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  • in GNOME
  • 2 min read

GNOME Sysadmin team update

(This is reposted from an email earlier this evening)

Hi all, I wanted to give you a brief update on the GNOME Sysadmin team.

Last April, Owen sent out an email outlining changes to the Sysadmin team and a goal of hiring a part-time System Administrator to help coordinate the Sysadmin team. (And we’re getting closer to be the goal every day!)

Last year John Carr oversaw the team and the Sysadmin team was able to work on a number of improvements to the GNOME infrastructure, including a Bugzilla upgrade, installing a CRM system and web analytics application for the Marketing team and Plone, a CMS for a new www.gnome.org.

In October I volunteered to help with coordinating the team as John stepped down and with a new year starting a couple other members have indicated they don’t have time to help right now as well.

We have lots of improvements planned for this year such as bringing a brand new server online (thanks to Jeff Schroeder’s donation!) and migrating services from older servers to the new one, Git and Damned Lies integration, integrating all GNOME servers with Puppet and scoping Tomboy Online. That’s just to name a few – we also have a number of tasks open in Bugzilla in the sysadmin component.

We are looking for two volunteers to join the team to help with these projects and more. As Owen mentioned last year, team member responsibilities include:

  • Attending the IRC meetings
  • Regularly spending time handling routine tasks
  • Volunteering for infrastructure development projects as needed

We have a number of projects planned for this year, so that 3rd bullet is important!

If you are interested in joining the team, please join the gnome-infrastructure mailing list and introduce yourself, why you want to join and any relevant skills or experience you have. It is helpful if you have been active in other GNOME teams and can have someone vouch for you. (We are talking about giving you root access to GNOME servers, after all!)

If you have any questions, please feel free to send me an email, email the infrastructure list or stop by the #sysadmin IRC channel on GIMPNet IRC.

GNOME Journal #18 – Multimedia released!

Just in time for your weekend reading pleasure, GNOME Journal #18 is out. Issue 18 is a special edition focusing on Multimedia & GNOME, as well as recap of the recent Boston Summit.

  • Writing Multimedia Applications in Vala by Jim Nelson
  • Pitivi by Jono Bacon
  • What’s new with Banshee by Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier
  • An interview with Jonathan Thomas, creator of the OpenShot video editor by Paul Cutler
  • Boston Summit Recap by Jason Clinton

This issue features four (4!) new authors and the GNOME Journal team is thankful for their contribution. We also couldn’t have done it without our editors: Stormy Peters, Sumana Harihareswara, and Jim Hodapp.

Go read it now!

GNOME Odds & Ends

Pantai Hill Park - Odds & Ends 02

A few different things going on:

  • Tomboy documentation is almost done in Mallard. I’ve really enjoyed using the Mallard syntax – so much less complex than Docbook. Every time I have to look up an element reference, I shake my head and think, “Duh! That makes so much more sense I should have figured that out!“. Nice work Shaun.
  • I triaged some docs bugs in GNOME Bugzilla. Want to get involved with the GNOME Documentation team but don’t know where to start? This wiki page has a list of projects looking for help with their documentation.
  • We had a Marketing team meeting earlier this month and we’re having another next month.
  • We’ll be having Sysadmin Team meeting soon too. (Surprise Sysadmin team members!)
  • We’re having a Snowy meeting tomorrow. I know it’s short notice, but I love the potential of Tomboy Online – if you can’t attend I’ve volunteered to post the log and meeting minutes. We need web designers, web developers, CouchDB folks (whoops!) – you name it there’s probably a role for you. Come get in on a project at the ground level! GNOME needs a web service likes this.
  • Rumor is we’ll have the beginnings of Banshee documentation showing up next week, stay tuned. (Though I have no idea where these rumors start, really!)
  • We’re in the final throes of pushing out a new GNOME Journal. Soon, I promise you, soon!
  • in GNOME
  • 1 min read

GNOME Accounts

Martin Pitt mentions in his latest blog post that it took only 4 hours to get a GNOME git account after requesting it.

And that’s all do to the work of one person: Andrea Veri.

I’ve done some poking around on the status of the Accounts Team and whether it’s active or not, but after Jeff Schroeder on the Sysadmin team sponsored Andrea last month, Andrea joined to help out specifically with GNOME Accounts and has done an awesome job. He’s cleaned up Request Tracker, stayed on top of new requests, and helped with some outstanding and older requests. (And a big thanks to Olav and Jeff and everyone who has helped mentor Andrea).

I can’t thank Andrea enough for all of his help and chances are if you’ve requested git access, mango password resets or anything else Accounts related in the last month, it was Andrea helping you.

  • in GNOME
  • 1 min read

A follow-up on GNOME 3 myths

Friday I wrote a blog post kicking off a wiki page on debunking GNOME 3 myths. The dozen or so comments left on that blog post highlight perfectly why we need a wiki page that debunks myths – and it’s a good place to start to add to the wiki page. (And refine it, I think some of the comments are valid).

If you’re a GNOME developer, please give the GNOME 3 Myths page a look over and add any questions that you have been asked.

Thanks!

Debunking GNOME 3.0 Myths

Change is hard. People go through six predictable stages as they adjust to change, which I learned at a former company. From Changecycle.com:

People react, respond and adjust to change in a sequence of six predictable stages. The Change Cycle model identifies the thoughts, feelings and behaviors associated with each stage of change.

  1. Loss
  2. Doubt
  3. Discomfort
  4. Discovery
  5. Understanding
  6. Integration

With GNOME 3.0 coming out later this year, there is certain to be fear, uncertainty and doubt associated with the changes in GNOME’s user interface and applications.

Diego had an awesome idea that we should start a PR campaign and / or meme to start debunking this myths. It’s best to get out ahead of these things, and with that I give you: Debunking GNOME 3.0 Myths.

Please consider this page just a stub at the moment, but if you have heard of any misconceptions around GNOME 3.0 or you’re a developer on a project and have an idea or myth to debunk, please add it! It will take all of us through the year to keep this page up to date and help our users and journalists informed of what the changes in the GNOME experience entail.

Thanks in advance!

Banshee Documentation

I’ve been working on Banshee documentation on and off for the last few months (ok, more off than on) but as I get more comfortable writing in Mallard and the recent discussion in getting Banshee on the GNOME release cycle I am motivated to get this to done.

The most important part of writing documentation (or writing in general) is the planning phase. A few of us on the Docs team did a first pass at planning the topics that should be in the user help of Banshee in Google Wave, and I’ve copied that over to the GNOME wiki.

If you use Banshee, please give it a look – are there any topics missing that you think a user would want help with? Writing user help in Mallard gives us the ability to organize topics into groups – for a good example, check out the Empathy help. What’s missing? What would you organize differently?

Do you want to help? Have you written about Banshee features before? Let me know – either add content to the wiki page or post a link as a comment on my blog. If you have written a howto for Banshee, we’d love to include it – the new GNOME help is CC 3.0 licensed, so it’s easy to add from other sources, as long as it’s licensed as CC-SA 3.0. Please don’t feel you have to know how to write documentation or use Mallard – you can create a sub-page on the wiki for the topic and I will be more than happy to help edit it, convert it to Mallard and commit to git. Right now the important thing is to make sure we have the topics right and get some first drafts of the actual help created. I appreciate all help and would rather not do it all myself if at all possible!

There is a Banshee Docs branch on Gitorious – if you do know Mallard and want to help let me know and I’ll get you added to the team. If you don’t know Mallard, let’s start writing some howto’s in the wiki!

Marketing Hackfest (Part 1)

I’m overdue in recapping some of my thoughts of the Marketing Hackfest. Overall, the hackfest was a success and now we begin the hard work in recapping everything we talked about, making it actionable and doing the work!

One of the best things about the hackfest, in my opinion, was the cross-section of people who attended. Each individual had different strengths and views of GNOME and it served to remind me of the different groups who use GNOME and how they use it.

I spent a lot of time at the whiteboard helping facilitate and I’m still sorting through all the notes we discussed. Somewhere Shaun has some video as well.

A lot of our discussion was centered on GNOME 3.0 and how we can communicate to our users and our downstream partners of the features and benefits of GNOME 3.0. If you think back to the email Vincent Untz sent this past April on behalf of the Release Team, GNOME 3.0 has three goals:

  • Revamp our User Experience
  • Streamlining of the Platform
  • Promotion of GNOME

That third goal is why we got together and the bulk of what we discussed. We touched on what GNOME 3.0 is; GNOME’s overall branding; marketing GNOME to users and how to improve our partnerships with downstream distributions such as Fedora, OpenSolaris, openSUSE and Ubuntu.

But it wasn’t all just discussion ’round the campfire! We did a lot of work on creating materials for volunteers who host a GNOME booth at a conference. We wrote the copy for a new brochure explaining what GNOME is; created a Frequently Asked Questions for those hosting a booth with answers to questions they should expect from conference attendees; and wrote core messages and speaking points when talking to attendees.

We also discussed in detail the Friends of GNOME program and did some work on an upcoming fundraising drive.

And lastly we’ve started to work on presentation materials for volunteers who may want to give a presentation on GNOME. We still have a ways to go to finish this work, but using the awesome template Vinicius created, we envision having a number of presentations available that can be used as building blocks for someone who wants to give a presentation on GNOME. Some of these include:

  • GNOME History (5 minutes)
  • GNOME 3.0 (5 minutes)
  • Getting started using GNOME (5 minutes)
  • Getting started developing GNOME (5 minutes)
  • GNOME 3.0 (45 minutes)

And lots of others – the above are just examples of templates with content someone could take and mix and match together to put together the bulk of a presentation they might want to give.

Lastly, we also spent some time talking about the GNOME Marketing community and how we can work together, communicate effectively, mentor new members and tackle some of our action items. We’ll start by having IRC Meetings where we can recap some of the discussion topics from the hackfest, discuss ideas from the community on improving how we market GNOME and hopefully have some of the community members volunteer to tackle some of the action items and next steps in creating marketing materials for GNOME. Look for the announcement in the next couple of days to help pick a time for that meeting, and similar to the Bug Squad, we’ll use Doodle.com to try and find a time that works for as many people as possible.

More to come!

GNOME 3.0 talk this weekend!

My scheduled talk at the Penguins Unbound LUG in St. Paul, MN has been moved up one week to this Saturday, November 14th at 10:00 a.m. (Minnebar, the Minnesota Barcamp was recently announced for November 21st conflicting with the meeting).

I will be presenting “An Introduction to GNOME 3.0” talking about GNOME, its history, and where GNOME is going with the upcoming GNOME 3.0 release next year. If you’re in the Minneapolis / St. Paul area come join in the fun.

I look forward to seeing you there!