Safe as Milk

Newly confirmed keynotes

I can confirm two more keynotes for GUADEC! Yay!

Eric Sink is a co-founder of AbiSource, and author of an informative and influential blog. In particular, Eric has written some series’ of articles which might be considered essential reading for those interested in the business of software development: Marketing for Geeks and the Business of Software. Eric has eschewed the software megapoles of San Francisco and Boston to start his latest company SourceGear in Champaign, Illinois.

Leisa Reichelt is a User Experience Consultant, based in London UK, but recently of Sydney, Australia. Most of the work she does is in interactive media (web, iTV, mobile and the like) and she uses a mixture of User Research Techniques, Information Architecture, Interaction Design, and Usability skills mixed up with a background of Project Management, Producing, and Account Management to help define the requirements for a project, understand (and often define) the content and functionality involved, and design a structure (or architecture) and interface.

Leisa has been doing this kind of work for about ten years, under various guises, including project management, account management, web producing, information architecting, user experience designing, interaction designing, digital strategising and generally evangelising all the things she thinks are good about the internet and networked technology in general. She’s recently gone completely mad^Wfreelance.

These come after the confirmation of Matt Webb, co-author of Mind Hacks, as well as being a design consultant, who has already confirmed his attendance.

There is a fourth keynote which is currently very likely, but not yet confirmed, so I’ll keep mum on that person for the moment, except to say that of the 4, it’s the one I’m the most excited about.

For all GNOME user groups wondering what to organise…

…Have a “Give a school a foot up” day on Software Freedom Day.

The idea: you go to your local university, and ask permission to have a stand during the day. You print out some posters, wear some team t-shirts, and go along with a few hundred LiveCDs.

During the day, you organise 2 hours of presentations in a lecture hall (one in the morning & one in the afternoon) where you just show off the software. Nothing whizz-bangy, just showing people that there’s an alternative to Windows (“Look! There is a clock & calendar at the top! And I can browse the web while writing a text document in two different fonts!”).

The hard part is getting back in touch with that Comp.Sci. professor that only gave you a C in AI 10 years ago. Go on, pick up the phone!

(post inspired by discussions with Fabrice Alphonso and Frank Alcantara, and the recent posts from BarCamp Chicago by Ken vanDine)

Update: In comments,  Andy Price gave some priceless advice (sorry, I couldn’t resist): Computer clubs have access to university facilities,can typically rustle up volunteers and do pre-event advertising for an event, and are usually delighted to have someone do some of the organisation for them. Help out the young ‘uns – they’re the community’s bone marrow.

JLM 2007

I got back to Lyon on Saturday evening after 3 days in Martigues (sun, sea, sand) and a quick trip to the “Journées du Libre à Montpellier” 2007 – a local conference organised by the ALL (Association des Logiciels Libres).

It was a very nice conference – apart from the small detail that they forgot me. Well, all’s well that ends well.

I had a nice meal & conversation on Friday evening with some members of the association (lightning struck twice – I was forgotten again) and other invited guests (who weren’t forgotten).

I was especially impressed by the president of the association, who is a fan of martial arts – he is a 1st dan black belt in Aikido and Kendo (which is his favourite) as well as having skillz in jujitsu and judo.

So I forgave him for forgetting me.

I learned the difference between a “jitsu” (dangerous) and a “do” (less dangerous).

For example, “Kenjitsu” was the art of sabre fighting, “Kendo” is the art of fighting with bamboo sticks. “Jujitsu” is a vicious fighting style with kicks, punches, chokes & holds, and “judo” just keeps the holds.

On Saturday, I caught up with Frédéric Couchet and Pascal Chevreul, from APRIL and Mozilla respectively, and saw Richard Stallman give a presentation on free software in French.

I was also very pleased to meet Thierry Stoer from formats-ouverts.org for the first time, after several email conversations.

My presentation of the WengoPhone in the demo space attracted a nice crowd and went pretty well – VoIP is a big topic at the moment and lots of people wanted to know how to hook their home Asterisk up to the Wengo service, or how to make video calls. A nice feature people seemed interested in was the file transfer (which is funny, since it’s not one of those features I use a lot, or consider important) and having a real phone number for people to call you on your VoIP phone.

The presentation afterwards got a lot more attention that me – someone showed off all of the free software games that are available these days, from Neverball and X-Moto through FPS games and flight sims, and brought people up from the crowd to show off. Good fun.

After my presentation I gave a short interview with FreeNews and Divergence FM, media partners for the event. I’ll post links when they have it online.

Journées du Libre à Montpellier

I was going to blog about my demo/presentation of OpenWengo at the Journées du Libre à Montpellier, but it seems like I’m not on the agenda, in spite of having had a session accepted.

I don’t know whether I’ll still go or not – but I’m a bit annoyed about being forgotten.

Upcoming travel

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be hitting the road again.I’m eager to meet up with Openwengo and GNOME people when travelling – drop me a line if you’re available.

• LinuxDays.ch, 23 & 24 May, Geneva:
  I’ll be giving two presentations during LinuxDays.ch, one on contributing to free software projects (including a focus on marketing GNOME) and one on the OpenWengo project, and our recent 2.1.0 release.
• LinuxTag, 31 May – 1 June, Berlin:
  A flying visit, I’m arriving on Wednesday evening, and flying out again on Friday. I’ll be on the look-out for GNOME people, and I’ll be giving a workshop presentation of OpenWengo.
• Journées du Libre, 15 June, Montpellier:
  A flying visit, I’m arriving on Friday night and training out again on Saturday evening. Looking forward to meeting up with people on Friday evening, and I’ll be giving a presentation on OpenWengo on Saturday.
• COPU Summit, 21 & 22 June, Guangzhou, China:
  I was invited to this last year but couldn’t go, this year I’ll be going along to meet with Chinese distributions and spread the Free Software gostpel to a high-powered group of executives from free softwarte companies and from the Chinese government.
• LUG Radio Live, 7 July, Wolverhampton:
  After exotic travel, I’ll be in the Black Country, telling LRL fans about the joys of OpenWengo, a great free software project that’s only going to get better. On condition that Anne my wife doesn’t need a lift to the hospital in the middle of the night. This will be my last travelling until after the Summer.

So there we have it. Aside from that, the company has organised a “retreat” for a few days in the South of France (oh, the pain) and I’ll be going up to Paris every week, as I have been for the last 6 months.

Ho hum.

GNOME Live CDs II – the return!

They’re back! And this time, they’ve got company.

Two years ago, Luis Villa took up the cross and made sure that there was a GNOME LiveCD for GNOME 2.10 and GNOME 2.12 – he was joined in that journey by a band of companions like Marcus Bauer, the man who made sure the 2.12 Live CD was available in 12 languages.

After a couple of releases of a lapse, they’re back! We have revived torrent.gnome.org (with many thanks to Corey and Michael from OSU OSL for installing the server so quickly, and for providing the rack space and bandwidth, and to Intel for the 5U (!) server that it’s running off, and to Olav for getting things configured).

Ken van Dine is the man to send all the accolades – he’s one of the people behind Foresight Linux, the most GNOME friendly distro around – they release with the latest GNOME release on the same day as GNOME.

Not only do we have a LiveCD ISO image for download this time, though, we also have VMWare, QEMU and VHD Virtual Server images available for all you virtualisation freaks out there.

LiveCDs and VM appliances are good for a few different things – giving away at trade shows and conferences, showing off GNOME to your boss without having to spend all day installing, or writing and testing GNOME software for the latest platform without being on the bleeding edge for all your user needs.

So head on over to torrent.gnome.org and start seeding.

GNOME user groups around the world

I used one of those sites that generates a world map from country lists to see what amount of the world was covered by GNOME User Groups:

I know of a few smaller groups (like in Seattle, although I don’t know if Lion has actually done anything with that) and there are certainly countries represented by GNOME Hispano and gnome-fr which I haven’t put in there – I’ve tried to limit myself to countries where I know that there are GNOME User Group members.

There are some surprising absences from the list – the US, for a start.

It seems like US-based GNOMErs think of the foundation as their GNOME User Group. This year, there are exactly 0 US residents on the board, and only one North American (who’s actually an Iranian). So don’t let that myth take hold.

We need local volunteers like Eitan and Brad to man stands and spread GNOME Love thick in conferences like LinuxWorld Solutions, EclipseCon (kudos to Billy Biggs and Ben Konrath for taking this on), OLS, SCALE, the Desktop Linux Summit (which probably isn’t going to happen this year) and OSCon, as well as a decent contingent of people representing us at things like DDC, desktop architects & FSG meetings.

I would love to see an initiative to create a GNOME US Users Group, or even state-wide GNOME User Groups (or even US LUGs who let us know they were fans of GNOME).

This echoes what Jono Bacon mentioned about the Ubuntu community – up until a few months ago, there were no grass-roots Ubuntu advocacy groups in the US. Anyone have any ideas why that might be?

OpenWengo releases the WengoPhone 2.1 rc1

I won’t make a habit of announcing software releases on my blog, but this is an important one – the first release since I’ve been at Wengo that I’ve been involved with.

And since this is the first that most of you will have heard of OpenWengo, allow me to show you around.

OpenWengo is an umbrella project – a community of people working to make great cross-platform free software for communication over IP. From the beginning, we have used open standards to ensure interoperability (even though that’s not quite so easily done as that). We use the SIP protocol for VoIP and video calls, and have integrated libgaim (a part of gail) to allow us to handle a range of IM protocols (we also support SIP/SIMPLE, which is SIP’s messaging and presence extension).

Assane on the videophone

Update: Especially for Paul Cooper (hi Coop) here’s a link to some screenshots.

This release is the first one that I can encourage people to use on Linux – previous releases have had a number of known blocker issues with certain types of hardware. In this release we have fixed literally hundreds of bugs and hardware compatibility issues, and I am now quite happily using the WengoPhone every day for my VoIP and messaging needs. We still have some known issues which need to be resolved for 2.1.0, but we’re well on track.

The release is available here, and a more complete release announcement is here. Bug reports and feedback can be sent to us via the OpenWengo wiki & bug tracker (yes, we use trac, and are overall pretty happy with is, aside from one or two performance issues).

One major black spot on this release, though: translations. We use Launchpad (or more specifically Rosetta) for translations – we convert our .ts files to .pos, then convert back to update the translations for releases.

But since Feisty’s translations opened a couple of weeks ago, there were around 40,000 files awaiting import – and I don’t know what Rosetta does to import a .po file, but it is taking ages. That queue (correction) has 10,000 files which are approved and awaiting importation and my imports (which I requested 10 days ago) are now around 1000th (correction: 10,500th) in the queue. So unfortunately, for the moment, I have no way to let translators start working on the translations for 2.1 on Rosetta, and I had no way of getting existing translations merged from another branch and committed for the 2.1 release.

If we don’t manage to resolve our problems with Rosetta (we were badly bitten in the ass with a Rosetta bug with uploaded .po files last year too), we’re going to have to go back to an old reliable solution, and just get people to use qtlinguist. Which would be a pity, since I like opening up the translation to people who don’t have a full development environment installed, and having a few approved translators who integrate their work.

The Codebreakers

I got around to watching this programme by the BBC (made for BBC World, and it shows) on free software recently, and it’s pretty interesting – it’s an overview from 20,000 feet of the world of free software and the breakthroughs we’ve made with the public sector in developing countries and established IT giants.

I found it through the Weekly Squeak, which also links to an article called “Breaking Barriers” (PDF, 1MB) which talks about a lot of what we know already – how and why free software is helping bridge the digital divide.

FOSDEM

It’s Sunday afternoon in FOSDEM, and I’m just adding one or two slides to compliment the presentation I’m giving this afternoon – which gives me a minute to sit down and think on everything that’s happened since we got here.

I travelled to FOSDEM with Mathieu Stute of OpenWengo on the surprisingly fast Thalys, which gave me a chance to write my presentation on “Developing GNOME through marketing and outreach” (shortened to “Marketing GNOME” on the title slide).

Thanks to Bader for proving one of my early points after the talk – he said “you know you didn’t talk about marketing, you talked about promotion”. We spend too much time talking about metaphysical questions like “what is GNOME” and “what is marketing”, and not enough time actually making the easy wins in outreach. The main point I wanted to get through with this presentation are that there are lots of ways that grass-roots movements can do outreach, but that we have now got most of the useful infrastructure in place to allow the project as a whole to benefit from that outreach, and create the feedback loop which will improve GNOME over time.

Some simple things that you can do as an individual:

• Talk to your local council and get in contact with their CTO to see if there are plans to use free software
• Talk to the college professor you know asking if he’d like to have students do a free-software related project next year
• Offer to do a talk to the local LUG/college computer club on free software and GNOME
• Write articles for the local paper/magazines
• Ask local magazine editors if they’d like to include a GNOME LiveCD or OpenCD on their cover

All of these things come from the same principle – people aren’t aware that there are free software community members everywhere – a local counsil would like to use some stuff, but they don’t know about the local LUG, and no-one’s thought to go and talk to them. Magazine editors are looking for content, but don’t know who to ask. Trade stands are being organised, and people ask the GNOME Foundation if we can run a stand, the answer is almost always “I don’t know”.

I also gave a lightning talk on OpenWengo which was well received, I think – and I’ve had lots of chats at various stages with Yannick from Nokia and Simon and Daff from Collabora about Telepathy and its relationship to OpenWengo.

Yesterday evening, had a good dinner (expensive, and not very copious, but nice) with a bunch of people from the FLOSSFoundations group – I don’t remember all the names, but Gerv from MoFo, Allison Randall from TPF, Cornelius and Sebastien from KDE eV, Greg Stein, Sander Striker, colmmacc and others from the Apache Foundation, and Leslie from the Google Summer of Code were there – we had a good & varied chat which went from energy through to hacking, accountants, trademarks (as usual) and governance. Oh – and Belgian beer.

Today is chill-out day in FOSDEM – everyone’s a little dehydrated, a little hung over and a little tired – which makes for a nice chilled atmosphere. I am still getting over people walking around at 10 in the morning with a bottle of Orval in their hand…

For those wondering, I didn’t manage to get up and get running at 7am on Saturday. I finally got on the road about 7.45 – and planned on running a little over an hour just to tread water for the week. In the end, I got lost in the outskirts of Brussels (running South on the East side of the park, rather than North on the West side), and ended up running about 11 miles, which is close enough to keep me on schedule for the marathon.