Category: PlanetKubuntu

OpenHatch: Making the first step easier


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!

KDE GSoC 2010 wrapup

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.

KDE SC 4.5 release parties – let’s get them started!

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.

Akademy is (not so) far away

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:

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:

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! 😀

Season of KDE 2009 wrap-up

Stu is awesome and because he’s awesome he wrote a nice wrap-up of the successful SoK 2009 projects for Google’s Open Source blog. Go and read it and see the cool stuff that has been done last year.

This is the package our 4 successful students received:


Thanks a bunch to Giulia, ruphy and sheytan for designing the shirt and certificate and Claudia and Torsten for getting them printed and shipped.

Oh and btw: I’m still looking for more mentors – ping me! 😀

Ada, meet Katie’s posse!

Role models are key to getting more women and especially young girls interested in science and technology and specifically open source. And here are some of KDE’s finest 🙂  Will you be one of them next year?

Ada Lovelace Day, video by fabulous Alexandra

Unfortunately not in the video but still very awesome: Alex, Ana Cecília, Ana, Chani, Claudia, Sabine, Valerie, Valorie, Vera and many more.

KDE accepted for GSoC 2010

KDE has once again been accepted as an org for GSoC. Yay! This means we’ll once again be welcoming a bunch of great students into our team to make KDE software rock this summer.

So what to do now?
If you’re a student who wants to take part in GSoC this year: Go and check out the ideas page and pick one you like or come up with your own idea. Then get in touch with the team working on the program you want to contribute to over the summer. Work with them to write a kick-ass proposal and then hopefully make it reality this summer. To keep up with all things GSoC you can also subscribe to the kde-soc@kde.org mailing list.

If you’re a potential mentor: Go and check out the flow chart below. It has everything you should need to know about how we’re doing GSoC this year. Then go and subscribe to the kde-soc-mentor@kde.org list. Further announcements for mentors will be made there.

If you have any questions please join us in our IRC channel #kde-soc on freenode or send an email to the kde-soc mailing list.

KDE GSoC process 2010

GSoC info session in Karlsruhe

Since Google Summer of Code is coming up again very soon Sven, Phil and I will be doing a short info session at the University of Karlsruhe on Thursday at 4pm in room HS -101 in building 50.34 (Infobau). We’ll be giving a short intro to GSoC and tell a bit about how GSoC works in KDE and Debian and of course answer lots of questions. If you’re planning to apply this year you should definitely show up 🙂 Please drop me a short email if you want to attend at lydia at kde org.

If you’re not in Karlsruhe or anywhere near there are info sessions in other cities around the world listed in the GSoC calendar.

Let love light your way

Happy holidays and a happy new year to all of you. I hope you get to spend it with people you love and care about. May the next year bring many exciting things and great opportunities.

The Amarok team will begin the new year with the release of Amarok 2.2.2 at the beginning of January and KDE will follow with KDE SC 4.4.0 in early February. Exciting times ahead …