The Ubuntu-UK community took part in the Ubuntu Projects global effort of having a combined effort of working on bugs, and showing others how to work on Ubuntu to make it better, done in tandem with many countries around the world concurrently.

This was our first effort of having an event like this, and it was a huge success. As the UK is larger than people think, we actually held two venues, one was held in Birmingham and the other in our countries capital – London.

I traveled to Birmingham Thursday night, in preparation as it was a number of hours away. Luckily i did, as it mean’t I was able to attend the Birmingham Linux Users Group, who had the guest speaker of Scott James Remnant speaking about one of his pet projects, Upstart. This was really worth attending!

The Jamming started on Friday in the Birmingham venue, and in many ways I was kind of worried about having one during a working day – as not everyone can get away from employment commitments during the week. However, I was proved wrong – and was actually rather pleased with the turn out! It never ceases to amaze me how so many great people are willing to give up their free time to *want* to help make Ubuntu better.

As we had two venues, we eventually got a working video and sound link between the sites – things like this are really useful for a couple of reasons, primarily it was great to see the ‘other’ site at work on the large LCD television on the wall – but also it made it possible to share talks across sites. As we didn’t enable this until quite late on in the event, it wasn’t used as much as it could have been – however, it’s really something we can get working for the next one! I would also encourage other countries to consider this also, even if it’s perhaps snapshot pictures beaming across on the internet – just for others to see. It’s great watching others at work, surprisingly encouraging!

Both events were kicked off with me giving an Introduction to Launchpad, some people at both events hadn’t really used Launchpad (or in some cases heard of it), others believed that as they weren’t experienced developers (just users), that they were not entitled to have an account on Launchpad. This is a shame, and I hope the feeling isn’t widespread. The introduction talk I gave, covered the basics of launchpad including bug reporting, triaging, advanced triaging and then went onto fixing the bug by using the supplied information on the report to create a ‘debdiff’ and upload to the site pending review. I made it clear that someone didn’t have to work to the end, and each part of the process was really useful in itself. I’m pretty sure that to some people there, it wasn’t that useful, but I think it was generally useful to ‘get the day started’, and allow less experienced users to know where to get started. Following this the rockin’ Martin Meredith (Mez), showed how to locate bugs to continue work on, with the intention of getting them fixed, packaged and uploaded.

The London Jam started on Saturday, this mean’t I had to get a train from Birmimgham to London Saturday morning which shouldn’t be too bad. However, London Transport decided it would be a good weekend to have major maintenance work making delays and rerouting quite a problem. However, i got there eventually.

Following my second introduction to Launchpad, the ever awesome James Westby gave a presentation on fixing a package based on a patch and uploading it. This was great on many levels, as for me, I found it useful to see someone elses work flow and other ways of using tools I wasn’t previously aware of.

We were also quite lucky to get a GNOME developer turn up – Simos Xenitellis, which was mutually useful as we were able to show him some of the more advanced features of Launchpad, and he was able to show us around the GNOME Bugzilla and between us we explored advanced triaging methods and linking to upstream bug reports, he was really keen – which was great to see.

For me, the aim of both events was to meet as many people as possible, and pass on knowledge to as many as I could, as well as learn a thing or five for myself. It wasn’t necessarily to just churn out touching of as many bugs as possible, it was to equip others with the knowledge and skill to be able to go home, and continue working on them throughout the year. Otherwise, we would all probably have sat in silence trawling launchpad and working as if we were on our own anyway, saying that I did get the odd message on IRC from across the table!

At the end of both events, i asked for feedback and it was really encouraging. Will we hold another Jam in around 6 months? Hell yeah! I have some ideas for some things we could improve on, but as this was our first effort I think we did really well!

So a big thank you (and hugs), to everyone that turned up, even if you chaps feel you didn’t achieve much on the day(s), you really did! Every little counts. Infact, the success of this reasonably technical event has given me the confidence to explore organising more events, including more social aspects. Especially as we did pretty well in the Bug Jam Stats.

A special thanks to Linux Emporium for providing us a venue for the Birmingham Jam, Martin Meredith (Mez) for allowing me to stay at his digs – as I was a guest in Birmingham. Also James Thomas (selinuxium), for getting his employer to allow us to use their lovely offices in the centre of London.

February 22nd, 2009 | All, Blogroll, hantslug, lugradio, ubuntu, ubuntu-uk

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