Same folks wondering how to use the “Documents” application:

KDE 4.8 Prague Release Party Cake. Congrats to the KDE team:

One installation of the “Middle East Europe” exhibition at DOX:

What the docs posse is doing:

• The team updated some parts of the GNOME user help for 3.4. Everybody got assigned an area. I tested the printing related pages (as far as possible without a printer, but abusing translation templates helps to check for string correctness).
• Marc-Andre showcased GNOME Boxes so it can receive some documentation and usability love.
• The team tried to use GNOME Documents and as some stuff was not clear or easily discoverable Cosimo was brave enough to face our questions and criticism (appreciated).
• Jim showed some documentation overview ideas.
• Baptiste updated parts of the gnomine documentation.
• Rumors also tell that new Baobab documentation and improved examples on developer.gnome.org will be available soon.

What I’ve been doing:

• As part of Google Code-In, Ivaylo Kalinov Markov proposed a better organized wiki frontpage for the GNOME Translation project.
  I finally merged this with a few tweaks. Thanks for your great work, Ivaylo!
• Triaged some open documentation bug reports and as usual if you try to fix one thing you end up finding three other issue. Or underlying infrastructure issues.
• Tried to manually find mismatches between documentation component assignees in GNOME Bugzilla, the GNOME documentation team, and the reality.
• Other stuff that’s not yet ready for primetime. :)

Kat and me also updated the GNOME Evolution documentation a bit. Still many things left on my todo list, but we at least got the Bowling session done yesterday night.

Thanks to the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring our accommodation and to Red Hat for providing the venue.

Today Google Code-In 2011 ended.

Out of the 136 tasks that the GNOME community provided, 124 were successfully resolved by highschool students.

Achievements include

• code improvements in cheese, gnome-games, vino and other modules,
• improved or new documentation for Python and C tutorials, Anjuta, Evolution and several GNOME games,
• updated translation for Czech, Greek, Indonesian, Latvian, Romanian and Ukrainian,
• (re)testing of applications such as brasero and gnome-boxes,
• and many more things, especially in outreach and research.

Also see Tiffany’s blogpost about her Code-In mentorship.

Thanks to all mentors, students, helpers and Google! I hope everybody had a good time.
If you participated I am interested in your feedback: What went well, what didn’t? If you didn’t participate, why not? Looking forward to your blog comments or emails.

What is left and to recommend in this area is Mer, a community-driven project based on MeeGo with real open governance and trustworthy maintainers that know how to communicate.

Consequently I have removed my admin flag for MeeGo’s bugtracker (it feels unmaintained anyway) and unsubscribed from nearly all MeeGo and Tizen mailing lists.
I will continue to stick around in the Maemo and Mer communities (mailing lists, IRC, bugtrackers) as they currently feel like the places to be. Cheers!

Google Code-In has been running for nearly three weeks and 57 tasks have been completed so far by highschool students. Only 27 tasks have not been completed yet. Some examples of completed tasks:

• A boost for Greek, Indonesian, Romanian and Ukrainian translations by several contributed translations.
• Boxes received some testing and libosinfo now detects more systems
• Documentation improvements for sudoku and Python tutorials.
• The preferences dialog of Cheese was redesigned and the application received some code cleanup
• Mockups for a bookmark editing dialog in Vinagre
• Several presentations and guides were created and proofread.

It’s not too late to join for mentors to add new tasks and for students to work on GNOME: Check out GNOME’s wiki for more info!

Note that the second batch of tasks will be made available to students on December 16th. The contest ends on January 16th.
Happy hacking everybody!

This Monday Google Code-In 2011 starts. Google Code-in is a contest for pre-university students (13 to 17 years old) to get involved in free and open source software. GNOME (and 17 other organizations) are proud to participate by providing a few dozens of small mentored tasks. These tasks cover eight different fields (code, documentation, translation, and more)!

Students!

If you want to join Google Code-In, check out the Contest Rules and the Frequently Asked Questions for more information. Specific information for GNOME’s tasks is available on the GNOME wiki.

Mentors!

We want more mentors and tasks!
You can add/propose new tasks at any time until December 16th. Check both GNOME’s wiki and Google’s wiki for more information for mentors!
Note that there are only two dates on which GCI tasks will be published for students: this Monday (November 21st), and December 16th. All tasks created between November 22nd and December 15th will be published on December 16th.
Or just discuss task ideas that you have with potential mentors.
Or join #gnome-love on IRC to help students if you don’t have time to be a mentor.
There’s many ways to help.

Enjoy, and just ask if you have questions or ideas.

Last weekend I attended MozCamp Europe in Berlin. I was mostly interested in discussing and learning about QA, Support/Documentation and Localization.

Most interesting talk for me was Robert Kaiser’s “Crash Investigation 101″ covering the infrastructure behind crash-stats.mozilla.org, interaction with Mozilla’s bugtracker, some statistical data (2-3 million received reports per day for Firefox, processing 10-15% provides a relevant data sample), and crash reasons (more than 50% of reported issues have nothing to do with the codebase but instead with Flash, Add-Ons, or Malware).

I was also impressed by the infrastructure on support.mozilla.org: Page access statistics for each article (issues that are popular might imply required UI improvements), combined with a “Was this article helpful? [Yes] [No]” at the end of every article: if the “Yes” percentage suddenly drops it implies that the article is not correct anymore and needs an overhaul.

Small nitpicking: Next time I would not recommend scheduling about 13 BOFs / Work Sprints for one 90min slot on a Sunday evening (people leaving for flights) – I was not the only BoF host who had only one attendee. Maybe have at least two slots and find a better time?

I’d like to thank Mozilla for the invitation and the interesting conversations that I had with community members.

Last weekend Marina and me represented GNOME at the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit in sunny California.
It was my first time attending a Mentor Summit and I was surprised about the wide range of topics at this unconference and the many different participating organizations and projects.

To mention some of the sessions:

• Marina’s and Pat’s session about women in FOSS and contributor outreach (e.g. GWOP).
• Metrics Working Group: Probably the most interesting session. Several FOSS projects work on gathering statistics on their community and its health, and I also had my shot at it last year. So why not join forces? This blog post lists some existing approaches, and there is a mailing list.
• “Google Code-In: Contribution Quality” was my own session. About 20 people (among them three Googlers and last year’s grand prize winner Daniel Kang) discussed common issues, such as organizations playing favorites by cooking up tasks for specific students (hence Google changed the rules for publishing tasks this year), defining the task difficulty, or impatient students asking for reviews (put information in the task about your availability on weekends or christmas, or have a backup mentor).
• “Documentation: Organizing the Effort” was about the management of user and developer documentation – keeping user docs up-to-date/in sync, translation infrastructures, organization and structure. Was wondering if GNOME analyzes click rates and search terms for access to the online user and developer docs to find out which topics are popular (and might need a better UI, or even a “Top 5 issues” section).
• And I popped in at the end of the “Melange Feedback Session” to find out why Google Code-In tasks from the last year are not accessible anymore. I was not the first to ask. Google is working on it and soon will provide them.

Finally a big thanks to Google for sponsoring and arranging a summit with a creative, welcoming and open atmosphere.

GCI is back

Also, Google Code-In 2011 was announced – see Johannes’ post for more info how to make students contribute to your GNOME project, but hurry up as the deadline is on Monday.