life at the end of the universe

Baby, originally uploaded by gabi_menashe.

(This is a guest post by Asheesh Laroia of OpenHatch, an “open source involvement engine.” OpenHatch is a website and ongoing project to help new contributors find their place in free software projects. A few months ago, he imported some bugs in KDE’s bug tracker into the OpenHatch volunteer opportunity finder. I invited him to write about it for my blog. OpenHatch has its own blog, too.)

KDE is doing something wonderful with its Junior Jobs. These are issues (often small feature requests) that are appropriate for a first-time contributor. When maintainers create these opportunities, they take information that would otherwise be trapped in their head — how easy or hard an issue is — and make it available as hint to new contributors. Conveniently, creating a “Junior Job” doesn’t take any special work: maintainers just have to find the relevant bug in KDE Bugzilla and add the junior-jobs keyword.

But KDE Bugzilla isn’t necessarily a friendly welcome mat. Probably everyone reading this post can remember a time when Bugzilla seemed like a difficult, arcane tool. Bugzilla works well (enough) as an interface for project maintainers to share the status of what they’re working on with each other.

But imagine you are a prospective contributor. Aim your web browser at the list of junior jobs. (To get that link, I went to KDE Bugzilla and clicked the “Junior Jobs” link on the left side.) This is what I saw when writing this post:

Here are some questions I might have as a new contributor (and some commentary as myself):

• What do “wis” and “UNCO” mean?
• Who is JJ? (Maybe that’s a person’s initials; maybe he or she plans to fix it.)
• What project are these bugs in? (I can guess from the assignee….)
• Where do I get the source code? (The wrong answer might lead the new contributor to submit a patch against the most recent release; that patch might not apply against trunk.)
• If I get started on this, who can help me when I get stuck? (Otherwise, a new contributor might make an effort, become confused by something, and fall away.)

I like to joke that bug trackers say lots of information about what the problem is, but they don’t provide any information on how to solve it.

We at OpenHatch noticed that a great number of projects were in a similar situation: they label bugs as “easy”, “bitesize”, or “Junior Jobs” and point first-time contributors straight at the bug tracker. So we created what we call the volunteer opportunity finder to help people find something to work on. It wakes up late at night to download issues from bug trackers representing hundreds of projects. (Since OpenHatch is itself a free software project, we also import the bitesize bugs from our own bug tracker.)

When you browse the available issues, you can click on the project name and see its page on OpenHatch. (We make one for every project that someone says they’ve contributed to, or where we’ve imported bugs for it.) The pages showcase the people who have listed themselves as possible mentors. Contributors can also write instructions or suggestions for how to get involved; for example, the page for Gally does a great job of answering “Other than writing code, how can I contribute?”

If you don’t know how to get involved, you can also browse opportunities by programming language, the kind of help you want to give (such as writing documentation) or flip through a few projects you might want to work on. You can narrow your search to just the ones we call “bitesize” (“Junior Jobs” in KDE, bugs labeled as “easy” in the Python programming language, and so forth).

So OpenHatch is a project to think through how people join free software communities and to build technical tools and social structures to make that better. This browsing tool is one thing we’ve built. It’s a community project, so you can help out! Say hi on IRC or email if you want to join in.

I’d like to hear (in the comments on this post) from you guys and gals: What do you think about our “volunteer opportunity finder”? What works about it for you? What would you change?

If Lydia invites me back, I plan to write about getting non-coders more involved in free software projects. During the weekend I first met Lydia and Jeff Mitchell of Amarok, I had a crazy idea for something you can build on top of OpenHatch. If you want to stay in touch until then, join our IRC channel or subscribe to us on Identi.ca/Twitter/RSS!

Google Summer of Code 2010 finished. It’s been a blast again for KDE. Of our 50 students 46 completed the program successfully and one withdrew after successful midterm evaluation to start an internship he couldn’t say no to. Each of them has produced something really cool, has learned a lot and I’m sure also found a few new friends. Check PlanetKDE for updates on their projects. Thanks to each of our students and thanks x2 to our amazing mentors who once again rocked very much. And of course thanks to Google for making the whole program possible. A dot story including details about each project will follow soon – stay tuned.

Season of KDE hasn’t wrapped up just yet. Updates on that when it finished.

Oh and if you want to hear me ramble about GSoC and Season of KDE with the awesome Guillermo and Paul, go and listen to the latest KDE and the Masters of the Universe podcast.

Eike has been collecting KDE sightings in movies and tv series for quite a while already. It seems he’ll have to add books as well now. One of our attentive users (thank you!) brought this to my attention today:

Amarok gets mentioned in “The Fuller Memorandum”, the new SiFi book by Charles Stross. Rocking!

I’m back from conference touring (which was awesome btw – more about that later) and Tom reminded me that the release parties for 4.5 are not planned yet. And the release is planned for August 4th, so in a bit more than a week. OMG!

Clearly it is time to fix this situation and give the world a chance to meet some cool KDE people. So go to the 4.5 release party planning page and check if there is one near you already. If there is one then sign up for it and have fun. If there is none yet it’s time to start one. Pick a date and time (preferably within 3 weeks of release) and reserve a place in a local restaurant, bar, meeting room, university, whateverelsefits. Add it to the wiki page, spread the word and then have lots of fun.

Of course it’s my pleasure to announce the first of hopefully many release parties: Stuttgart, Germany on 7th of August. Exact place and time is still to be determined. Check the wiki page every now and then for updates.

For those who have never planned or attended a release party: You can do pretty much everything you want from simply getting together for a beer and chatting to full day event with talks, workshops and so on. It’s up to you. You can find a few tips on the community wiki. Everyone is welcome from active contributor to interested user. Just let the person organizing it know you’re coming so they can plan better.

(more akademy blogs including write-up of my talks will follow later – just need to get this out before I leave to Portland to join Jeff, Valorie and Knut for the CLS and a bit of OSCON)

Not long before Akademy Tomaz told me about the awesome Qt/KDE courses he and his team are giving at Brazilian universities to a few hundred students each. (They seriously rock!) At the same time he was working with a student who wanted to do his internship that is required by university with KDE and I was in a similar situation looking for a topic for my diploma thesis. And I’m sure you’ve all heard about Kevin ruling French university students and giving them KDE projects to work on to help them learn how to work in a large distributed team and develop software in the open that is actually getting used by a lot of people. (Unlike a lot of the code I have written so far for university…)

So there we have a few KDE contributors doing awesome stuff – teaching students about KDE, KDE software and how we develop it. We sat down at Akademy with a few more people and talked about how we can adapt what Tomaz and Kevin are doing to other universities (and maybe schools?). And the first step in that direction is the creation of the kde-teaching mailing list. If you’re interested in helping out or are already doing something similar please subscribe. There is a lot of awesome waiting there (and maybe some cookies)

So as you might have heard KDE is going to host its own git infrastructure. This means that the projects currently on gitorious will have to be moved one by one. Amarok and Konversation made the move yesterday to once again test the waters and make sure it is good to go for everyone else.

To quote Jeff’s email to the Amarok lists:

Amarok, along with Konversation, is trailblazing, and today the new official location of the repository is at git://git.kde.org/amarok/amarok.git

If you already have an existing checkout, simply edit the .git/config file and change “gitorious.org” to “git.kde.org” for the main repository (not any personal clones you may have in remotes).

If you are a committer, the clone URL is git@git.kde.org:amarok/amarok.git. SSH keys have been migrated from those used for your KDE SVN server account.

You can browse the repository via cgit at http://git.kde.org/amarok/amarok or via Redmine at the Project page on http://projects.kde.org/projects/amarok — both are still a work in progress (there is e.g. no KDE theming, and accounts on redmine have yet to be set up for all but a few of the KDE sysadmins), so please keep in mind that this is still a test infrastructure.

Thanks to our rocking sysadmins (especially Eike and Jeff) for setting everything up so quickly.

Please let us know if there is still any docu left to update due to this move that we missed so we can update it quickly.

Last year around this time everyone was getting ready for the Desktop Summit. I couldn’t make it and I could still kick myself for it tbh. Watching it remotely was rather painful as the information flow wasn’t as good as it could have been. So I promised myself two things for this year’s Akademy: 1) I’m soooooo going to be there. 2) I’m going to help make it easier on the people who can not go for whatever reason.

So here is the run-up of resources you will need to keep up-to-date on all things Akademy while it is happening in 2 weeks:

• identi.ca: search for akademy, the @akademy account and the !akademy group
• twitter: search for akademy and the @akademy account
• flickr: search for the tag akademy
• the irc channel: #akademy on freenode
• planetKDE
• the dot
• the workshop and BoF schedule
• various etherpad installations to follow live meeting notes (ask your specific team if they have one)
• place for slides of the talks will be announced later
• talks will be recorded and if there are no major ooopses uploaded after the event

Most of them have RSS feeds you can subscribe to – use them

If there is anything else that would be helpful please leave a note in the comments.

Now if you are going to be in Tampere and going to make the world rock more, spread the coolness:

• identi.ca: join the !akademy group (you can’t post without joining)  and post about what you’re doing
• identi.ca: poke me, Claudia or Kenny to get useful stuff posted to @akademy
• twitter: tweet about cool stuff and tag it with #akademy
• twitter: poke me, Claudia or Kenny to get useful stuff posted to @akademy
• flickr: upload photos and tag them with #akademy and #akademy2010
• write blog posts and have it aggregated to planetKDE
• ping jefferai to get etherpad set up for your team for live meeting notes if your team doesn’t have one yet (I know at least promo and edu do)
• if you’re a speaker: get your slides to the program committee, the friendly folks who sent you your talk confirmation

And you might have guessed it already…

(Special thanks to my employer ontoprise and the KDE e.V. for paying travel and accommodation. It would not be possible without you. *hint* individual supporting membership *hint*)

Hmmm and while I’m at it I might as well create some buzz for my talks, right? So I’ll be doing 3 talks it seems:

• Pimp my Community
• Highlights of KDE Women 2010 (with Celeste, Alexandra, Anne and others)
• KDE’s wikis – getting closer to world domination with SMW and SMW+

Be there! You know you want to  I’ll also be doing 3 BoF’s on git, community and wikis for those interested. Oh and I’m writing on a paper on mentoring to accompany my community talk. I’ll post it here when it’s published.

CU in Tampere!

Amarok 2.3.1 “The Bell” has been released. Check out the release notes, download, install and enjoy rediscovering your music

I’m back at home from the multimedia and edu sprint in Switzerland (yea the one some people call cheeseland and others chocolateland) and things are finally getting back to normal so time for a bit of blogging. It was productive, fluffy and awesome! Those three pictures sum it up pretty well



Check out my Flickr page for more pics.

Having a lot of projects at the sprint was really great. For example I’ve worked with j-b of VideoLan fame on some announcements and website restructuring and helped the edu team with promo and community building advice. A lot of progress has been made on the VLC backend for Phonon which will hopefully solve a lot of the small pain points we still have in Amarok. Besides getting the VLC backend in shape the next weeks in Amarok land will be spend on improving startup time for example. New script bindings by Ian and Richard should help quite a bit with that hopefully. Colin did not have an easy job being the PulseAudio guy but he was a really good sport in not-so-friendly territory . We also had a telephone meeting with the QtMultimedia guys in Brisbane which cleared up quite a few things even though the setup of the meeting was a bit adventurous. Sharing knowledge not only inside the KDE teams but also meeting with other free software teams like this is invaluable and should be done more often.

A big thank you to everyone who helped make it possible. You’re fluffy.

Oh and btw: Car trains rock.

Only a few days left until

in Randa, Switzerland together with fregl and dani_l. Looking forward to lots of multimedia and edu discussions. Wohooooo.