Apart from hacking at Open Help, we also…
For those of you who have not been before, Open Help has quite a standard conference layout of two conference days over the weekend followed by three hacking days during the week. As I mentioned before, I joined the travel committee a few months ago and was working on processing GUADEC sponsorsip requests. A number of the summer interns asked me to explain to them what is the difference between conference days and BoFs. So, this is what our conference days at Open Help were like:
And this was what our hacking days were like:
We took one look at https://developer.gnome.org/ and decided that it needed some care. After quite a lot of brainstorming and debate, we concluded that the structure of the Developer Center needs to be simplified, which is now a work-in-progress in master.
One of the biggest issues that we addressed is that the Documentation Team does not have the manpower to keep up with all the cool new stuff that developers should know about. Ryan is leading the effort to try a different approach which we hope may be more developer friendly when it comes to maintenance and new content with a “How Do I…?” series on the wiki.
In the mean time, we are aiming to merge the platform-demos, the examples and mini-showcase applications, into what is currently the platform overview.
For more details on the state of https://developer.gnome.org/, have a look at the Documentation Team’s planning pages on the wiki.
Open Help is on this weekend in Cincinnati. We’re half way through the two conference days and have seen very interesting presentations from Jorge Castro about helping users help users, Janet Swisher on sprints and Rich Bowen about writing better help, which led to interesting discussions during the panel and open floor.
The trip over to the US was a bit long as Dave and I were delayed at almost every point of the way, but we finally arrived in Cincinnati after a 22 hour trip to a lovely reception at Via Vite on Fountain Square.
The conference itself has a very relaxed atmosphere. With around 40 attendees, it is possible to meet everyone and it is rather nice to have a fluid schedule. There are people here from a range of different projects, including Drupal, the Wikimedia Foundation and WordPress, including four people who previously participated in the OPW. Unfortunately, Sindhu and Aruna, the Documentation Team interns from round 5 and 6, could not make it because they have exams right now, but I am hoping to meet them at GUADEC.
We had a grand total of 54 sponsorship applications for GUADEC and a budget of €30,000 (approximately $39,000). The requests amounted to $57,668 which we calculated would be more realistic at $53,661 after verifying travel costs. We were able to offer sponsorships to the amount of $45,055 to all 54 applicants, as Google will kindly assist with some of the cost of bringing the interns to GUADEC.
The applicants consisted of 24 Foundation members, 12 speakers, 24 GSoC students, 5 OPW interns, 18 women and 1 journalist.
The first application was received on the 5th of April (thank you for being organised) and three applications were late.
This was the first event that I have helped process from the start, with lots of help from Germán. The earlier applications were generally easy to process, but some of the later applications were more time consuming as not all were complete and precise, so we needed to verify details. Sorting applications is surprisingly time consuming, three of the travel committee members spent around 51 hours on it over the last week, and there are many points to consider before making the offers. Overall, the applicants have been happy with the offers that they have received, some have already booked their travel, and it is satisfying to see so many Foundation members and new contributors being given the opportunity to come to GUADEC.
GUADEC is only a couple of months away, so it’s time to start planning for it. The main conference days will be on the 1st to 4th of August, while the BoFs will run from the 5th to the 8th of August.
For those of you who have not been to GUADEC before, the talks happen during the main days while BoFs are reserved for planning and hacking sessions.
The travel sponsorship application period will close in a few days, so now is the time to send in your applications and volunteer to help out during the conference!
The documentation team is back in Brno for another week of writing this year. We are working on updating help pages in time for the GNOME 3.8 release: I am working towards merging gnome-system-monitor and Sindhu‘s rewrite of the gnome-terminal help. We are also working on new help for gnome-boxes, although it will still take some time for us to finish as most of the pages are stubs.
In the mean time, Dave and Marta have been working on developer documentation, updating the Python tutorials and fixing bugs.
As last year, we spent the first two days of the hackfest at Masaryk University and we are at the lovely Red Hat offices from today.
The only downside to this hackfest has been that Sindhu’s visa application was refused, so she could not attend in person, but she is joining us using Google hangouts!
I have just arrived at Universidade da Coruña for GUADEC via a very roundabout route. I have also been told that I cannot comment on the driving of the gentleman in the photo on the right, so I won’t be doing that.
Instead, here is some of what we saw on the way from A Coruña down the Costa da Morte, past Santiago and through Lugo:
The documentation team had a very productive, week long hackfest in Brno that finished last week. We could not have had it without the nice workspaces that were provided by Masaryk University and Red Hat, while Florian Nadge and Petr Kovar did a great job looking after us, even making sure that we got fed tasty pizza on demand so that we could keep going. Syllogist (and Shaun) also treated us to a lovely dinner.
At the hackfest, the team managed to update large chunks of gnome-user-docs for GNOME 3.4, while Susanna and Tiffany added tutorials to developer documentation, and Dave fixed lots of glib and GTK+ API documentation. We were also treated to interesting demonstrations of Boxes and Documents, and we planned out user help for Online Accounts.
Julita has been working on porting the baobab user help from DocBook to Mallard. The first (basic) pass is now complete, but there is still some more work to be done. baobab is also currently being re-written in Vala, so any help from Vala enthusiasts would be very appreciated!
GNOME needs 3 more outreach, 3 more QA, 4 more training and 5 UI tasks to be able to participate in Google Code-in! Add tasks by the end of tomorrow to the wiki page or GNOME won’t be able to participate, which will make Andre very sad ;_;
A couple of months after I finished rewriting the Vinagre help in Mallard, I have had to come back to it because the user interface changed quite significantly (and will continue to change), so some of the help pages needed rewriting/removing/reordering. Dave also noticed that the online version of the help was rather old and Damned Lies showed more translations of the help than actually existed.
One bug and a fix later, the online version should always be up-to-date now. Damned Lies has also been updated (the bug was fixed very quickly by Claude Paroz) which was followed by a surge of translations! More are always welcome 🙂
