andré klapper's blog.

This city is foggy at 3:30AM.

• Conference feels well organized and things (wifi, sound, projectors) work.
• Daniel said that his talk will include pictures of me but I think he fibs. Still not sure whether to consider him a trustworthy source of information after all those years.
• Happy to see some new faces and that it feels like the highest ratio of women among the attendees ever.
• The release-team (those 67% that are present) had a meeting to discuss stuff and such.
• Hotel is a bit outside but has a nice bar so GNOME folks sit outside together till late at night.
• Andreas Nilsson has found his favorite hairstyle.

Yet another notorious “I go to GUADEC” post.

My everchanging plans are to provide the Bugsquad annual report at the AGM meeting and to maybe theoretically join Gil Forcada in his talk “Towards less i18n barriers and more (quality) translations” on Saturday morning. Oh wait, morning? Well, we’ll see.

And to split my body on Monday to attend both the Accessibility BoF and the Localization BoF! Somehow! It’s magic!

Other vague plans feature the terms “parties”, “swimming”, “release team meeting”, “football match” and “GUADEC 2013 hosting intentions”.

I hope to see you around!

GNOME.Asia summit ended five hours ago. A big thanks to our friendly and welcoming organizers for their great work and the good time that we had (and still have) here in Hong Kong, and to the companies that sponsored this conference. As sleep is a precious treasure I’m just posting five of the snapshots that I made and leave writing detailed posts to others.

I’d like to thank the GNOME Foundation for their sponsorship!

Today I arrived in Hong Kong (PRC) to attend this year’s edition of GNOME.Asia summit at the City University of Hong Kong. It takes place on Saturday and Sunday and you can should check out the schedule in case that you are around.

On Sunday I am going to explain how to write and improve GNOME user documentation, and maybe join Tobi to present how to triage bug reports.

While asia has so much manpower and emerging economies, GNOME’s development (and its dominant culture) still feels mostly US/Europe centric to me. Ever wondered how many maintainers in GNOME are based in India or China, to pick just two examples? I don’t know many unfortunately. So if attend GNOME.Asia and would like to talk about cultural differences in communities, user documentation, bug management, translation, release management, …, I’d be happy to talk to you!

Also, thank you GNOME Foundation for covering a large part of my expenses!

A quick and dirty blog post to keep the world out there in the loop about what is done by a dozen of people in a big meeting room with a view over Brno, right next to a small meeting room with a view over Brno filled with people that work on a toolkit.

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. :)

The first two days of the GNOME Documentation hackfest in Brno (CZ) are over.
After I picked up a bunch of jetlagged folks at Prague airport to trick them to Brno, we kicked off at the Masaryk University by having brainstorm sessions trying to use the GNOME Documents and GNOME Online Accounts applications (and I realized how bad their design is and wonder if the corresponding developers just cross fingers that somebody will magically pick up the remaining work and bug reports while they might have moved on to write the next new GNOME application).
Today we moved to the Red Hat offices and everybody got assigned an area of the GNOME Desktop help to check for correctness in version 3.4.

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.