Category: Amarok

Let’s take it to the next level!

2 weeks ago I asked people to help with getting our Junior Jobs list above 100. That worked out nicely. We’re at 140 right now and reached 148 at some point in the last week \o/  200 in 2 weeks from now? 😉

Keep adding Junior Jobs. As some people were unsure how to do it, here’s a screenshot:

Junior Jobs

Interested in getting involved in KDE by writing code? There are 140 bugs waiting for you 😉

What is KDE for you?

For me KDE is:

  • working with great people
  • good friends
  • people to depend on
  • a community that helps me do things I would never have imagined I would be able to do
  • me going to random places around the world and having a couch to sleep on
  • a team that gets stuff done
  • having someone to share good and bad things with
  • people who are so far away and yet so close
  • a team that brings me to my limits
  • a crowd that has seemingly endless energy to make better software
  • so much more than just a desktop environment.

Let’s start small, Junior!

When a new contributor comes to you and wants to start coding on KDE do you have a small task to hand him or her immediately? The moment they show up in your IRC channel, email inbox, identi.ca or wherever else they find you is the moment their motivation is incredibly high. They are willing to invest time and energy right there and they likely have a few free hours to dive into a simple task. This is the moment we need to get them hooked. If they have to wait a few days, a week or even longer for a task they might well have lost that initial motivation and will be gone never to be seen again.

Now we all know that our time is limited and we can’t be there 24/7 and give out tasks to newbies. Thankfully we have a solution: Junior Jobs on bugs.kde.org. The sad thing: There are less than 50 of them at the time of writing this posting. Let’s improve this. Have a simple task you don’t have time for right now? File a bug right now (you can even skip the wizard), tag it with the keyword “junior-jobs” and be happy to have a list to give to a potential new coder next time someone approaches you.

But having this list to point to is not the only benefit. It will also be used by people looking for something to do on their own. They might be too shy to approach you for the time being, but looking at a task-list on their own and maybe trying to fix one of the bugs is possible for them.

Let’s get this list above 100 within the next two weeks together!

Now say you don’t have a suitable Junior Job for someone. There are a few things you can do to keep them involved until you have something:

  • let them set up their devel environment
  • ask them to test something for you
  • ask them to help a little with bug triage
  • ask them to go trough your websites and see where they are out-of-date and maybe get them updated
  • have them check if someone needs help in the forum
  • let them organize a meeting for your team if needed
  • …

While Junior Jobs are used for coding tasks mainly it would be nice to have a similar system for promo for example. I am not sure Bugzilla is the best tool for that though. Are there better tools we could use for promo task scheduling?

Californication

Group Photo, originally uploaded by warthog9.

Leo and I went to California for the GSoC mentor summit to talk to lots of other mentors and admins about Summer of Code and whatever else was on our mind. In short: absolutely awesome and definitely worth the travel (which included lots of hours in airplanes and airports for me including an unplanned 6 hour stay in Salt Lake City – thank you very much border control).

The energy you get when you put that many geeks together is amazing. And at the same time it is quite different from conferences where you only have one project present like Akademy. It shows you that people working on competing projects are actually pretty cool people when sitting in a hot-tub with them *g*. (If course I knew that one before but it feels good to be reassured about it.) It shows you a lot of white spots on your personal open source map. Any idea what the Boost community looks like? Any idea how huge the Apache Software Foundation is? Now I do. It has definitely been interesting for me to see how different communities are managing their day-to-day business and especially GSoC. And the most surprising thing for me: Even pretty dysfunctional communities can release decent software 😀 I also learned that you can indeed have a session on minorities in free software and actually get useful results everyone can apply in their communities instead of getting derailed and discussing colors of random bike sheds. (They should all be blue and have pink doors of course.)

Check out the session notes (not 100% complete at the time of this post but hopefully soon), the one thing people learned at the summit and pics.

Thanks a lot to Google and everyone who attended the summit for making this happen. It has been 2 intense days and a great experience.

After the summit I stayed another 2 days with Alejandro to check out the area. Thanks so much for offering a place to crash. We went to San Francisco – what a great city – and met up with Gary and blauzahl who were great hosts. (Sorry I wasn’t more talkative that night folks but the previous days really drained my energy.) And it again showed me one of the best things about our community: No matter where I go on this world, friends are never far. I uploaded a few pictures to my Flickr page.

What a crowd!

I’ll definitely have to return – not just for the massage chairs and hot-tub.

Sunjammer

In the last 14 weeks the Amarok team has been working hard to get Amarok 2.2 ready for prime-time. We’ve worked in dark cellars, in a nice living room in front of a warm fire, at the beach, at airports, in cabins in the wood, on the train – yea you get it – pretty much everywhere.

Today we can finally present you the result. Amarok 2.2 is out in the wild and brings lots of goodies people have been waiting for. Check out the release announcement and please digg it!

With that I say bye bye and run off to a very sunny island with my fellow rokers – oh wait, no – we gotta prepare 2.2.1. Stay tuned 😉

More serious though: I’m getting ready for the GSoC mentor summit. Soooo excited.

KDE <3 GSoC (or how to handle a big org by crowd sourcing)

I finally got around to writing the GSoC wrap-up for the dot with a short intro to what all our students achieved during this summer. 37 successful projects out of 38 is awesome. It was great to work with this year’s mentors and students alike. Thanks to every one of them for making the admin team’s life as easy as it gets.

I think our new selection process had the biggest impact on this year’s great results (besides a lot of very awesome students and dedicated mentors of course). For those not familiar with it: In previous years we had one big  IRC meeting with all KDE mentors and a few more people to select the best projects and students for KDE out of over 200 proposals. As GSoC slots are very limited and everyone wanted to get a few for their sub-project this was quite chaotic and not always fair especially to smaller sub-projects that didn’t have the power to make themselves heard in those meetings. But given the time constraints and size of KDE this was what we had to deal with.

Last year bigger sub-projects like KOffice and Amarok got a fixed amount of slots and were asked to select their students themselves.  This improved things a lot for the big projects as they got the projects they really needed and wanted without other sub-projects messing with the selection. But the smaller ones were probably even worse off than in previous years.

This year Jeff, Leo, Ian and I decided to change this and make it better for everyone. Our goal was to make it fair for all involved and at the same time give more power to the sub-projects in selecting their students because in the end only they really know what they want and need. No use in me deciding if KDE Games needs someone working on KGolf more than someone working on KPatience. Oh and of course we wanted to get rid of that hated hour-long IRC meeting.

So we started a big spreadsheet on Google Docs with a sheet for every sub-project as well as one for proposals which don’t fit in any of the sub-projects. Then we sent an invite to our mentor mailinglist and asked all mentors to add the proposals for their sub-project with a possible mentor and backup mentor as well as if the student already got in contact with our community somehow to work on improving the proposal. Then we asked them to rank their proposals, why they think this particular proposal is important for KDE as a whole and which projects they definitely need and which ones they would rather not have. Armed with this huge spreadsheet and some keeping in mind of the proposals no-one was fighting for because they didn’t belong to any sub-project the admin team sat down and created a list of the students KDE would really love to have. We ended up with a list of 60 students or so. Everyone was happy – no sub-project left behind. Everyone got the projects most important to them and no-one was going away with no student. We knew we weren’t going to get them all and we already had a few students we knew we would have to dismiss. But since they were on the maybe-list according to the previous ranking anyway that was ok. Then we got the first number from Google. We would likely get 42 slots. Ok. That meant all our maybes had to go. Tough but doable. Then the second round of slot allocations came. We got down to 35. Outsch! That would mean quite a few of our we-really-want-this projects would need to be cut. We had an emergency meeting with a few people to cut even more without having to let a sub-project go without any student at all but it was pretty much impossible. Thankfully Leslie is awesome and we got 38 slots in the end which meant we could give at least one slot to every sub-project that requested one and everyone got the projects most important to them (which turned out to also be the ones most important to KDE as a whole btw).

This crowd sourcing approach was a lot fairer because it is basically impossible for every mentor to read over 200 proposals and select the most important ones. (Though huge props to those who did!) Everyone could concentrate on their part of the proposals and really make a good judgment on whether the project is good and if the student is actually able to do it or just a poser. And I think our success rate this year speaks for itself 🙂

Claudia bought tickets for Leo and me to the mentor summit last week and I’m really excited to finally put a mark on that big white spot on my personal travel map called America 😀

Now gearheads: Is there anything you think we can improve for GSoC next year? What did you like? What didn’t work so well? What do you want Leo and me to talk about at the mentor summit with all the other orgs?

it’s all clear now

We’re happy to release the first beta of Amarok 2.2. It comes with many goodies like playlist sorting, UMS device support, the ability to customize the program layout to your liking and much more. For details please read the release announcement and this nice review.

Enjoy rocking 🙂

Oh and don’t forget to send feedback, bug reports and patches (and maybe some cookies and hugs?) so we can get it in perfect shape for release in about a month.

Paros, Greece