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 ;-)

oSC 11 take-away

Writing a blog about oSC is quite difficult. I've been asked a few times what I thought about the conference. Well, let me be honest - I was stressed like a headless chicken. I didn't attend half the sessions I wanted to and didn't sleep very well during the nights.

On the other hand - the sessions I did attend were interesting, meeting all the openSUSE people was really awesome and the parties and barbequing evenings were really fun. I think that's the main thing I took away from oSC and I know this goes for many other people as well: awesome community! Quite a few people remarked on the open atmosphere and the friendly people and that's what really matters to me.

I guess I simply need to digest the conf a bit longer until I can say more. So let me just quote from Kostas:

Drinking beer with Greg KH: great. Having him carry your beer: priceless

Bikeshedding and CLS

I wrote a blog about bikeshedding some time ago. At the Community Leadership Summit this subject came up and as I promised to write some blogs about that and because the openSUSE conference is coming I decided that this should be the topic for my second CLS notes blog.


What color should it be?

Refresh

So what was bikeshedding again? It happens if on a mailing list or a IRC channel a subject comes up which is trivial enough for everyone to have an opinion on. The result is that everyone feels obliged to share that opinion and challenge whatever anyone else comes up with. Leading to a long and mostly useless discussion.

That is bad because, especially on lists with many subscribers, it clutters hundreds of mailboxes of busy people with pointless mails and it needlessly complicates decision making. Which in turn leads to people starting to ignore the mailing list or even unsubscribing. Usually the people who do a lot of work are the ones leaving, while those who prefer talk over work will stay... See bikeshed.com to learn where the term comes from.

Dealing with bikeshedding

So bikeshedding is bad and it's something to avoid. How? There are a few ways in which you can avoid it.

1 - Change the culture

First of all, bikeshedding is a 'cultural' thing. If it's seen as acceptable, if people say 'all opinions are valuable here', well, it won't stop. So people will have to speak up against it. Tell others "ok, it's been enough, let's move on" or "This is not on-topic, please don't do that". This is a responsibility of all people on the list in the spirit of Edmond Burke's "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" ;-)

2 - Be a good admin

But preventing bikeshedding and off-topic comments it is especially a responsibility for list admins and moderators: stop bikeshedding threads. On forums this is usually quite well established, on mailing lists less so.

Intervening as list or IRC channel admin should be done in the proper way: "praise in public, punish in private" is the golden rule here. Tell people privately that it's been enough. When a big group in thread engages in bikeshedding, give a general warning like "Ok, enough bikeshedding, please end this thread". It is possible on most mailinglists to block threads, so that might be a good next step if things don't improve. If people keep engaging in bikeshedding or other abusive things and don't listen (or fight your decision) a 24 hour ban can be a good cooling down period for some.

Oh, that's censorship? So we should allow a few people to make a whole list useless to protect their freedom of speech, you say? Realize that anyone can exercise that right in many places! A community has every right to have rules protecting their communication channels. openSUSE has these described on the mailing lists wiki page and our Guiding Principles.

3 - Try to turn it around

One thing a moderator but also anyone else on the mailing list could do is recognize the value of people who bikeshed. I've been talking all negative about it, but the discussions and sometimes conflicts which take place on the list also show that people care. One interesting tip which was brought up at CLS was to give people who often are involved in bikeshedding and conflicts a 'job'. After all, they seem to care a lot - giving them some responsibilities diverts their (negative) energy to something positive! It takes skills to turn a negative into a positive but it can be a powerful thing.

4 - From the start

A way of preventing bikeshedding lies in how topics are brought to the mailing list. Not only the kind of topics (irrelevant topics are of course bad) but also how you start. Yes, we are an open community, but that doesn't mean that you can't prepare your mails. It can help a lot if you first talk to some key people involved in what you want to discuss and include in your first message a list of the 'obvious' arguments. This prevents the first 20 mails from being trivial and keeps the thread short. Which in turn prevents these basic arguments from being brought up again and again because they people didn't bother to read the huge thread!


We need plenty of bike sheds, let's build one in each color...

So...

If people take others up on their behavior and when list or channel admins moderate actively a lot of bikeshedding can be stopped. And prevented - yes, people learn, albeit slowly. You'll get a few fights and disagreements as those 'corrected' often don't like being corrected. But realize that the 'silent majority' will be grateful for it and the list will become more useful. And discussions can be shortened considerably if the topics are presented well prepared.

I do think that we, in openSUSE, allow too much bikeshedding at times, which hurts us. Feel free to argue with me at the openSUSE conference if you agree or disagree! But don't bikeshed about it ;-)

I think openSUSE can improve with the lessons learned in other, more established communities where the culture is so that bikeshedding rarely happens.

Bretzn at oSC

So there is the cool Bretzn project which was about creating a plugin for IDE's to compile and publish code via the Open Build Service and the Open Collaboration Services and then letting the user install, rate and comment on apps via a desktop client.

Unfinished

This last step, the client, unfortunately isn't finished yet - you can find the current code on gitorious but it still needs work. The underlying stuff is done, however so it shouldn't be that much work to finish it. The team working on it had to move on to other things - jobs, clients, real life stuff.



Too bad, as that means the chances of this making it into openSUSE 12.1 aren't big. So Bretzn is looking for help! According to Frank Karlitschek, finishing the client shouldn't take much more than 6 weeks volunteer's work. It's currently done with QML but obviously a contributor could take it in another direction. Sure is, however, that whoever takes it on can count on some pretty good mentoring from Frank, Frederik and others.

You?

So - anyone around who's interested in a cool, cutting-edge GUI project for openSUSE & KDE? Note that in typical openSUSE fashion, this tool is not meant to be openSUSE specific - or even KDE specific. The Appstream project is working on a GNOME GUI based on the Ubuntu Software Center and sharing most of the infrastructure. It's a cross-distro effort, with people from Fedora, Debian and other distro's involved!

If you're interested, contact me (just post below) or talk to us at the openSUSE Conference!!!

CLS, DS, COSCUP... Plasma Active, ARM, ...

It's been quite a while since I wrote a decent blog and it might be a while longer until I really get to it. I do have a lot to write about, however. First about the Community Leadership Summit - the notes of which I'd like to turn into a few blogs. Second, the Desktop Summit, which was awesome. And third my trip to Taiwan. Finally the upcoming openSUSE conference which is going to be awesome. But let me get the most important stuff out of the way first.

Desktop Summit Awesomeness

At the Desktop Summit (which imho was a great success) I organized 3 food cooking parties where we made some Asian-inspired curries. I've put the recipes on-line for those who asked for it. Find them on the Desktop Summit Food page.

At those cooking evenings we had between 25 and 30 people join us each night. It was big fun, we had good food (and beer and more) and I really intend to do it again next time. As a matter of fact, I hope to do the cooking again at the openSUSE Conference. And remember - if you don't use openSUSE that doesn't mean you can't come and enjoy the company, food and discussions about all kinds of things. See for yourself in the detailed program. You can also learn how IO travels in the kernel, how to use the mtux console multiplexer, the sessions about GIT, cross-cultural communication, GCC and Kernel stuff and more. And that's just stuff from day one, we have about 100 sessions in 4 days.

Talking about cool stuff, on Tuesday we'll have an 8-bit music workshop... Seriously, I look forward to that. If you want to join, hurry up, the conf takes place September 11-14!

!Fail

Taipei and Plasma Active

Last week I made a trip to Taiwan to meet the openSUSE community there. There's quite a bunch and they did awesome at the booth at COSCUP. Really cool. We had lots of interesting stuff there, flyers, geeko's, stickers, USB sticks and Aaron left his Plasma Active tablet (runs openSUSE, of course) at the booth a few times. That thing drew quite a crowd - and rightly so. I hadn't seen that much of it but Plasma Active is really something very interesting. It's a unique touch tablet UI, yet easy to use and intuitive. Build in just a few months it's amazing to see how well it works already. The team aims to stabilize it in the next few months and I'm absolutely certain it will result in a pretty darn impressive product.

Aaron spoke quite a bit about how well the Open Build Service works for them during development. The team works closely with an interaction designer and obviously she's not such a hugely technical person. With a traditional development process someone would have to do packages for her - or she'd have to learn how to check out a repository and then compile and install stuff herself. Thanks to OBS, packages are build continuously and very easy - a dev checks some code in and the next day the designer can give feedback! Continuous build services are not unique of course but they usually don't come easily, don't produce packages, etc. build.opensuse.org has an easy web interface, can build for all major Linux distro's and architectures (yes, including ARM) and is of course entirely free.run it in-house,

I'm quite proud that openSUSE proves to be so successful for the Plasma Active team. They also build packages for MeeGo, as they want to support ARM systems. I know several openSUSE contributors want to have ARM in openSUSE, well, Plasma Active is at the openSUSE conference so we can meet and talk about it there...

Anyhow. So Taiwan was fun. You can find some pics of COSCUP on flickr and I have an image of two of my hosts as well as fellow visitor Aaron below :D

You'll probably find all three of them at the openSUSE conference too, btw.

oSC2011 CfP & reg

Titles are supposed to be short, right?

The full text would of course be "openSUSE Conference 2011 Call for Papers and Registration" and yes, that's what it is about: on Monday we've extended the deadline for the CfP so you can still shoot in session proposals. And today the registration has opened so you can let us know you'll be there :D



We want to let you all use this conference to get something done which is why we focus so much on interactive sessions. BoFs, workshops, hack sessions... Think about yourself! What do YOU want to accomplish? What does YOUR team need to talk about? What features should be finished? What decisions should be made? Use the conference for that!

Shoot in a proposal here!!!

And as I said, registration is open, register now!

BTW I just updated the links to openSUSE conference posters, there are two of them now. One by Robert Lihm with a big Qr code, the other, designed by two Greek Georges, is a bit more Green :D

Was it useful?

For the openSUSE conference, a number of people has worked hard to provide tips and information on giving talks, organizing BoF's, setting up a Workshop or managing a Hacksession.

We developed a few resources:

• The Guidelinesfor speakers (and specifically the Tips and tricks, like the extensive how-to on preparing a talk)
• The articles on news.opensuse.org:
  
  • What is and how to do a BoF/Discussion/team meeting session
  • How to prepare and give a workshop
  • How to organize a Hack session/Developer Sprint

We spend quite some time on it, but now I wonder: who has seen this? Who has actually read it? Who has USED it for anything? Below a nice (javascript...) survey which might help me answer that question :D



Free Web Poll

Code of Conduct or anti-harassment policy

I went to LCA 2011 in Januari. There, a 'mild controvercy' (or rather 'nuclear war') developed around a keynote by Mark Pesce and how it was handled by the conference team. Now personally, I had little issue with Mark's keynote. Ok, there was some harsh language and some explicit imagery, but nothing that offended me. So when an apology was made during the closing ceremony, I was suprised and later on spoke out with some others against the 'censorship'.

Changing mind

But after a while I realized that the point of all this isn't about censorship or Freedom of Speech (vs freedom of 'not being insulted'). Those issues surely play in the wider, public area. I don't want to have laws which allow our government to prosecute anyone who talks about something they don't like! But that is not relevant here. LCA is NOT a public place. It is a conference organized by a team which has EVERY right to tell us under what condictions we can join! It is their conference, after all. And yes, one of those conditions is that we are supposed to watch what we say so we ensure a welcoming place for everyone.

As I've already been convinced that we do need to think about diversity, openness and anti-harassment after reading this LWN article about the darker side of open source conferences by Valerie Aurora, I've decided to draft up a Code of Conduct for the openSUSE Conference today.

You can find the Code of Conduct draft on the wiki and would love input!