are not familiar with PO files.

For any issues, suggestions or enhancement, use the Online Tour’s Launchpad project to report bugs or submit improvements.

Enjoy!

The post Get the Ubuntu Online Tour on your LoCo site appeared first on David Planella.

If you follow the Ubuntu channels, and unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll have noticed that this coming weekend we’re organizing the Ubuntu Global Jam, a worldwide event where Ubuntu local community teams (LoCos) join in a get-together fest to have some fun while improving Ubuntu.

As we’re ramping up to a Long Term Support release, this is a particularly important UGJ and we need all hands on deck to ensure that it does not only meet, but exceeds the high quality standard of previous Ubuntu LTS releases. This is another article in the series of blog posts showcasing the events our community is organizing, brought to you by Rafael Carreras, from the Ubuntu Catalan LoCo team.

Tell us a bit about your LoCo team

Our LoCo is language-oriented, and by language I mean Catalan (a Romanic one), not Perl or Python. In fact, the Catalan LoCo Team was the first language-oriented LoCo to be approved back in 2007. We manage our day-to-day in three mailing lists: technical doubts, team work and translations and do IRC meetings twice a month. We organise Ubuntu Global Jam events every 6 months (with some minor absences) and of course great release parties every 6 months along with some other little ones in between.

What kind of event are you organizing for this Ubuntu Global Jam?

As always, we will translate some new packages, discuss translation items, a bug triage session, some install release work and even evangelization to some passing people, as we organise UGJ this time in a civic centre.

Is this the first UGJ event you’re organizing?

No, it’s not, we are running UGJs since the first one and I think we only missed last one.

How do you think UGJ events help the Ubuntu community and Ubuntu?

It’s a great opportunity for meeting people you only know by email or chat. Also, as we sit down together, there is little room for procrastination. Well, more or less, anyway.

Why do you think Jono Bacon always features pictures of the Catalan team when announcing the UGJ? Are we the most good-looking LoCo?

Yeah, definitely. It must be that.

Join the party by registering your event at the Ubuntu LoCo Portal!

p1010458 by Alex Muntada

The post Ubuntu Global Jam events: jamming Catalan style appeared first on David Planella.

I’m particularly happy to announce that the Brazilian team managed to get their translation of the Ubuntu Packaging Guide up to more than 70% of completion, which is the magic threshold to get it accepted and posted on developer.ubuntu.com. This means that our current list of available languages is:

• English
• Spanish (99%)
• Russian (85%)
• Brazilian Portuguese (74%)

You can view the individual forms of the Packaging Guide in Brazilian Portuguese here:

• HTML, multiple pages
• single HTML page
• one PDF document
• in EPUB format

Right at the start I said that I was “particularly happy” about this translation. That’s because I recently picked up a little bit of Portuguese. Mostly useful sentences like “Meu irmão gosta de cerveja” or “O leão escreve cartas”. Thanks Duolingo!

A big big big “obrigado” to the tireless Brazilian Portuguese translators. You all are heroes! This is great news for everyone who wants to get involved in Ubuntu development, as it smoothes the first steps considerably.

You can help out with translations. Just head to the Packaging Guide’s translation page in Launchpad, pick your language and get started. Current runners-up to the translations mentioned earlier are:

• German (32%)
• Japanese (15%)
• French (7%)
• Indonesian (5%)
• Dutch (4%)

The available translations are not entirely complete yet either, so please do get involved.

At the last UDS we talked quite a bit about LoCo teams in during the Leadership Mini Summit. One interesting point was that many seemed to have the impression that events have to be big, everything has to follow an established protocol or a rigid process. That’s not the case.

I’m sure my friend Jorge Castro would agree with me if I told you to JFDI. The result of not doing things is that things will not get done. Setting up an event is sometimes just a matter of sending a mail to the team and asking everyone to come to a certain place at a certain date and time. Another point discussed was the number of people. Seriously, if it’s just two of you who hang out and make Ubuntu better or just have a good time together, that’s so much better than not meeting at all.

The reason I write all of this is that we’re getting closer to Ubuntu Global Jam again and some of you might be considering setting up an event and adding it to the LoCo Team Portal and you might still be a bit unsure. There’s really no need to.

It’s very very likely you don’t need a huge venue with lots of bells and whistles, maybe just meeting in a coffee shop will be good enough? A room in your local university? Or invite people to your place? Just somewhere with internet might be good enough. You might get to know some new local team members and it’s all about having a good time.

We have instructions up how to set up a jam, a video, and you can always ask for advice. Join the Ubuntu Global Jam today!

We have achieved a huge milestone in the development community. For years we wanted translatable packaging and development documentation. It’s there. If you head to http://developer.ubuntu.com/packaging/ you can see the following:

The Ubuntu Packaging Guide (Spanish) – would you like to learn how to package or become an Ubuntu Developer? Here’s a comprehensive, topic-base guide that explores and describes the main concepts of packaging. It is available as

• a single HTML page (Spanish),
• a PDF document (Spanish), or
• in EPUB format (for eBook readers) (Spanish).

This is absolutely awesome. From now on we will be able to add languages and have up-to-date Packaging and Development docs available whenever they are complete enough.

This work was brought to you by many people who worked very hard to get all the bits right, both on the packaging, integration, beautification and translations sides. You all know who you are. Be proud of your work. This will ease the steps of many people into helping out with Ubuntu!

As always this is ongoing work and the great thing is, you can help out:

• Fix bugs and improve the guide.
• Translate the guide.
• File bugs on the guide.

This makes me a very happy man and it’s great we finally got there. Now let’s get all the other translations up to scratch!

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll have noticed that this coming weekend we’re organizing the Ubuntu Global Jam, a worldwide event where Ubuntu local community teams (LoCos) join in a get-together fest to have some fun while improving Ubuntu. As we’re ramping up to a Long Term Support release, this is a particularly important UGJ and we need every hand on deck to ensure it not only meets but exceeds the standard of previous Ubuntu LTS releases. This is another article in the series of blog posts showcasing the events our community is organizing, brought to you by Andrej Znidarsic, from the Ubuntu Slovenian LoCo team.

Tell us a bit about your LoCo team

What kind of event are you organizing for the upcoming Ubuntu Global Jam (UGJ)?

Is this the first UGJ event you’re organizing?

How do you think UGJ events help the Ubuntu community and Ubuntu?

The post Upcoming Ubuntu Global Jam events: here’s how the Slovenian team rolls appeared first on David Planella.

Well, we did it.  The six members of the Canonical Community Team stayed awake and (mostly) online for 24 straight hours, all for your entertainment and generous donations.  A lot of people gave a lot over the last week, both in terms of money and time, and every one of you deserves a big round of applause.

Team Insanity

First off, I wanted to thank (blame) our fearless leader, Jono Bacon, for bringing up this crazy idea in the first place.  He is the one who thought we should do something to give back to other organizations, outside of our FLOSS eco-system.  It’s good to remind us all that, as important as our work is, there are still things so much more important.  So thanks, Jono, for giving us a chance to focus some of our energy on the things that really matter.

I also need to thank the rest of my team, David Planella, Jorge Castro, Nick Skaggs and Daniel Holbach, for keeping me entertained and awake during that long, long 24 hours.  There aren’t many people I could put up with for that long, I’m glad I work in a team full of people like you.  And most importantly, thanks to all of our families for putting up with this stunt without killing us on-air.

Upstream Awesomeness

Before we started this 24-hour marathon, I sent a challenge to the Debian community.  I said that if I got 5 donations from their community, I would wear my Debian t-shirt during the entire broadcast.  Well, I should have asked for more, because it didn’t take long before I had more than that, so I was happily sporting the Debian logo for 24 hours (that poor shirt won’t ever be the same).

I wasn’t the only one who put a challenge to the Debian community.  Nick made a similar offer, in exchange for donations he would write missing man pages, and Daniel did the same by sending patches upstream.  As a result, the Debian community made an awesome showing in support of our charities.

All of our donors

The biggest thanks, of course, go out to all of those who donated to our charities.  Because of your generosity we raised well over £5000, with the contributions continuing to come in even after we had all finally gone to bed.  As of right now, our total stands at £ 5295.70 ($8486).  In particular, I would like to thank those who helped me raise £739.13 ($1184) for the Autism Research Trust:

• Christopher Crisafulli
• Michael Nachtigal
• Jane Silber
• John Pugh
• Laura Czajkowski
• Stephen Smoogen
• evilnick
• Sam Hewitt (twice!)
• John Vrbanac (thrice!)
• Stefano Zacchiroli
• Paul Tagliamonte
• Jonathan Carter
• Thijs K
• Cary Haynie
• Chris Johnston
• Angel Abad
• Mark Shuttleworth
• Gregor Herrmann
• Benjamin Kerensa
• SamVH
• sebsebseb
• Anonymous (x6, you know who you are)
• Corey Goldberg
• William Anderson
• Philip Ballew
• Dmitry
• Arthur Talpaert
• Kelly Reid
• Michal Predotka
• Peter Mahnke
• Dave and Elizabeth
• Thomas Richards
• Kev Quirk
• Peter Jensen

And a very big thank you to my brother, Brian Hall, who’s donation put us over £5000 when we only had about an hour left in the marathon.  And, in a particularly touching gesture of brotherly-love, his donation came with this personal challenge to me:

So here it is.  The things I do for charity.

My big focus during the week of UDS will be on improving our Application Developer story, tools and services.  Ubuntu 12.04 is already an excellent platform for app developers, now we need to work on spreading awareness of what we offer and polishing any rough edges we find.  Below are the list of sessions I’ll be leading or participating in that focus on these tasks.

• Upstream App Developer Documentation
  Identify tutorials and documentation needed by upstream developers to port and integrate their applications with Ubuntu and Unity
• App Developer events
  Promote and run a successful series of online app developer events, including at least:
  - The Ubuntu App Developer Week
  - The Ubuntu App Developer Contest
• Ubuntu platform API documentation
  Identify which APIs need to be documented for application developers and ways in which we can provide these APIs in a developer friendly way
• Upstream App Developer Support
  Provide support and mentoring resources for upstream app developers who want to port or integrate their application with Ubuntu and Unity
• Promote and encourage upstream delivery in Ubuntu
  Get more app developers talking about Ubuntu and targeting Ubuntu. Promote Ubuntu as a platform in the places independent app developers socialize.
• Upstream App Developer Outreach
  Identify and engage targetted upstreams to submit their apps to the Ubuntu Software Centre
• Ubuntu App Developer Site incremental improvements
  Building upon the foundations of the initial Ubuntu App Developer site, we’d like to expand it on a second design phase.
• App Developer external outreach
  We want to increase the visibility and awareness of Ubuntu app development outside of the regular Ubuntu channels.
• MyApps submission experience and expectations for upstreams
  Review the current process and identify which parts of the documentation need to be improved. Also figure out what specifically we expect from upstreams and which help the ARB can provide.
• Advertise new apps in the Software Center
  Promote the availability of new apps in the Software Center, both in USC itself and through other channels, to raise awareness of apps targeting Ubuntu

And if you’re curious about what else I’ll be up to, my full schedule for the week can be found here: http://summit.ubuntu.com/uds-q/participant/mhall119/

As part of an ongoing series of blogs about LoCo Team Jams, I spoke with Benjamin Kerensa (bkerensa), the team contact for Ubuntu Oregon about their Global Jam activities.

Tell me about yourself and how you are involved in Ubuntu

My name is Benjamin Kerensa and I’m Team Lead for Ubuntu Oregon and also actively contribute to  the Ubuntu Weekly News, Ubuntu Developer News, Ubuntu Documentation, Ubuntu BugSquad and I write for OMG! Ubuntu!. I have been involved mostly behind the scenes for a number of years providing community support.

Have you organized a Global Jam event before, and if so what was your experience? How did you choose a venue and select activities?

I have organized a Global Jam before in fact I organized our event last year and I feel it turned out really nice however I did not fully take into account the amount of time needed to get people contributing at an event so our Jam last year was mostly social in nature but this year we are planning for a whole day from morning till late night. Last year I chose PuppetLabs to be our venue because I knew that the folks there shared a very common love for Free Open Source Software and also had facilities that were very accommodating for a crowd of our size. I selected documentation and bugs last cycle however due to the limited time we really didnt get to work on any tasks but we did however get to do a general overview of how to contribute in those areas.

What kinds of activities do you plan of doing as part of your upcoming jam?

This cycle we hope to focus on Bug Triaging and Bitesize Fixes with the help of Ubuntu BugMaster Brian Murray and potentially have a talk on packaging by
Steve Langasek. It is my hope that these focuses will not only benefit the LTS but also gear our community towards accelerated contributions in the area of    development and continue to lay a foundation for future contributors in Oregon to be involved in more technical focused contributions.

Our LoCo is lucky to have the opportunity to work with Western Oregon University this year in a Mentorship Project for their students in which they have chosen to learn how to contribute to Ubuntu as such we anticipate a number of those students to be in attendance.

How do you spread the word about your event to get more people to participate?

I announce via our mailing list and the loco directory and then cross post those announcements to other LUG and Tech focused mailing lists in our region and then I use a mix of social media and IRC to encourage our existing Ubuntu LoCo folks and others to come and check out what we have going on.

Thanks Ben and the entire Ubuntu Oregon team!

So you want to contribute to Ubuntu’s Unity desktop, but you’re not a software developer?  No problem, there are still plenty of things you can do.  And not just in terms of documentation and translations either, there are ways to contribute directly to the desktop without having to know any programming languages.  One of these is adding Quicklists to application launcher.

Quicklists can be added dynamically from within the program code, but they can also be defined statically outside of it, in a simple text file.  It’s these static Quicklists that anybody can contribute.

For this post, I’m going to walk through the process of adding a Quicklist to Geany, my personal programming editor of choice.  You can add one for your favorite app, of choose from one of the following popular applications that are in need of a Quicklist:

• Empathy done!
• Gimp done!
• Brasero done!
• LibreOffice
• SMPlayer
• K3B
• Totem done!
• More target applications…

Step 1: Getting the package code

Everything in Ubuntu exists in bzr, which makes getting the source for the package easy.  just “bzr branch ubuntu:<project>”.  For geany, this is what I ran:

bzr branch ubuntu:geany

 Step 2: Add your Quicklist items

The first think you need to do is locate the .desktop file for your application.  For me, it was located in the root of the branch in a file called “geany.desktop.in”.  If you don’t see it in the root of your project’s branch, try running this command:

find ./ -name "*.desktop*"

This may not look exactly like the file in your /usr/share/applications/, since some processing is done to add translated strings for the application name and comments.  But as long as you are just adding the Quicklist items to the bottom of the file you shouldn’t have to worry about that.

The next step is to add your Quicklist shortcuts following this specification:

mhall@mhall-laptop:~/projects/Ubuntu/unity/quicklists/geany$ bzr diff
=== modified file 'geany.desktop.in'
--- geany.desktop.in 2011-05-28 19:49:19 +0000
+++ geany.desktop.in 2012-02-22 01:18:55 +0000
@@ -10,3 +10,9 @@
Categories=GTK;Development;IDE;
MimeType=text/plain;text/x-chdr;text/x-csrc;text/x-c++hdr;text/x-c++src;text/x-java;text/x-dsrc;text/x-pascal;text/x-perl;text/x-python;application/x-php;application/x-httpd-php3;application/x-httpd-php4;application/x-httpd-php5;application/xml;text/html;text/css;text/x-sql;text/x-diff;
StartupNotify=true
+Actions=New
+
+[Desktop Action New]
+Name=Open a New Instance
+Exec=geany --new-instance
+

(UPDATE 2012-02-28: A new XDG spec has been approved to make Quicklists desktop agnostic.  The Unity documentation has the new examples, and I have update the snippet above to match.)

As you can see in the example above, there isn’t much you need to do to add a Quicklist shortcut.  Calling the application’s binary with a different argument (as I did here with –new-instance) is a common and easy shortcut.  You can usually find all the available arguments to your application by calling with with –help.

 Step 3: Submitting your changes

Now that you’ve made your changes, we need to get them back into the main package.  Chances are you don’t have permission to apply them directly (otherwise you wouldn’t need this tutorial), so instead you’re going to put it somewhere else.

bzr commit -m "Add a Unity Quicklist"
bzr push lp:~mhall119/ubuntu/precise/geany/add_quicklist

This will put your changes on Launchpad in a place that the people who actually can apply it to the main packages can see your work.  But just because they can see it doesn’t mean they will see it, at least not without a little prompting from you.

To open the page on Launchpad that you just created (with your bzr push), run the following:

bzr lp-open

On that page you’ll see a link labeled “Propose for merging”, click that and fill out the form on the next page to create your merge proposal.

Step 4: Recompiling your kernel

Just kidding, there is no step 4.  You’re done!  You’ve contributed to making Ubuntu and Unity a better experience for millions of users.  Congratulations, and thank you!

From 2nd-4th March 2012 we will hold an Ubuntu Global Jam again. This is an event where Ubuntu teams around the world come together, meet locally and together make Ubuntu better. We have a number of events and teams already lined up, among them: the Italian team.

I had a chat with Andrea Grandi and Paolo Sammicheli, here’s how they organised everything.

How did you organise the event?
Paolo Sammicheli: Andrea is the president of the Pistoia LUG. They normally organize events so we’ll be using their big space.
Andrea Grandi: Basically:

1. Asked in PtLUG mailing list how many people would like to help organizing the event and how many people were interested in.
2. I contacted the owners of the venue where is our Linux User Group and asked them to reserve it for saturday march 3rd.
3. I contacted Paolo Sammicheli and the other people of #ubuntu-it-promo to ask them to join us.
4. I contacted Marco Trevisan to ask him to join us and lead the bug-fixing group during the event.

About the venue: our LUG has a small room with two desks and 4 PC, wifi connection ecc… we normally use it for our meeting. Next to this room there is another one capable of about 100 seats. It’s located inside a big structure few km far from the center of Pistoia.

What’s going to happen in Italy at the UGJ?
Paolo Sammicheli: We’ll start with an introduction about how to start contributing in Ubuntu. Then we’ll split in two team: the beginners team will do testing with me, the experts team will work on unity with Marco.

There will be also a translation session over IRC. So people will jam remotely with us helping translating big tasks (ie: package descriptions)
Andrea Grandi: I confirm this and talking about this to some friends their response was: oh I’ve never used Linux, but I’d like to help testing and translating, it looks funny!

How did you find people who were willing to help with the event?
Paolo Sammicheli: The Pistoia LUG gave all the support.
Andrea Grandi: I asked in our LUG mailing list and in #ubuntu-it-promo IRC channel.

How did you announce the event?
Paolo Sammicheli: We published in the loco directory, we announced in our weekly newsletter and Andrea just blogged about it. Few more blog posts in Italian will follow next week.
Andrea Grandi: using Facebook (inviting all friends), blogging about it and spreading the news on out Twitter and G+ accounts. We also have a local mailing list with about 100 people subscribed.

Did you run UGJ events before?
Paolo Sammicheli: Yes we made few already. Some times we had a peer to peer jam. We met in 3 different cities in small groups (2/3 people) and we worked together through IRC.
Andrea Grandi: personally this is the second UGJ I attend to. Here’s a picture of the last event we had in Pistoia.

How many people do you feel will attend this time?
Paolo Sammicheli: I don’t know, Andrea?
Andrea Grandi: I think about 12 / 15 people at the moment, but if we can do something more to spread the event we could have more people attending.

Do you have any good tips for anyone planning to organise an event
Paolo Sammicheli: Keep it simple, keep it fun!
Andrea Grandi: Oorganize it in collaboration with other Linux User Groups. Did you know that in Italy there are more than 100 Linux user groups?

Thanks a lot guys! Have a great time at Ubuntu Global Jam!

We’re coming up on the next Ubuntu Global Jam, the point in every cycle where the community gets together for a weekend of contributing to the next release of Ubuntu.  And this time we’re shaking things up a little bit.

Every cycle we help people organize their jams, and suggest the same generic topics: Bug triaging, packaging, translations, documentation, testing, etc.  This time, in addition to these topics, we will be reaching out to the various teams both in Canonical and the Community, and picking some very specific activities that will directly help them make the Precise Pangolin the best release of Ubuntu ever.

Another change this cycle is a focus on bringing all of the global jam activities together so that we can all see, in real time, the work being done by contributors around the world.  To that end, we’ve added a Global Jam Dashboard to the LoCo Teams Portal, which features an integrated webchat, updating twitter/identi.ca stream, and photo feed.  So while you are jamming locally, be sure to tweet about it using the #ubuntu hashtag, and upload photos to Flickr, Picasa or pix.ie, again using the #ubuntu hashtag.

I’ve finally had a little extra time to get back to working on Singlet.  There’s been a lot of progress since the first iteration.  To start with, Singlet had to be upgraded to work with the new Lens API introduced when Unity 5.0 landed in the Precise repos.  Luckily the Singlet API didn’t need to change, so any Singlet lenses written for Oneiric and Unity 4 will only need the latest Singlet to work in Precise[1].

The more exciting development, though, is that Singlet 0.2 introduces an API for Scopes.  This means you can write Lenses that support external scopes from other authors, as well as external Scopes for existing lenses.  They don’t both need to be based on Singlet either, you can write a Singlet scope for the Music Lens if you wanted to, and non-Singlet scopes can be written for your Singlet lens.  They don’t even have to be in Python.

In order to make the Scope API, I chose to convert my previous LoCo Teams Portal lens into a generic Community lens and separate LoCo Teams scope.  The Lens itself ends up being about as simple as can be:

from singlet.lens import Lens, IconViewCategory, ListViewCategory 

class CommunityLens(Lens): 

    class Meta:
        name = 'community'
        description = 'Ubuntu Community Lens'
        search_hint = 'Search the Ubuntu Community'
        icon = 'community.svg'
        category_order = ['teams', 'news', 'events', 'meetings']

    teams = IconViewCategory("Teams", 'ubuntu-logo')

    news = ListViewCategory("News", 'news-feed')

    events = ListViewCategory("Events", 'calendar')

    meetings = ListViewCategory("Meetings", 'applications-chat')

As you can see, it’s really nothing more that some meta-data and the categories.  All the real work happens in the scope:

class LocoTeamsScope(Scope):

    class Meta:
        name = 'locoteams'
        search_hint = 'Search LoCo Teams'
        search_on_blank = True
        lens = 'community'
        categories = ['teams', 'news', 'events', 'meetings']

    def __init__(self, *args, **kargs):
        super(LocoTeamsScope, self).__init__(*args, **kargs)
        self._ltp = locodir.LocoDirectory()
        self.lpusername = None

        if os.path.exists(os.path.expanduser('~/.bazaar/bazaar.conf')):
            try:
                import configparser
            except ImportError:
                import ConfigParser as configparser

            bzrconf = configparser.ConfigParser()
            bzrconf.read(os.path.expanduser('~/.bazaar/bazaar.conf'))

            try:
                self.lpusername = bzrconf.get('DEFAULT', 'launchpad_username')
            except configparser.NoOptionError:
                pass

    def search(self, search, model, cancellable):

I left out the actual search code, because it’s rather long and most of it isn’t important when talking about Singlet itself.  Just like the Lens API, a Singlet Scope uses an inner Meta class for meta-data.  The most important fields here are the ‘lens’ and ‘categories’ variables.  The ‘lens’ tells Singlet the name of the lens your scope is for.  Singlet uses this to build DBus names and paths, and also to know where to install your scope.  The ‘categories’ list will let you define a result item’s category using a descriptive name, rather than an integer.

 model.append('http://loco.ubuntu.com/events/%s/%s/detail/' % (team['lp_name'], tevent['id']), team['mugshot_url'], self.lens.events, "text/html", tevent['name'], '%s\n%s' % (tevent['date_begin'], tevent['description']), '')

It’s important that the order of the categories in the Scope’s Meta matches the order of categories defined in the Lens you are targeting, since in the end it’s still just the position number that’s being passed back to the Dash.

After all this, I still had a little bit of time left in the day.  And what good is supporting external scopes if you only have one anyway?  So I spent 30 minutes creating another scope, one that will read from the Ubuntu Planet news feed:

The next step is to add some proper packaging to get these into the Ubuntu Software Center, but you impatient users can get them either from their respective bzr branches, or try the preliminary packages from the One Hundred Scopes PPA.

[1] Note that while lenses written for Singlet 0.1 will work in Singlet 0.2 on Precise, the reverse is not necessarily true.  Singlet 0.2, as well as lenses and scopes written for it, will not work on Oneiric.

Recognition is the currency of the open source community.  When somebody does something that helps you, the proper way of paying them for their time and effort is, quite simply, to thank them and let other people know that they helped you.  This is why the most popular Creative Commons licenses include attribution.  This is why even the most permissive open source licenses ask that attribution notices be kept and distributed with the code.  And this is why members of the Ubuntu community is celebrating everybody else in the community in our first ever Community Appreciation Day.

I was a member of the Ubuntu community long before I became an employee of Canonical, and I’ll be getting much more community focused in my new role as Upstream Liason on the Community Team in January.  Suffice it to say, I owe a lot of people thanks for their work, support and encouragement over the years.  But Community Appreciation day isn’t about repaying old debts of gratitude, it’s about letting people know that their work doesn’t go unnoticed, that it does make a difference, and that people do appreciate it.  Without that, it’s very easy for a community member to burn themselves out.  So consider Community Appreciation day to be a day of investing your gratitude, because while it may just feel like you’re being thankful, you are in fact building up a fellow contributor.

I will be sharing my appreciation with people either privately, or in the medium where I usually interact with them, either mailing lists of IRC, because I feel that I should show my appreciation in the place where I received their contribution.  But you should share your thanks in whatever manner you feel is most appropriate, and most sincere.  Just make sure that you do.

It’s late, I’m tired, so this is going to be brief.  But if I didn’t put something up now, chances are I’d procrastinate to the point where it didn’t matter anymore, so something is better than nothing.

JuJu

So the buzz all week was about Juju and Charms.  It’s a very cool technology that I think is really going to highlight the potential of cloud computing.  Until now I always had people comparing the cloud to virtual machines, telling me they already automate deploying VMs, but with Juju you don’t think about machines anymore, virtual of otherwise.  It’s all about services, which is really what you want, a service that is doing something for you.  You don’t need to care where, or on what, or in combination with some other thing, Juju handles all that automatically.  It’s really neat, and I’m looking forward to using it more.

Summit

Summit worked this week.  In fact, this is the first time in my memory where there wasn’t a problem with the code during UDS.  And that’s not because we left it alone either.  IS actually moved the entire site to a new server the day before UDS started.  We landed several fixes during the week to fix minor inconveniences experienced by IS or the admins.  And that’s not even taking into consideration all the last-minute features that were added by our Linaro developers the week prior.  But through it all, Summit kept working.  That, more than anything else, is testament to the work the Summit developers put in over the last cycle to improve the code quality and development processes, and I am very, very proud that.  But we’re not taking a break this cycle.  In fact, we had two separate sessions this week about ways to improve the user experience, and will be joined by some professional designers to help us towards that goal.

Ubuntu One eBook syncing

So what started off as an casual question to Stuart Langridge turned into a full blown session about how to sync ebook data using Ubuntu One.  We brainstormed several options of what we can sync, including reading position, bookmarks, highlights and notes, as well as ways to sync them in an application agnostic manner.  I missed the session on the upcoming Ubuntu One Database (U1DB), but we settled on that being the ideal way of handling this project, and that this project was an ideal test case for the U1DB.  For reasons I still can’t explain, I volunteered to develop this functionality, at some point during the next cycle.  It’s certainly going to be a learning experience.

Friends

Friends!  It sure was good to catch up with all of you.  Both friends from far-away lands, and those closer to home.  Even though we chat on IRC almost constantly, there’s still nothing quite like being face to face.  I greatly enjoyed working in the same room with the Canonical ISD team, which has some of the smartest people I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with.  It was also wonderful to catch up with all my friends from the community.  I don’t know of any other product or project that brings people together the way Ubuntu does, and I’m amazed and overjoyed that I get to be a part of it.

Being able to find each other is a key part of building community. I mean, what’s the point of having a release party if no one knows where to go? This is why we have tools for bringing people together. We call it the LoCo Team Portal. It’s a portal where local community teams can claim their space, list their events and meetings, as well as allowing people to show their interest, check out where events will be, register their interest, and so on.

It’s got nice map integration too, tell me this isn’t nice:

Nice huh? It’s all in Python and django, and Chris Johnston’s looking to see if anyone is interesting hacking on it with him. You can find their info here: http://loco.ubuntu.com/about/

This past weekend was Ubuntu Global Jam, where Ubuntu users and contributors all over the world get together to work on improving the project.  Jams come in many forms, code hacking, bug triaging, translating, documenting, or even just promoting Ubuntu in their community.  In my own corner of the Ubuntu community, a few of us got to together to work on improving the Summit project

This is the code behind http://summit.ubuntu.com, which provides the UDS scheduler and sponsorship application forms.  Summit is a Django application, released under the AGPLv3 license, and is primarily developed by community members.  Joining me were Chris Johnston,  a frequent community contributor who I’ve also worked with in LoCo Directory and other projects, and Elliot Murphy, my 3rd-level boss as Canonical (no pressure there!).

Here’s a list of what we managed to accomplish:

Switch to the new ubuntu-community-webthemes, which will give us the “mothership” top-navigation links as seen on planet.ubuntu.com and wiki.ubuntu.com

Started work on integrating Summit with Django testing framework.

Bug #643012: Register Interest should only show currently available tracks

Currently when you register your interest in a track, the form shows tracks for previous summits.  This will restrict it to just the tracks for the summit you’re registering for.

Bug #668532: /today page to display current day’s schedule

A new, permanent URL which will show the current day’s schedule, so you can bookmark it once and re-use it for each day of the summit, and even future summits!

Bug #745378: Empty sub-nav exists on sponsorship page

Removes the gray sub-navigation bar from pages where there aren’t any linkes in it.

Bug #462793: Add slots for videographers

Up to two videographers can not be assigned to a UDS session and their names will appear on the schedule.

Bug #747296: Add plenary flag to iCal feed for conventionist.com

We have been working with the makers of Conventionist, a convention management application, which will allow you to track your session schedule on your Android or iPhone, even getting directions to the correct room.  This fix was necessary for them to distinguish plenary sessions from regular ones.

Bug #747301: Add daily Crew list

Allows Summit to schedule which UDS attendees are willing to act as event crew, with the current day’s crew assignments listed on the daily schedule which is displayed on the large monitors during the event.

Bug #747303: Auto-add slots to schedule

This solved an administrative headache for those organizing the summit.  For past events, every available time slot had to be entered manually, which was a very time consuming task.  This provides them a quick way to pre-populate the time slots, with the ability to fine-tune just the ones that need it.

Bug #747419: Fix login redirect

Several features of Summit require that you log in using your SSO/Launchpad account.  However, after login you are currently redirected back to the main Summit page instead of the page you left.  This sends your current page URL as the path to redirect to after a successful login, so you no longer have to go find that page again.

At UDS Natty in one session we talked about our current team reporting infrastructure in the Ubuntu community. Some participants explained that they found it hard to use and set up and that it required the user to be familiar with the wiki markup, etc.

There were lots of ideas kicking around like

• have a nice and small web app that had some kind of wysiwyg editor
• allow sorting by month/year, team, team category
• have public and private reports (for boards that report to another governance board)
• have irc bots feed actions into the web app
• etc.

Some time ago I started a project together with the unstoppable Nathan Handler to do all of the above and more. Unfortunately we ran out of time.

If you like working on web stuff and would like the Ubuntu community to be even more transparent and to rock harder, please consider helping out. It’s half-way there.

Launchpad project, the code, its bugs.

During my holidays I made it, among other beautiful stops, to the wonderful city of Esfahan.

While I was there, Software Freedom Day was being celebrated at the University of Esfahan. I met Ehsan Shahrokhi a day earlier and he gave me the opportunity to give a brief talk at SFD.

Like all the other experiences I made in the country, it was absolutely fantastic. Everybody was incredibly welcoming, everybody was extremely friendly, very helpful and just wonderful.

I loved the atmosphere there. Everybody was trying hard to contribute something good to the Open Source world. There was a large Ubuntu following and there were people of other parts of the wider community, but there was no bickering, complaining or distro, flavour, editor, or desktop environment wars going on.

Apart from that dedication there were two other things that really impressed me:

1. The percentage of women. There were at least 40%-50% of women in the audience. It was just fantastic to see much more women participating than in any other places as I had seen up until now.
2. How the event in Esfahan attracted people from all over the country. There were people who drove there from Mashhad, from Tehran and other places. Take a look at a map and see how far it is.

In just one day I made lots of new friends in Esfahan who are all determined to bring something good to the world. People who welcomed me in an incredibly friendly, hospitable way and with lots of good humour. Thanks a lot everybody!

It was easy to promise to come back one day again.

In the first weeks when I started contributing to the Ubuntu community about six years ago, I was constantly amazed at a number of things:

• how friendly, encouraging and motivating people were: in a very short time I made lots of friends, people who are always there for me and I’d always be there for (extended family – kind of)
• how much I learned in a very short period of time (a state of constant “a-ha! moments”)
• the incredibly strong sense of opportunity: “if I fix this bug, I not only fix it for myself, but for millions of users”

After a few months I helped out new contributors myself, answered questions and tried to give them a similar experience as I had. Learning to do something great by experiencing it first hand. The great thing is that a lot of contributors already went ahead and became involved in upstream projects and Debian.

I’m extremely grateful I’m in a position where I can do this as part of my job.

I’ve been working on a few things in the last time that will hopefully give even more people that sense of opportunity and that sense of achievement soon. Please note that all of the items below are just happening because of “a little help from my friends”, I couldn’t have possibly pulled this off all on my own.

• Daily Builds documentation and testing: with Jorge Castro and others I went through the process of getting Daily Builds up and running, we documented it, found issues, reported them and thought about how it would make most sense to package maintainers, upstreams and users. So we set up a knowledge base as well, that should help upstreams and package maintainers to figure out when a daily builds makes sense, how to sell it to their users and what kind of preparation ios necessary.
• Harvest: I had the extreme pleasure of working with Dylan McCall on Harvest this cycle. It was an awesome experience. He chose Harvest as his Summer of Code project and directly dived into the hardest things first: instead of fixing small things here and there, he implemented a great user interface that’ll be great to use. I did quite a bit of code-review and fixed a bunch of bugs myself. It’s soon in a state where it can be deployed. With Harvest out there, it will be a lot easier to find things that need doing, get a good overview of outstanding work regarding a few packages you might care about and coordination/cooperation might actually be easier too.
• LoCo Directory: Starting from a vague idea we first just set up a place where LoCo teams could register themselves, then we added team events and then started making it pretty. At times I was hacking a lot on it, at other times doing lots of code reviews, but I’m very glad to see that more and more people are starting to help out and implementing their ideas and visions into it. It’s an amazing project and hopefully helps LoCo teams to coordinate their work and make people interested in Linux and Ubuntu open source enthusiasts and contributors by giving them that great first experience.
• Lots of Sponsoring/Code Review: I still feel this is the best way to help out new contributors on their way. By explaining how things are done (also when to better get stuff upstream first), how to do them better and guide them on their way to commit access/upload rights, you do Ubuntu and Open Source a great service. Make people feel welcome, help them out, by having a good experience with the process of fixing problems for millions of people you get contributors hooked up forever.
• Operation Cleansweep: Speaking of patches and code review: we have a huge backlog of patches that didn’t follow the process and need to be reviewed and forwarded to Debian and Upstream. The team reviewed heaps of patches and I was glad to be part of the initiative. I helped with the documentation, organisation of events and reviewed a couple of bugs myself. This is an awesome way to get involved and immediately make the whole open source world benefit.

There’s quite a lot of other things where I could be helpful too to keep the ball in the Ubuntu community rolling: as member of the Community Council I do bits of organisation here and there, within Canonical I often answer questions about Ubuntu development processes to new starters and development-unrelated teams, I helped organising the Ubuntu Global Jam, Ubuntu Developer Week and other events, thankfully found a team to take over the “Behind MOTU” interviews, helped with the organisation of Ubuntu’s participation in Google’s Summer of Code, that plus calls, heaps of mails, small and big arguments keep me quite busy.

I feel very privileged being in this position and hope I’m instrumental to the open source world at large. One thing’s for sure: I still immensely enjoy it.