Filthy attempts on the unconference session scheduling whiteboard by so-called “friends” trying to trick me into literally ‘something’.
They won’t succeed.
#makeandrenevertalkagain #noicecreamleftbehind
GUADEC 2016.
Travel.
Middle East
In late March 2016, I attended some Wikimedia gatherings in the Middle East: The WikiArabia conference in Amman (Jordan), a Technical Meetup in Ramallah (Palestinian territories), and the Wikimedia Hackathon in Jerusalem (Israel).
I gave an introduction to the many technical areas in Wikimedia anyone can contribute to. I also gave an introduction how to use Phabricator, the project management suite used (for mostly technical aspects) by the Wikimedia community which allows managing and following progress in projects and collaborating with developers.
As I love discussing society and politics I was not sure initially how much I’d have open and blunt conversations. But on the first evening I was already sitting together with folks from Tunesia, Egypt and Saudi-Arabia who were comparing the situations in their home countries. People also allowed me to learn a little bit about how daily life is in Iraq or Saudi-Arabia.
Petra
After a short trip to Petra, we spent an entire day to get to and cross the border between Jordan and the West Bank. If you look at the mere distance it feels ridiculous. It definitely makes you appreciate open borders.
At the border crossing between Jordan and the West Bank
Afterwards, we were very lucky that Maysara (one of our hosts) took the time and his car to drive us around in the Westbank to visit a bunch of spots, pass settlements, look at walls, or wonder which streets to take (sometimes a checkpoint with a soldier pointing a machine gun at you helps making decisions).
The old city center of Nablus
Graffiti on graffiti in Ramallah
At some point, Maysara simplified it in a single quoted sentence: For Israelis it’s fear. For Palestinians it’s humiliation.
Street sign in the West Bank
Imagery of dead fighters in Nablus
In Israel, we walked through Jerusalem’s old town, visited Masada and took a bath in the Dead Sea.
Dead Sea: Past war zones
View from Masada (the squares were siege camps)
On the last day I visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial with some co-workers (thanks to Moriel for organizing it). It’s obviously an activity you cannot “look forward to”. I am still impressed by our guide who explained and summarized history extremely well.
The architecture of Yad Vashem makes you go through several rooms on the left and right of the passageway in a chronological way and our guide mentioned several times that you “cannot yet see what is coming a few rooms (means: a few years) later”, and the question “Why did Jewish citizens not flee” got answered by “Where would you try to escape to if even outside of ghettos and concentration camps everybody is hostile”. Which explained very well the self-understanding why to found a state for Jews.
I am incredibly thankful to those many great people I could meet and who shared their points of views on the social and political situation, always in a pretty reflected and respectful way despite of all the frustration being around.
And whatever my question was to locals, the answer pretty much always was “It’s more complicated than you thought.”
India
Afterwards I spent some time in India to attend Rootconf, visit GeekSkool to learn a lot about why the concept works, and attend GNOME.Asia (thanks to Shobha and everybody organizing it!).
Hardware recycling via badge lanyards
Breakdance competitions
In a society where the path of welfare could be expressed by “walk → motorbike → car”, I received some grins admitting I had never had a motorbike ride before. In Indian traffic I’d call that an experience, for a tourist like me.
GNOME.Asia 2016 venue
GNOME.Asia 2016 music
As usual, it’s wonderful to finally meet folks in person who you’ve only spoken to online beforehand, and to hang out with old friends. (I sound like a broken record here. I am sorry I could not see everybody. I’ll be back.)
War Porn.
Sometimes, when some individual, group, institution publishes, releases, leaks a cruel video of this planet’s conflicts, media decide not to show it or only show a (edited) screenshot.
I usually end up trying to find the uncut video on the internet because I naively believe I can better realize how cruel things are when I force myself to watch it.
So I constantly feel the need to defend my behavior against accusations of voyeurism and dehumanization: “Can’t you imagine the rest anyway? Haven’t you played video games and watched enough fictitious movies?”
A few months ago I bought the photo book “War Porn” by Christoph Bangert (a photo journalist in war regions). The photos are somewhere between disturbing and disgusting.
Bangert also covers the aspect of self-censorship as a photographer or publisher, hence for some of the pages you have to decide yourself whether to break the perforation to see the image included on that page.
The book’s introduction puts it into simple words that I could not find myself:
“What’s the point of showing these things? We know that wars and disasters are horrible events. But are we really aware of just HOW horrible they are? Yes? Why are we so shocked by these pictures, then?”
Posted in lang-en, non-technical, politics
2 Comments
Wikimedia in Google Code-in 2015
Google Code-in 2015 is over. As a co-admin and mentor for Wikimedia (one of the 14 organizations who took part and provided mentors and tasks) I can say it’s been crazy as usual. :)
To list some of the students’ achievements:
- More than a dozen of MediaWiki extensions converted to using the extension registration mechanism
- Confirmation dialogs in UploadWizard and TimedMediaHandler use OOjs-UI
- Vagrant roles created for the EmbedVideo and YouTube extensions
- Two more scraping functions in the html-metadata node.js library (used by Citoid)
- Many MediaWiki documentation pages marked as translatable
- lc, lcfirst, uc and ucfirst magic words implemented in jqueryMsg
- Screenshots added to some extension homepages on mediawiki.org
- ReCaptchaNoCaptcha of the ConfirmEdit extension uses the UI language for the captcha
- MobileFrontend, MultimediaViewer, UploadWizard, Newsletter, Huggle, and Pywikibot received numerous improvements (too many to list)
- Long deprecated wfMsg* calls were removed from many extensions
- The CommonsMetadata extension parses vcards in the src field
- The MediaWiki core API exposes “actual watchers” as in “action=info”
- MediaWiki image thumbnails are interlaced whenever possible
- Kiwix is installable/moveable to the SD card, automatically opens the virtual keyboard for “find in page”, (re)starts with the last open article
- imageinfo queries in MultimediaViewer are cached
- The Twinkle gadget‘s set of article maintenance tags was audited and its XFD module has preview functionality
- The RandomRootPage extension got merged into MediaWiki core
- One can remove items from Gather collections
- A new MediaWiki maintenance script imports content from text files
- Pywikibot has action=mergehistory support implemented
- Huggle makes a tone when someone writes something
- Many i18n issues fixed and strings improved
- Namespace aliases added to MediaWiki’s export dumps
- The Translate extension is compatible with PHP 7
- …and many, many, more.
Numerous GCI participants also blogged about their GCI experience with Wikimedia:
- Ioannis Kydonis
- PranavK
- Julian Engel
- mhutti
- Scimonster
- Victor Barbu
- Georggi
- Ananay Arora
- AndyTechGuy
- MtDu
The Grand Prize winners and finalists will be announced on February 8th.
Congratulations to our many students and 35 mentors for fixing 461 tasks, and thank you for your hard work and your contributions to free software and free knowledge.
See you around on IRC, mailing lists, Phabricator tasks, and Gerrit changesets!
Posted in computer, lang-en, wikimedia
2 Comments
2015: Music.
Publishing my usual list of awkward and never complete pop music preferences of 2015.
Grimes’ “Art Angels” is probably my favorite album of 2015. Halsey’s “Badlands” debut and the latest releases by Purity Ring and Chvrches came close.
In general Angel Haze was the most dominant artist in my playlist. I also enjoyed Little Simz’ “A Curious Tale of Trials + Persons” debut and FKA Twigs’ “M3LL155X”.
Other helpful artists were We are Twin, Leftfield (with a surprisingly great 2015 release), Lowell, TĀLĀ, Camila Moreno, and Tei Shi, and Autobahn.
Posted in lang-en, music, non-technical
1 Comment
Google Code-in 2015 has started!
Another round of Google Code-in started yesterday. Together with Nemo and Petr I am one of the organization administrators for the Wikimedia community.
In this year’s edition of Google Code-in, students can choose from tasks provided by the following organizations / projects: Apertium, Copyleft Games, Drupal, FOSSASIA, Haiku, KDE, MetaBrainz, OpenMRS, RTEMS, SCoRe, Sugar Labs, Systers, Ubuntu, and Wikimedia.
If you are a 13-17 year old pre-university student interested in getting involved into free and open source software development, check out Google Code-in.
It is a great opportunity to learn about distributed software projects, to find out which areas of software development you are interested in, to gather some on-hands experience, to contribute to “real” projects out there used by millions of people, and to make new friends all over the world.
Prioritizing volunteer contributions in free software development
Wikimedia is an organization which has both volunteers and paid folks working together in software development, with many software projects and different stakeholders involved.
In Wikimedia, there is currently some discussion how to improve the code review process. One aspect is reducing our code review queues and waiting times, with a focus on contributions provided by volunteers.
There are numerous successful free and open source software projects with a similar setup of companies and volunteers involved (Mozilla, Openstack, …) so I’m curious if your project has also investigated similar questions and if there is some knowledge and experience to share.
- In your project, do maintainers commit to review contributed patches in a certain timeframe, like “all patches receive a first review comment within four days”? How is this process implemented? Do you think it is successful?
- With an existing backlog of patches that did not manage to attract a review, what do you with ancient and rotting patches? Do you just abandon them after a certain timeframe in your code review tool to get a “cleaner slate”? Or do you leave them open to (theoretically) allow someone to find them and them pick up?
- Do you have any specific workflow in place that provides feedback to patch authors who contribute a patch to a rather unmaintained repositories that noone feels responsible for (anymore)? Do you signal the lack of maintainers and encourage contributors to step up as maintainers? How?
- Do you have a workflow in place to specifically prioritize the review of patches contributed by volunteers? How efficient is it?
I’d be very interested in hearing how your project handles these issues. Needless to say, links to documents are welcome. Thanks!
Wikimedia: Phabricator, Tech Community Metrics
Trying to quickly summarize what’s been either on my plate or what’s been generally cooking in Wikimedia, before I postpone writing that again…
Phabricator
- Seven months after migrating from Bugzilla to Phabricator (and keeping Bugzilla available for login to access personal votes and saved searches while making all tickets read-only), we killed Bugzilla for good in May 2015. One tool less to maintain.
John and Daniel turned Bugzilla tickets and their activity/history into a static HTML version at static-bugzilla.wikimedia.org. That static and sanitized database dump was created to keep some historical changes available, for example historical changes to the priority of a ticket were not imported into Phabricator but only the Priority value at the moment of migration. Researchers might also be interested in that (or not).
Nemo was kind enough to use that data dump and import it into a read-only Bugzilla instance on Wikimedia Labs again which also includes tickets’ votes at that time. - Furthermore, no Wikimedia teams are left using Mingle for task management and planning – all moved to Phabricator. We still have a small number of Trello users though.
- Wikimedia Deutschland is working on Phragile (for agile project planning) to replace the custom Phabricator Sprint extension in the long run.
- Two weeks ago, Wikimanía 2015 took place where (among a billion other things) Andrew and I gave introduction talks to the Wikimedia tech infrastructure (we plan to turn that into a generic script that anybody could follow). I also gave an introduction to Wikimedia Phabricator and joined the Community Engagement panel discussion. In general: Great people in the Wikimedia community and great conversations. (Plus need to go to Mexico City again to see more of that.)
- As usual, Phabricator upstream development is moving fast. Upstream now provides Spaces to isolate access areas. Once we’ve set this up (work in progress) in the Wikimedia instance, this will help some of our non-engineering teams to manage tasks that are not (yet) meant for public.
Tech Community Metrics
Recently also spent more time with Tech Community Metrics. Wikimedia has some metrics about code repository activity (Git), code review activity (Gerrit, in the long run to be replaced by Phabricator Differential), mailing lists and IRC. It’s available at korma.wmflabs.org backed by MetricsGrimoire and supported by Bitergia. When we migrated from Bugzilla to Phabricator Maniphest we initially lost any statistics on bug tracker activity but now there is an initial Phabricator Maniphest backend in MetricsGrimoire available.
Again, all this is work in progress and needs way more fine-tuning (see our project workboard).
Again, all this is work in progress and needs way more fine-tuning (see our project workboard).
GNOME.Asia Summit 2015 (part 2).
Continuing with the first day: Shobha Tyagi elaborated on the acceptance problems when moving users from Microsoft Windows to Linux based systems at her university. That talk resulted in interesting follow-up discussions on regional differences.
Shobha’s talk
Later on, lightning talks took place.
Olav banging the lightning talk gong
On the second day, Alexandre Franke explained the GNOME release cycle.
Kukuh Syafaat showed how he uses his guitar, keyboard and computer running Ardour, Guitarix, LMMS and the JACK audio connection kit to make music with GNOME.
Kukuh’s talk
And Yantisa Akhadi presented OpenStreetMap’s impressive improvements in covering Asia, often leaving commercial map services like Bing or Google far behind.
Yantisa’s talk
The second day ended with a thunderstorm. It created a refreshing breeze in the main hall and made the frogs speak up outside the hall.
Again, kudos to the organization team (great work!) and thanks to the sponsors!
GNOME.Asia and GUADEC
This was the fourth GNOME.Asia summit I attended. Compared to GUADEC (the annual European conference), GNOME.Asia seems to have more fluctuation among attendees (as travelling can be more expensive in Asia due to its size and flight costs in comparison to costs of living?). There also seem to be more attendees that show up being curious what that international conference at the university is about, so it feels good to have some “how you can get involved” talks covering coding, documentation, translation, QA / bug triaging, engagement / marketing, …
GNOME.Asia summits also offer more talks with a regional focus. Would have loved to attend the “Open Source Software in the shoes industry” or “My experience as a farmer, trader and principle of village affairs in contributing to BlankOn” talks – unfortunately they were at the same time as my own talk.
Still it was a gift to speak with many community members while walking around, grabbing coffee or food, or just standing outside enjoying the sun.
Terima kasih.
Posted in computer, gnome, lang-en
3 Comments
GNOME.Asia Summit 2015.
It’s that time of the year again: GNOME.Asia Summit at Universitas Indonesia in Depok (Indonesia)! On Thursday some workshops took place how to contribute to GNOME translation and documentation and how to start coding.
Today (Friday) is Day 1 of the conference.
Entrance to the main hall
The main hall (before opening)
There were welcoming speeches by the local organization team, Kat Gerasimova of GNOME, Mirna Adriani, PhD (Dean of the computer science faculty) and Aidil Chendramata (from the Ministry of Communication and Informatics).
Later today I am going to give an introduction to handling (“triaging”) bug reports in GNOME’s issue tracking system.
A big thanks to the local organization team and the many sponsors of this conference for making this possible!
