If you have followed my blog and what I’ve said elsewhere you might have noticed, I’m TOTALLY looking forward to the Ubuntu Global Jam.

The Ubuntu Berlinians will meet in Berlin’s c-base on 29th August from 12:00 to 18:00. Please come and join us!

Original announcement below:

Freie Software lebt vom Mitmachen und das ist gar nicht so schwer, wie
man vielleicht erwartet. Zum vierten Mal ruft Ubuntu zum "Global Jam",
bei der weltweit helfende Hände an einem Tag gemeinsam an der
Verbesserung der freien Linux-Distribution Ubuntu arbeiten. Gesucht
werden dafür nicht nur technisch versierte Entwickler, sondern alle
Nutzer, die Fehler aufspüren, melden und prüfen wollen, Übersetzer, die
Software in andere Sprachen übertragen oder die Dokumentation
überarbeiten möchten.

Für alle diese Schritte gibt es einfache Softwarelösungen, die einem
viel Arbeit abnehmen und den Einstieg erleichtern. Alles was man braucht
ist also: etwas Zeit, die Fähigkeit, englische Texte zu verstehen und
Lust, einmal etwas an die Gemeinschaft zurückzugeben.

Bei einem Jam arbeitet man gemeinsam an einem Ort, hilft sich
gegenseitig bei offenen Fragen und Einstiegshürden und hat dabei
übrigens nicht wenig Spaß.

Der Berliner Teil des Ubuntu Global Bug Jams wird am 29. August von
12 bis 18 Uhr in der c-base stattfinden.

Da die c-base im Moment keine Desktoprechner zur Verfügung stellt,
sollten ein Notebook mitgebracht werden. Weitere Informationen gibt es
auf http://loco.ubuntu.com/events/team/265/detail/.

Adresse der c-base:
Rungestraße 20, 10179 Berlin
U-/S-Bahnhof Jannowitzbrücke

Anfahrt zur c-base:
http://wiki.c-base.org/coredump/AnfahrtsSkizze
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild:C-Base_Map_1.png
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild:C-Base_Map_2.png

If you haven’t registered your Ubuntu Global Jam event yet, do it now!

Definitely going!

As you all know loads of teams around the globe meet this weekend and do great Ubuntu and Open Source work together. Ubuntu Jams are all about making Ubuntu and the open source world in general rock even harder. No matter which part of it you’re interested, be it Translations, Testing, QA work, Packaging, Docs or anything else, we want you to have fun with your local team!

I personally will join in on the fun in Berlin (announcement coming up soon) and will try to put a bit of work into Operation Cleansweep, a great initiative to get our backlog of patches under control. As you can see from this week’s report, it could do with getting some love:

Total bugs with patches: 2196 (-37)
Reviewed patches: 420 (+11)
---
Bugs with 'patch-needswork': 99 (+5)
Bugs with 'patch-forwarded-upstream': 177 (+3)
Bugs with 'patch-forwarded-debian': 62 (0)
Bugs with 'indicator-application': 39 (-2)
Bugs with 'patch-accepted-upstream': 56 (-1)
Bugs with 'patch-accepted-debian': 10 (0)
Bugs with 'patch-rejected-upstream': 18 (0)
Bugs with 'patch-rejected-debian': 3 (0)

If you’re interested in reviewing patches, check out the review guide and help the reviewers team out.

Guess who has all registered for the fun already:

• Berkeley, California, USA
• Birmingham, UK
• Novosibirsk, Russia
• Cape Town, South Africa
• Caldes de Montbui, Spain
• Dublin, Ireland
• Saudi Arabia
• Managua, Nicaragua

Lots of other teams are discussing their events right now. We in Berlin will definitely be part of the fun.

András Bognár also worked on new Ubuntu Global Jam badges:

Awesome! Let your friends know! Get planning! This will be a weekend full of awesomeness!

I wanted to follow up on Jorge’s great blog post for a longer while already. He said:

Lately I think we’ve gotten in a collective funk of “here’s what I think about this.” followed by “Oh yeah, well here’s what I think of that”, and “Allow me to retort!” and then getting stuck in a rabbit hole of distractions.

So screw that, let’s share some stories[…]

Needless to say: Jorge is spot on!

A lot of people have been doing ROCKing work in the last few weeks and I never took the time to thank them:

• Dylan McCall has been doing amazing work on Harvest. (Dylan wrote about it too.) Harvest came a long way from a nice idea about aggregating packaging/fixing opportunities in Ubuntu and thanks to Dylan’s great work as part of his Google Summer of Code project arrived in the 21st century. We had lots of ideas at the last UDS (spec1, spec2) but instead of fixing small bits and pieces here and there, Dylan took on the harder job: giving Harvest a nice, consistent and usable interface. I’ll be a very happy man once we deployed it and it’s in active use. Dylan is great to work with: a great attention to detail, still pragmatic and a great sense of humour.
• The LoCo Directory hackers! It’s just amazing to see what people who are excited about the LoCo world manage to pull off. Lots of bugs fixed, lots of nice fixes got in. It’s a pleasure to work with everybody. Every time I reviewed a piece of code I learneed something new.
• Sponsors! A big big hug to people who review code for newcomers who can’t directly commit to Ubuntu themselves yet. The Hall of Fame currently lists these folks, who did a lot of sponsoring: Stefano Rivera, Benjamin Drung, Sebastien Bacher, Didier Roche, Timo Aaltonen, Jonathan Riddell, Martin Pitt. If you can, help out!

UGJ - I'm going!

I’m SO looking forward to the Ubuntu Global Jam. Up until now we have 4 events registered:

• Berkeley, California, USA
• Dublin, Ireland
• Saudi Arabia
• Caldes de Montbui, Catalonia, Spain

and I talked to a number of people already who are planning additional events. This will be SWEET!

While there’s numerous activities you can dive into on a Jam event, I’d love to see a lot of work being put into Operation Cleansweep. If dealing with patches is nothing new to you, you’d do Ubuntu and the broader open source community a huge favour.

Here the Cleansweep stats of last week:

Total bugs with patches: 2313 (+30)
Reviewed patches: 388 (+10)
---
Bugs with 'patch-needswork': 93 (+3)
Bugs with 'patch-forwarded-upstream': 168 (+4)
Bugs with 'patch-forwarded-debian': 53 (+2)
Bugs with 'indicator-application': 42 (0)
Bugs with 'patch-accepted-upstream': 52 (+2)
Bugs with 'patch-accepted-debian': 11 (-1)
Bugs with 'patch-rejected-upstream': 15 (-1)
Bugs with 'patch-rejected-debian': 2 (0)

… also known as Ubuntu Global Jam is coming up swiftly, so make sure you put 27th-29th August into your calendar and talk your local Ubuntu friends into participating.

Ok, so it’s Ubuntu Global Jam. What does that mean? What’s going to happen?

Simple. It’s going to happen what you make happen. Whatever your team enjoys doing is great. The only requirements are: it needs to be fun and it should make Ubuntu better somehow.

Ok. What does that mean?

We had loads of different jams around the world already: events where people get together locally and make Ubutnu better by working on bugs, packaging, translations, documentation, testing, upgrading or whatever else they enjoy doing.

In the past we had events all around the globe, where new friends met for the first time, people learned from each other, people from other open source projects were invited and where everybody (most importantly) had a fantastic time.

If your LoCo team already knows when and where it’s going to happen, add the event to the LoCo Directory. We set up the event on loco.ubuntu.com already.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Jams has lots of information on how to to organise the event properly, and what kind of preparation your team mates should look into depending on what your team wants to do. Stay tuned for tuition sessions where you can ask all your questions. A good place for getting that information is of course loco-contacts or ubuntu-event-planners.

If you’re part of a LoCo team, please bring it up with your team, talk to them, find out what they like, meet and make Ubuntu rock even harder.

If you haven’t seen loco.ubuntu.com yet, click here.

It’s what we call the LoCo Directory and where more and more data of our Local Community teams goes. In the beginning we started with just a simple list of LoCo teams and additional data they can put there. After some time we added the functionality to put events in there too. It’s awesome and the work the whole team put into it is just amazing. The good thing is that we all hang out in #ubuntu-locoteams, do code reviews together and learn from each other. It’s a fantastic project.

To continue the great story and plan our next steps a bit, we’ll meet in #ubuntu-meeting (irc.freenode.net) on July 8th, 14:00 UTC.

Topics we’d like to talk about:

• explain the project to new interested contributors
• review the list of open bugs and reprioritise for the next 2 or 3 releases
• general Q&A

If you know a bit about Django, Python, Web development or are keen to learn about it and be part of a fantastic project that powers a great and fantastic part of our community, be there and talk to us.

(Also if you microblog about this and other LoCo stuff, use the #locoteams hashtag.)

?Hi all,

It’s translations announcements day today!

We’ve got some more content that would be very interesting for LoCos to have translated. Check this out:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LoCoCouncil/LoCoTeamsBestPracticesandGuidelines

The Ubuntu LoCo Council developed a series of best practices and guidelines to help all LoCos to be more successful, and it would be awesome to have it in YOUR language to allow everyone contribute making your LoCo rock even harder.

Here’s how you can help:

• Add your language and a link to the page where you want to put the translation to the table on top of   https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LoCoCouncil/LoCoTeamsBestPracticesandGuidelines. I’ve added some few languages already for your convenience, and some folks have even already started translating!
• I recommend creating a subpage named after the two-letter or threee-letter code for your language (e.g. LoCoTeamsBestPracticesandGuidelines/de for German). You’ll find a list of codes here.
• Copy the content of the page in English to your new page
• Translate!
• Save your translation and you’re done

Check out the Spanish or Italian translations for an example:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LoCoCouncil/LoCoTeamsBestPracticesandGuidelines/es
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LoCoCouncil/LoCoTeamsBestPracticesandGuidelines/it

Thanks!

Hi all,

The Loco Directory hackers have asked for some more help in getting the directory translated and thus more usable for your Ubuntu LoCo.

You can contribute to it the usual way by going to:

https://translations.launchpad.net/loco-directory

And leaving your suggestions or translations there.

We’ve got 7 languages which are nearly completed, and it would really be awesome if also Catalan, Finnish, French, Czech, Asturian, Serbian, Bengali, Greek, Ukrainian, Russian, Romanian, English (United Kingdom), Dutch, Swedish, Galician, Hebrew, Chinese (Traditional), Chinese (Simplified), Vietnamese, Irish, Thai, Arabic, Tamil, Turkish, Welsh, Portuguese, Slovak, Polish, Persian, Danish, Belarusian, and more! would get some translation love.

The LoCo Directory has continuous releases, although there are generally not big string changes, so remember to check it out and translate new strings from time to time.

Thanks!

Last weekend the Catalan LoCo team reunited again to celebrate yet another unforgettable Ubuntu release party in València, at the emblematic Octubre Culture Centre in the heart of the city.

They were two days packed with activities, presentations, conferences, unconferences, installs, excellent food and even better company. In summary, good fun for everyone, of which here’s just a taste:

Day 0: Friday – the ubuntaires are coming

As most of the LoCo team members come from different parts of the Catalonia region, they were traveling on Friday to be fresh for the big day on Saturday. Be it with car, train or motorbike, everyone had arrived by the evening and some of us met for a nice  dinner and enjoyed the warm Valencian night.

Apart from seeing the crew again, the highlight for me was to finally meet the great Cubells and Giorgio in person, with whom I collaborate online, but never had the chance to hang out with yet.

Day 1: Saturday – octubre, install, conferences, random number generators, 61

The first day started early in the morning, and those who managed to wake up soon enough were able to leave their testimonial in the early bird photo. The first thing we all contemplated in awe was the venue:

The current building is a reform from the 1879 original, and the adaptation in 2004 nicely marries the contemporary needs with the original style. The Centre itself and the organizations it is home to are a reference when talking about culture in the Valencian Community, and I think I can speak for the whole team in thanking Vicent Cubells for making the Lucid release party in L’octubre possible.

Moving on to more geeky matters, the party kicked off with Alex‘s presentation and the Maverick UDS video, with obligatory cheer when the picture with the Catalan team was featured. After that, workshops, presentations and the install party were ready to roll, many of them running in parallel.

Later lunch, short break, back to more awesome sessions and a final draw in which number 61 was repeatedly featured in our “random” number generator. Then fast forward to a well-deserved after work beer, a nice dinner in the city, some er… hacking, and last drinks.

Day 2: Sunday – unconference, ???, cava

As it is to expect with a Sunday morning, the last day started slower than the first, but Alex and Rafael managed to quickly sort that out by energizing everyone with cool topics for the unconference, to which people responded equally well volunteering for presentations.

While all interesting, the ones I would personally highlight were the ones from Josep Gallart, in which he explained the golden ratio applied to photography, and the session on Tai Chi at the terrace by Rafael Carreras, which constituted a very nice and pleasant finale.

Following that, we all went for dinner, enjoyed good food at L’octubre once more and were kindly invited to cava by Giorgio’s parents. That marked the closure of the event, after which people started the long journey back home, thinking already on how to make the next release party even more awesome.

Everything was very well documented by our very own reporters, and it seems that everyone took pictures, pictures, pictures, pictures, pictures and pictures.

Thanks to everyone and see you all soon!

UPDATE: I forgot to add that you can also read a report in Catalan from Sisco’s blog post

The pictures in this post are Copyright (c) 2010 all rights reserved to crazyserver, Copyright (c) 2008 all rights reserved octubre and

??I’ve been working with Laura Czajkowski to set up the main LoCo Council page for translations on the wiki, and I’m pleased to announce that you can start translating it to your own language, so that it is also useful for everyone in your LoCo whose mother tongue is not English:

• https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LoCoCouncil

The LoCo Council is at the heart of the governance of the Ubuntu LoCo community, and with such a diverse community as ours, it just makes sense to reflect this diversity in a set of translations for everyone.

Here’s how you can translate the LoCo Council page to your language:

• Add your language and a link to the page where you want to put the translation to the table on top of https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LoCoCouncil I’ve added some few languages already for your convenience.
• I recommend creating a subpage named after the two-letter or threee-letter code for your language (e.g. LoCoCouncil/th for Thai).
• Copy the content of the original English page to your new page
• Translate!
• Save your translation and you’re done

I’ve also created the Catalan translation to give you an example:

Remember that we’ve got other LoCo Council pages which can be translated. In particular the LoCo team reapproval one would be quite interesting to have available in everyone’s own language to read:

• https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LoCoCouncil/LoCoTeamReApproval

Thanks!