Category: Czech Topics

GUADEC 2013 in Brno

Today was the last conference day of GUADEC 2013 and I have to say that being involved in the conference organization and volunteering has been an amazing experience. I want to thank my fellow organizers, our volunteers and all the people who offered their help to make GUADEC in Brno happen. You were great!

This year’s program included a number of talks related to community outreach and documentation. On Thursday, Kat and Sindhu talked about how to get involved in community efforts such as the GNOME Docs. At the Newcomers Workshop organized by Marina and others, I had a chance to meet our newest member of the Czech localization team. Our team, just like pretty much any other, needs fresh blood, so I was more that happy to see so many newcomers attending GUADEC, including those who are also interested in other aspects of the project than just coding.

At the GNOME Foundation AGM on Friday, Sindhu gave an update on GNOME documentation and I talked about what GNOME Localization has been up to since the last GUADEC in A Coruna.

Kat gave a talk on documentation on the third day. Later that day, we had a lightning talk session and I talked a bit about Getting Started video tutorials that we introduced in GNOME 3.8. Today, Marta gave a presentation on the developer tutorial for GTK+, followed by Jeff Fortin who gave a talk on PiTiVi and showed us some really funny videos.

It’s probably needless to say that conferences like GUADEC are special in that you can finally meet in person other members of the teams that you are involved in. Seeing familiar and new faces is always nice.

Next week

Next week we plan to have a docs hackfest, which will be focusing on the GNOME Desktop System Administration Guide. GNOME translators also plan to discuss some hot topics in GNOME i18n, such as broken translations for the gnome.org website, a l10n workflow for translating Git submodules, auto-committing translation files to GNOME Git repos etc. One of the outstanding issues we had appears to be already fixed – big kudos to Matthias for that.

If you are interested in GNOME docs or l10n, be sure to join us for the shared docs & l10n session we will have on the morning of the 6th. So, see you next week!

Czech translations and Google Code-in 2011

This year, the GNOME Czech Translation Team officially participates in the Google Code-in program for pre-university students ages 13-18. I joined the GNOME mentors group and submitted four tasks so that students can help our team with updating GNOME 3.4 translations for gnome-system-monitor and seahorse’s UI, and brasero and file-roller’s documentation.

The full announcement in Czech was posted to the Czech translation team mailing list.

Great news is that one of the tasks has been already claimed by a student. But if you know anybody interested and suitable to participate in the program, or if you’re a Czech-speaking student yourself, don’t hesitate and claim your task today! Just keep in mind that all works stop on January 16, 2012.

From looking at the list of tasks submitted for the GNOME Project, it’s very pleasing to see that there are several GNOME translation teams also taking part in the program, besides other, perhaps more usual tasks oriented on coding, documentation, etc.

Big thanks goes to our Czech teammate André Klapper for providing me with some useful information and, above all, for coordinating the whole effort from the GNOME end.

And, obviously, big thanks to Google for organizing this program.

Czech community events

Just a follow-up to my previous post on the GNOME 3 Launch Party in Prague and two notes with regard to my past and future talks on FLOSS community localization.

Registration opened for the GNOME 3 Launch Party in Prague

Jiří set up a simple registration form and we ask all attendants to register. This is in particular so organizers will have some idea as to how many people can be expected for the first part of our party with talks, and also for booking the pub afterwards.

The registration form is in Czech (almost), nonetheless, but it shouldn’t be hard to submit it even if you don’t understand the language: fill in your given name and surname in the text box, then remember to tick the checkboxes below, the first one is for the first part of the party, and the second for the social event. (Yes, the Submit button and the “Required” label don’t seem to be localizable in the Google Docs interface.)

LinuxAlt 2010

I gave a talk on localization at the LinuxAlt 2010 community conference which was held in Brno, at the Brno University of Technology, Faculty of Information Technology, on November 6-7, 2010. Similarly to the one at the conference in Zilina last summer, this talk was mainly about the i18n/l10n basics, translation community building within the smaller and bigger projects alike, about usual translation workflows and tools, be it on the desktop or in the cloud, translation outsourcing, crowdsourcing and other buzzwords everybody loves.

Slides and audio record are available (in Czech). There is no recorded stream for download yet.

Open Source Conference / LinuxExpo 2011

The biggest FLOSS event in the Czech Republic, at least as per attendance, will be held on April 19, 2011 in Prague, at the U Hájků Congress Center. My talk on localization has been accepted recently, but the conference schedule is not available yet.

So if you will be around Prague either on April 9 or April 19, don’t hesitate to catch me. I always appreciate a chance to meet up and talk to people who are passionate about FLOSS communities, localization and documentation. I swear I’m rather chit-chatty when it comes to these things!

GNOME 3 Launch Party in Prague

In January, Jiří Eischmann started organizing the GNOME 3 Launch Party in the Czech Republic, with the obvious goal to celebrate the major release of GNOME 3, to promote and talk about the next generation of the GNOME Desktop in front of the Czech audience interested in FLOSS and technology generally.

A rather informal event in its form, organized by the Czech Translation Team, will be hosted on Saturday, April 9, 2011, at the Student Facilities in Strahov (Strahov Dormitory Campus), Block 7, Prague (Areál kolejí Strahov, blok 7, Praha 6). See Google Maps.

We will start at 15:00 with the following talks:

  • Tomáš Bžatek & Tomeu Vizoso: GNOME 3 from users’ and developers’ perspective
  • Vojtěch Trefný: Unity as an alternative way
  • André Klapper: Release and bug management in GNOME (in English)
  • Petr Kovář: Czech localization

Visitors will be offered fresh Live USB Images running GNOME 3 based on Fedora. After the conference part (around 19:00), there will be a social event/informal meeting in a near pub.

There may be some further news from organizers regarding this event, so follow the appropriate Czech GNOME 3 Launch Party page, or this blog.

Come to visit us and join the GNOME 3 fun in Prague!

GNOME 3 Poster

Czech GNOME LUG nonsuccess

A member of the Czech GNOME community once had a promising idea to strengthen and organize user community in our country (and possibly also counting in people from the neighboring Slovakia) at a common place where interested visitors could find various information on the GNOME Project, and on what could be called as a GNOME software ecosystem, on its developers and, in particular, end users. This all provided in their local language, and considering needs and concerns of the local user group. It was nothing new, after all, we knew about similar local groups that have been very active in, e.g., Asia or Hispanic world.

But contrary to the vital successful ones, the Czech group (or what was meant to be the Czech group) soon showed its limits. I assume that this GNOME LUG attempt failed mainly due to the quantitative factor: in a country with 10 million people, the FLOSS community may be seen as strong and vital enough, probably thanks in part to a distinct tradition of higher technical education (in the country that has been continuously attracting many ICT businesses from 90s on, including those well-known in the FLOSS world), but in the end, it showed that it’s not enough for an enthusiastic individual or a handful of people with interest in a minority software to be able to form an organized group.

Instead of that, Czech and Slovak people who want to read or communicate about FLOSS tend to frequent two or three major Czech FLOSS-oriented websites with a standard set of social networking services. In addition to that, the only viable FLOSS websites beside the major ones are those aimed at “downstream” projects, i.e. distributions, operating systems or productivity software end-user support. This might be a significant drawback for upstream and much more “generic” projects like GNOME in general: users are aware of the distribution they are running, but they don’t know much about exactly what desktop environment they use. Nor they seem to care that much, after all.

So to make long story short, we had (and still have, for what it’s worth) a LUG-supporting website, but we quickly learned that such a website is merely unable to attract its potential users. That being said, for our Czech case, it wasn’t very helpful, either, that the project was planned and realized more or less as a one-man-show, with its primary and sole author not allowing website visitors to actively participate on and contributing to website content, thus making it hardly interactive, making it less like what many call Web 2.0 nowadays.

The author was ultimately able to work on the website for less than a year, from Summer 2008 to April 2009, with the last published news commenting the GNOME 2.26 release. Since then, the website has been dead as in never coming back.