oSC2013 next!

After Akademy 2013 in Bilbao, we will fly (via Berlin...) to Thessaloniki, Greece, where the openSUSE Conference will take place. Like I argued for Akademy, oSC is a relevant and useful event for the openSUSE folk.

History - oSC 10, 11 and 12

This year oSC takes place in Greece, a fact far more relevant than it might seem. The first three openSUSE Conferences I attended took place in Nürnberg. First in a conference center, the third was the legendary oSC2011 in the Zentrifuge, an old factory building creating an absolutely amazing atmosphere. Both events were largely organized by SUSE employees from the Nürnberg office but oSC11 already had a fair involvement of volunteers and a strong focus on BoF sessions and 'getting stuff done'. We had a lively marketing and ambassador team by then. I vividly remember the day before the event, when I rode a van full of crazy geekos by a few stores, buying everything from carpets and plants to lights to dress up the location. Every day we figured out who would staff the bar, organize stuff in the rooms - and moving the chairs was a matter of asking outside if a few folk would be willing to help out. At this event, there was already talk about doing the openSUSE conference in Greece.

First Prague

But going from doing the event in Nue and by SUSE people (with help) to doing it in Greece by volunteers (with help) seemed a big step and the team also had limitations as to the date and time: the event would have to be in May or June. As it was already September when oSC'11 took place, that was very close.

There came a different proposal from Michal and others in Prague, and with an office there, we decided it made much more sense to do it there and told Kostas that he'd have his oSC in Thessaloniki, but one year later. I joined Michal in scouting for a location in Prague and discovered a local community was about to organize another Linux event a mere two weeks after the openSUSE Conference! I proposed to merge the two, and the format of oSC'12 was born. Like oSC'10 two years earlier, this event tried to focus on collaboration and bringing communities together. I unfortunately had to scale back my involvement in the conference significantly after LinuxTag Berlin in May 2012 due to health issues and barely could make it to the event itself. Meanwhile, the Greeks had already started preparing the organization of oSC'13 and were present with a large team at oSC'12 to help run the show.

Greece in 2013

Feedback from the event did show that the openSUSE community wanted more 'Geeko time', so the Greek team has made sure that there will be a good openSUSE focus at the event. Of course, without compromising our open nature: there will be plenty colors besides green. Naturally, SUSE input will be lower than usual - the Nürnberg can't easily take a afternoon off to visit, even a bus trip is not enough. But we have made sure that many central developers will be there and there is a host of great sessions coming - a post about that on news.opensuse.org is coming soon!

Due to the internal changes at SUSE, I haven't been as much involved in the event as I would have liked but just seeing the conference team work has been amazing. It isn't just a Greek affair, mind you - for example, the logo and much artwork comes from the other side of the world, by the hands of US citizen Anditosan and Brazilian Carlos Ribeiro! And as with the Prague conference, Izabel Valverde again played a major role in handling travel support and sponsors. And we have Robert Schweikert and Henne Vogelsang, working on the program and website, Matt Barringer building OSEM (!!!) and some others.

Awesome

I might be overusing that word - but I really, really think oSC'13 will be awesome. As far as it is up to the Greekos organizing it, there's no doubt! And like with Akademy, if you haven't booked yet - you should...

Have a lot of fun and see you in Greece ;-)





PS: note that the above is mostly my memory of How Stuff Happened™. There were plenty more people involved, pushing, making it happen. Thanks to all of them, as we're gonna have a great conference in Greece ;-)

Akademy for everybody

About six weeks from now the yearly KDE conference 'Akademy' will kick off in Bilbao, Spain! Looking forward to that. I had to ramble a bit on why I think it's worth going there. And a tip for if you still have to book!

Have not booked yet?

Aw, I was late, and I'm paying the price, in terms of money and convenience. There's work and family and in my case a dose of always-lateness with this stuff that got in the way. Probably not different for others. But keep in mind - I never met anybody who who was sorry they went through the trouble of going to Akademy! It's worth it...

Relevant

Akademy is relevant, useful and fun above and beyond just another Free Software event. Seriously. Even in a world of Android, KDE still builds major Free Desktop stuff. Think about Krita going places lately. Think about how KDE PIM still is arguably the only serious Free enterprise-ready mail-calendar-etc solution on the market. There is plenty more at the event: KParts might get a successor, we move forwards with new task-centered UI paradigms, we move to new devices and more.

Directions

Akademy is important for setting directions. We don't all agree on where KDE is going and that's why we meet. To SET goals and CHECK expectations. That is hard to do over mailing lists, blogs, social media and all that - so we need to talk in person. We're doing new things and it takes a while, often a long while, to get stuff together. We have to address misconceptions, improve common understanding, find out why we disagree. And this works, we're making progress! Nepomuk is now getting the love it needed and same for KDE PIM, the Plasma team can finally implement their ambitious plans without the technical limitations of old thanks to QMLv2 and openGL etc etc.

And I'm betting that those who think KDE is doing the wrong thing actually have arguments and reasons for that. Are these reasons so vague and unconvincing that nobody will listen? Or would the KDE folk be so stubborn they wouldn't listen to obvious facts? That is either under-estimating who-ever-disagrees or the 300-odd KDE contributors. And both, I think, are undeserving of that.

Family

Akademy is about more than listening to talks or giving them. Even if you haven't had time or motivation to contribute, if you didn't agree with one thing or another or got yelled at by (or did yell at) somebody, does that matter? KDE is family: family has plenty of disagreements and fights, yet in the end, you all hug and make it up to each other, yes? Being at Akademy is not just about learning new things and deciding on the future of what we do (and, to a large degree, where Free Software for end users is going) but it is also about meeting, having energizing and inspiring conversations, learning from each other, sharing great ideas. Something we all enjoy, don't we?

Booking

I'm sure there'll be a lot of people at Akademy but I think that should include you... Now, about the booking. It will be hard to get a hotel room, esp if you need space for two people, I'm afraid... I booked the first 3 days (Thursday-Friday-Saturday) for a painfully high price in the Holiday Inn Express Bilbao and the rest in RÍA DE BILBAO which is far cheaper.

And last but not least, if you're going to Akademy and want to make sure all relevant people are there, be sure to talk to those you'd like to have a chat with, convince them to go! And perhaps add the awesome going to Akademy badges to your blog or website!

openSUSE at LinuxTag 2013

As I wrote last week, openSUSE was at Linuxtag. We didn't have a huge team like last year, nor did we bring all the beer - but we had some fun nonetheless.

Awesomeness

For me, the most awesome thing was the openSUSE Jeopardy done by Christan Boltz, it was SUPER cool. Of course, part of that was because I won, mainly due to the quotes section - my fellow participants had no idea who wrote them. I even recognized my own quote and it looks like I still can agree with myself. Must say that the Jeopardy thing was really, really fun.

For those wondering what the heck I'm talking about: we have small booth talks at our booth at LinuxTag. I believe Henne Vogelsang once started doing this (even before I joined openSUSE), teaching people how to fold paper Geekos and stuff like that. I'm not that creative, so I only gave KDE tips and Tricks on Wednesday and Saturday. Strange enough, nobody even seemed to have noticed that I gave that session in my favorite GNOME shirt... Luckily Christian had a way better idea for these booth talks: Jeopardy!

He has a cool html web thingy for it, complete with tracking scores and all that and I had arranged Club Mate for the winners (and, often, for the losers too). There were questions in areas like security, coding and development languages. Some worked with pictures, others had text but they were all quite ingenious. The '/etc/firstline' was cool although I didn't know any of them: it shows you the first non-comment line of a random file in /etc and you have to say what file it's from. Many of the questions were rather not openSUSE-specific, only the quotes from the Factory mailinglist (quote, you guess who said it) and the openSUSE Releases (screenshots of openSUSE login screens, you guess the version) were. I even learned a thing or two ;-)

Bernhard Wiedemann also joined the booth team, I even have to say he formed the core of it, being the most steady force as Christian didn't make it on Wednesday and I wasn't there on Thursday and Friday. He talked about OBS packaging which also attracted people interested in packaging.

The booth

Meanwhile, I've been working on the new openSUSE Merchandising program and that includes making a 'list of stuff to bring'. I decided to try and use LinuxTag to test out a few things! The booth pictures you see include some (but not all) of the goodies we plan on including in booth boxes. We learned some valuable lessons about the materials at the event. Our booth was at the entry of the event, for good or bad. The area was a bit small (although we shared some space with the ownCloud team next to us) but mostly people simply walked by to the main hall with booths and I'm not sure if they ever came back...

We had no beer this year but openSUSE Conference flyers and posters as well as a batch of 500 openSUSE flyers based on a design we've been working on in the last 2 years (until now they were only printed in the US). It seems not too many are interested in going to Greece (can't imagine why) but it was still good to point the existence of the conference out to people.

For the openSUSE flyer I had the explicit goal of seeing if it could help kickstart a conversation. I am not sure if that really works, but of course our booth team was so experienced they don't really need talking points.

The 'we believe' poster got some very valid criticism from the ownCloud team which was next to our booth: it has too much text on it and people simply won't read it. Having that design as small (a6 or so) hand out might work far better, or as a slide in a presentation. And having a big one with images or somehow else more, hum, easily (lazily) processed might be a good combination. Anybody has any ideas on how to put our philosophy as expressed on this poster in the form of a more graphical image? I'd love to see some ideas ;-)

Also, if you visited our booth and are reading this - I would love feedback, both good and bad. On the looks of it, the posters, flyers, DVD, people - all of it!

Talks

We also had a few 'big' (as in, not at the booth) talks. Bernhard and Sascha spoke about OpenStack / SUSE Cloud / crowbar in the main track and I myself talked for about 30 min on what happened to openSUSE in the last year and gave a 2 minute lightning talk about our booth as well. All talks went well but LinuxTag isn't the most crowded event and seems to be getting smaller - talking for 20 people is perhaps more fun as you get to have more close contact to the audience but it's hardly worth traveling for.

The booth talks I gave about 'advanced KDE usage' where big fun. They usually had just a handful of visitors which meant we all sat together around my laptop and could discuss things quite nicely. Fun!

Edit: and I forgot to mention the talk Bernhard gave on "openSUSE on ARM" including our cross-compilation tricks with qemu-linux-user. And sorry for the appearance of some old blogs on planet.KDE, I have no idea how to convince blogger not to do that stupid thing - I only updated the tags. The dates are correct :(

Getting involved in Free Software

I frequently get the question, by mail or over social networks:

But how do I get involved in $PROJECT?

Now a common answer is 'just do it' while others often point to resources like the KDE Developers Beginners Guide and Contribute to openSUSE, or write a simple how-to for building a package. But I usually don't actually reply with links to any of those. Mostly, people have found these resources by themselves.

What they want to know now is how to, you know, actually do it! And as that question can actually be answered rather project-independent so I thought it would be useful to write it down here.

Step one - Build the Code and get Familiar

After reading the various guides and how-to's, you set up a development environment. Be sure you can run the unstable application(s) or hack on a package. Getting that up and running is a very good first step.

I would also subscribe to mailing lists, read the blogs and hang out in IRC. Just watch what is going on: it will teach you the culture of the community and that's crucial to get stuff done later.

Step Two - Hack Something

Perhaps you will already find bugs, then: trying to report them is good, trying to fix them is better. It will not be easy to fix them but that is when you can ask for help on IRC, forums or here!

If you don't find any bugs you want to fix, perhaps you can think about what to add, what to change. What do YOU think is important and what needs to be done? It doesn't matter if you pick something yourself or find a todo list or wiki page of the project and pick something there. The hardest part will be: JUST DO IT. Get hacking. You'll get stuck, that is OK: read documentation and when you can't figure it out, just ask for help. Above all: don't give up until you are done! I would suggest not to pick something too big. A one-liner patch will take you a day, easily, and might not seem important, but this first step matters a lot. Don't try to fix the entire user interface or work flow with your first change! For example, fixing code style to comply with the project rules is already a perfectly fine first step.

Step Three - Get it in

Now you got something, so get it back to the project. On Github or on the Open Build Service you do a merge request; in other projects you have different work flows varying from sending the patch by mail to using review board or other tools. It doesn't matter.

This won't be easy, but that is mostly due to you being so anxious about it: it can take quite a while for the developers to review the patch and they're sure to have some comments on it. Don't be discouraged and do know that you're allowed to poke them: two weeks waiting isn't much in many projects but it's enough that you are entitled to poke somebody. Send a follow-up mail or ping somebody you know is active in the project on IRC and ask politely if they know how you can get feedback or if you did something wrong in the way you asked.

Note that your patch will not always go in, even in modified form. Not all projects might be OK receiving code style fixes or consider what you fixed a bug. Again, the hardest part here is to not be discouraged. You can ask if they can at least tell you that what you did made some kind of sense; and/or ask for a suggestion for something easy to fix. If they're half-way decent they will be nice about it! If not, perhaps you picked the wrong community to help out in...

Step Four - That's all!

When you manage to fix or hack ONE thing, you have done the hardest part of getting involved in Free Software: you GOT STARTED. From then on, you can find other things and really Make a Difference.

Really

Seriously, there is no more to it. The hardest part is of course the doing itself - but no amount of preparation can make that easier. The most important tip in this is to not give up, the second most important one is to ask for help. All developers had to go through this. Some locked themselves up in a basement, others spend a week banging their head against a computer screen. All of them created a ugly beast of a patch, article, image or whatever your first attempt is. That is perfectly fine. Accepting that is probably the third most important tip ;-)

Of course, I can recommend to check out Open Advice as it contains the lessons of quite a few smart folk. The short essays make for a nice read before bed time or so.

Have a lot of fun and enjoy hacking ;-)

LinuxTag Awesomeness!

Heya,

Tomorrow LinuxTag starts again. There'll be an openSUSE booth, although we won't be overstaffed this year. If you're up for helping, that would be greatly appreciated. You don't have to be a super technical person to be at a booth and help out: if you follow some blogs around openSUSE you already know more than most visitors and you can help out just fine! It's how I got started...

See you at LinuxTag! You can find us Geekos at Hall 7.1a, Booth 130.

Consensus decision making

Jono blogged about respect in community discussions. I have zero to say on the storm-in-a-teacup (his words) that started it other than, perhaps, suggest that when there are waves, there is wind. But whatever direction that wind blows, I'd like to focus on something else. Jono made the following statement:

Ubuntu is not a consensus-based community. Consensus communities rarely work, and I am not aware of any Open Source project that bases their work on wider consensus in the community.

I'm not entirely sure what he means with consensus and community here. He himself defines community as "a collection of people (or animals) who interact with one another in the same environment". Consensus decision making, according to Wikipedia, is:

"a group decision making process that seeks the consent of all participants. Consensus may be defined professionally as an acceptable resolution, one that can be supported, even if not the "favourite" of each individual"

Talking consensus

Let me take this as an opportunity to address a common misconception about consensus: that consensus means full agreement. The Wikipedia entry already points out that the outcome has to be 'acceptable', one that 'can be supported'. This matters: Jono probably meant to say that there is no sizeable community where everybody fully agrees on every decision and I can't imagine he is wrong on that. But that is not what consensus means.

(dis)agreement

The reality is that in a large and diverse group of people, it is impossible to really reach full agreement on any sufficiently complicated matter. Making decisions on agreement of all participants thus doesn't work. Consensus, instead, allows a decision to be made even in the face of disagreement. Essentially, it is a form of democracy without voting.

Ever heard the phrase: "Let's agree to disagree"? That is it: at some point in a decision making process, consensus requires some of the participants to be mature enough to step out of the way and let a decision actually get made. And others need to respect them for that.

Voluntairy

What makes consensus different from voting?

Usually, those in a small minority are the ones who have to (wo)man up and accept that the decision and project is more important than them. The main difference between voting however, where minorities (anything below 50%, usually) don't get their way, is that it is not mandatory. In some cases, the minority can get their way and it can be the majority which steps back and lets them. And even if that doesn't happen, the difference between being forcefully over-ruled and gracefully accepting that you can't always win is big.

A second key point is that ruling by consensus requires discussion, much more than voting does. You can't make decisions by consensus without informing people of the choices - you have to know what you (dis)agree with. Certainly, a community where a few take decisions without talking about it does not decide based on consensus.

Last, the two are not incompattible. It makes all the sense in the world to occasionally do an 'opinion poll' (as opposed to doing a decisive vote) to aid the decision making process. This is valuable input for a consensual decision: vocal supporters of either side can create rather distorted views on how strong the support for a certain opinion really is.

Trust and respect

So I think Jono is wrong when he states that there are no communities which decide based on consensus - KDE is an example of one, Gnome does it often and it's pretty much the way of the Geeko, too. Others usually prefer to vote (Debian) or have a more top-down structure like Ubuntu. There are many ways to Rome, as they say. Being aware of that is a good thing - and being dismissive of ways other than yours is not.

I want to add that Valerie Zimmerman made an excellent argument for the importance of trust and respect. No structure of decision making works without these - trust that those who disagree will have the courage to agree-to-disagree, trust that the majority is right or trust that those who decide for you make the right decisions. And respect each other while debating it.

Building for your version of openSUSE in 5 simple steps!

Today I bumped into a blog about dfc, a more fancy version of the df command. There were instructions on installation for Arch and an older Ubuntu version - a link to software.opensuse.org/package/dfc wasn't there but easily found.

There were packages, thanks to the awesome Open Build Service packagers. Unfortunately, it wasn't build for 12.3 yet. Now what? Luckily, this is what OBS makes easier than pie, let me show you how you can build this package for YOUR openSUSE version without ANY technical knowledge!



Step one, you click on the repository name, "home:tcpip4000". You now go to the OBS page where Juan "tcpip4000" Danza builds dfc. In order to be able to make changes, we need to branch dfc into our own home (you need to log in on OBS first to do this).



Step two, you click on "Branch Package" and say OK to the question if you're sure about this. Now, you've got dfc in your own home and the Open Build Service will immediately begin building it. However, it still just builds for the operating systems tcpip4000 had defined - we have to add a new one!



Step three, click on "repositories" and change them. You'll see on that page you first have to go to the project that dfc is a part off, as you can only enable or disable building for a package, not the build targets themselves. Click on the branch ("home:jospoortvliet:branches:home:tcpip4000") and under "Repositories" there, you pick "Add repositories".





Step 4, you can pick what you want and hit the button on the bottom of the page to add them. By default, packages are build but not 'published' in a repository for easy download. You can change that by hovering over the "Publish Flag" section and enabling the publishing.



Step 5, go back to the dfc package which will be build by the Open Build Service and then published in the repository. You can use the little refresh button to check for the status - and once it is build successfully, click the download button and call it a success!





Now, enjoy your new package and have a lot of fun!

If you want dfc for openSUSE 12.3 and Factory, check here. Of course, not all packages will build successfully for a newer or older version of openSUSE: you might have to make changes to the spec file. That is where things get more complicated and you'll need the documentation on packaging and help on IRC. Also, if you're up for it, this can all be done even faster from the command prompt with a few simple commands. But that's a lesson for another day ;-)


To add one more DFC tip: if you edit the .bashrc file in your home folder, you can use this command by default. I have this in my bashrc:
alias df='df -h' # human-readable sizes
[ -f /usr/bin/dfc ] && alias df='dfc -T' # use dfc if there for prettier df info and show filesystems

This will ensure that if you have dfc installed, it uses it by default (the [ -f ] thing checks for that) and if you don't have it, df -h will show the output in human-friendly sizes :D