Hooray! Another milestone finished!

This time we took on the task improving the ratio of people who contribute to Factory. The openSUSE Factory distribution is the current state of the development for the next openSUSE release (BTW: Save the date for 12.1 on November 11, 2011). The development releases of the openSUSE distribution like Milestones or Release Candidates are snapshots from this distribution. Developers and experienced testers use Factory as an always up-to-date development and testing platform. Factory is built on the openSUSE instance of the Open Build Service. In our Build Service instance we have round about 19.000 users who package software but only less then hundred contribute packages or patches to Factory. This milestone is about increasing this ratio.

Okay cool but how?

Image from morguefile.com

Each milestone we take on we start with a kick-off. For a whole day all the Boosters stick their super large brains together and come up with a plan on how to reach the milestone. This time we took a three legged (pun intended!) approach. First we were going to ask people that already do stuff why they didn’t yet for Factory. While at the same time pushing and helping them to do it. Never arouse a contributors curiosity without guiding them afterward! Then we were going to see what they said about why they didn’t contribute and, of course, do something about it.

The Factory Contributor Survey

We settled on the form of a survey to get a feeling why people don’t contribute. First thing we did is we came up with a list of people we wanted to interview.  We checked the changes that happened in the last year, to packages in top-level projects, that build against Factory but are not in Factory. After we cleaned that list of known Factory contributors and people who only contributed once or twice we had a list of regular packagers that had Factory packages but didn’t contribute to Factory.

Image from morguefile.com

We whipped up a survey on Google Docs and sent it out to those people asking about their packaging and software development skills and, bluntly, why they didn’t submit to Factory yet. Nearly all of the people we asked responded and the results are pretty interesting. All of them, except two, packaged for more than a year already and assessed their packaging skills as mediocre (45%) and expert (34%) level. Seems like Factory is not very attractive to packaging beginners. Most of them hunt for packages that are not in the Build Service yet (93%) and the majority already thougt about pushing them to Factory (62%). So apparently we choose the right group of people to ask. Good.

Now the first thing that is not only an interesting statistical marker, but leads to an entry in our TODO list, is the amount of people that didn’t think about pushing their packages to Factory because they didn’t know they could: 14%. Apparently we have to think about ways to tell the world that you can contribute and that it’s as easy as checkers! Quickly!

©Ludovic Bertron. Some rights reserved/CC-BY 2.0

The other interesting results are the responses from the people to the “why didn’t you?” question. We used a free text field for this answer so we imagined that people would gave all kind of answers and we would end up with a long list of items we would have to take care of. But strangely enough you can interpret the answers as two big issues. The most important one is about the quality of the package. From the perspective of the packager most people are afraid that their packages are not good enough. Nearly the same amount of people think, from the perspective of the user, that their packages would have no audience. Remember these are the people who package for more than a year, consider themselves mediocre/expert packagers and hunt for software not packaged yet. Wow! Obviously another thing we need to communicate badly. The scope of Factory.

Those quality related answers are quickly followed by answers that relate to missing time to support users and answers that talk about problems with the process of getting your package into Factory. People seem to think that maintaining a package in Factory is a tedious task that will take a lot of time. Yet we have this superior Build Service, with all the nice collaboration features built in, which makes maintaining packages as easy as a summer breeze. Hmmm. So after some discussion, about what this means and what we can do about it, we took the action item to look at our process documentation. To see if it helps when we improve that.

There were also some really nice quotes that show us that social science experiments also have something like a Plank constant 8-)

Since the boosters email mentions 14 packages, I’ve audited the packages from my home repo…

or my favorite

For other … packages, I was not the initial uploader of the package in those repositories and I wasn’t sure if they should be forwarded to Factory or not (now, I think, they should :)

Then get to it!

As you can see planing is everything! By now we had a nice list of tasks to do.

1. Straighten out the projects that make up Factory

A couple of Boosters looked at projects that had a high amount packages building for Factory, a lot of Factory contributors but also a lot of packages that weren’t in Factory.

• Contrib
• devel:languages:perl
• devel:languages:python
• devel:languages:ruby
• devel:libraries:c_c++
• Packman (especially Games)

They approached maintainers there and persuaded them to submit a lot of packages to Factory. As they maintain a lot of similar packages in Factory already, this increases the contribution without costing too much hazzle for them. Why that’s easy peasy lemon squeezy!

2. Factory Documentation

Another group of Boosters took on the documentation about Factory in the openSUSE Wiki. They consolidated content from a lot of the other pages and refined it. Then they documented some missing parts like the duties and rights and the do’s and don’ts of a factory maintainer. The result is a completely overhauled Portal:Factory that now has a nice “Contribute to Factory” section. Good stuff.

3. Get the marketing team cracking

The last thing we did to reach the milestone is this post. Which I will discuss with our marketing team so we can think about ways to improve our efforts to tell people what Factory is, what it’s scope, who can contribute to it and how. This will be an ongoing task for the next years we guess. We’ll  help in any way we can of course.

Conclusion

This was a nice exercise and we learned a lot. Straight forward, small surveys with a well defined audience are a good way to gather info. There is a lot of good documentation in the Wiki and we “just” have to make it more accessible. We tend to forget to tell people repeatedly about our great tools, processes and documentation. How can we expect to gain their attention in these days of tweets and status updates if we don’t? But a fault confessed is half redressed. Let’s roll.

What do you think? Let us know here in the comments or contact us on our mailinglist opensuse-boosters@opensuse.org

And there are two answers so far I have heard. One is that people say that this is normal. Because we as open source project always ask for equal rights, democracy and all these other crazy liberal ideas and that now we reap what we sow: politics. So however you are involved in this, like me for instance that stood up and took responsibility for nasty things nobody else wants to do, you have asked for this and now got what was coming to you. Don’t be a crybaby now, bitch!

The other answer I see to this from the members of our project is to be passive. YAWN politics… I want to code, draw, write, fix, test. Politics are none of my interests and I don’t want to get involved. You idiots can fight this out, I just work on my stuff while you’re doing that. So however you are involved in this, like me for instance that stood up and took responsibility for nasty things nobody else wants to do, you have asked for this and now got what was coming to you. Don’t look at me, not interested!

Both are equally destructive and neglect the reason all of us are here.  We are here for one thing: FUN! Yes, remember please why you have come to the openSUSE Project. Because it’s fun to use the software for any purpose you want. Because it’s great to study how the software works, and change it to make it do what you wish. Because it’s cool to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor. Because it’s a great feeling to give the whole community a chance to benefit from your work. You know what’s wrong with us? We have forgot to Have a lot of fun!

Can all of you who love openSUSE please go to a console, open an xterm, gnome-terminal or a konsole, do a cat /etc/motd and think about the output for a while?

Then pull yourself together and stop doing what is robbing ALL OF US of the reason we are here! If you want to push through your agenda, don’t!  If you want to stick it to the man, don’t! If you want to insist on all of your given rights, don’t! If you want to be pigheaded, don’t. If you want to be serious, don’t!

Instead, remember to Have a lot of fun!

Summary

For the first time in months I have a couple of hours to reflect on what we, the openSUSE Boosters, have been up to. With the release of openSUSE 11.3 and the openSUSE Conference 2010 we had two big fish to fry and they turned out quite yummy in the end. But those two were only the tip of the iceberg! We had a very busy summer full of hacking and events, which means we basically went to all big FOSS events in central Europe, ran a couple of smaller ones on our own and finished two milestones from our backlog. Of course all of us are pushing the openSUSE project in general forward and lead our individual teams. Pavol, the other board member and me where busy working towards the foundation, Vincent and Will with maintaining their desktops upstream AND downstream, Robert with artwork and promo material like the Ambassador press-kit, Coolo with managing the distribution, Tom and Christopher with all the web apps, Michal with MySQL, Egbert with X.org and Klaas with taming all of us.

That’s nice work and very good for the project but that’s also the reason of the only thing that didn’t turn out quite like we wanted to: our agile work on the milestones. The distractions of our day to day dealings we’re, for the last couple of months, way to high and made the progress on the milestones very, very slow. So Tuesday before the conference we sat down and tried to come up with a way to resolve this. We identified three “problems” with our current setup:

1. Day to day distractions
2. Someone who drives the overall process (scrum master or whatever)
3. Communication of the things we do

The daily work which is mostly urgent and important makes it very hard for people to concentrate on milestones which are important but not urgent. There is always a quick fix you can do in the OBS, always a mail you can answer, always someone on IRC with a question. And, if you do these things all week long there is no one really holding you accountable that you didn’t do anything else. No one that questions if you spend too much time on firefighting, no one driving the milestone. We thought we can share the task of caring for the overall process among ourselves but it turned out that we can’t. On top of that we do not communicate our urgent and important things very well and hence some people outside the team and everybody inside the team has the feeling that we are not doing enough despite all the good general things we do.

This can’t be and after we have finished the openFATE and Connect milestones we’ll make a tactical retreat and regroup. This means we will only do one Milestone at a time, I will act as classical project manager/scrum master and I’ll also document what we do, including general things we hack on or contribute to. We hope that once we practiced this process for some time and with the addition of a few new people to the team, we will be able to take on more milestones again. But for the moment we need to regroup. So this is whats going to change in the future, time to tell you people what we did in the past!

Hacking

As the openSUSE distribution is the most important thing the openSUSE project does, we of course helped to make 11.3 a great release. All of us took on their fair share of package maintenance and bug fixing in various areas, from the command line to the two main desktops. Coolo, as openSUSE Release Manager, pushed it out of the door and afterward many of us helped with the marketing around it. Of course there are also other things to do afterward like getting the extra repositories Contrib or Packman up to speed. openSUSE 11.3 took a lot of effort for us but we greatly enjoyed i!

Of course 11.3 is not the only thing we did. Here is a list of various of our hacking activities.

• Robert and Henne prepared and release the new news/lizards theme based on bento
• Coolo worked on factory cycles to reduce the overall rebuild time and the 11.4 roadmap
• Klaas had a meeting with Prof. Dr. Riehle and his PHD students to discuss further collaboration
• Michal implemented openSUSE Paste and made Lubos’s obs-generator KDE independent
• Pavol, Michal and Vincent helped to staff the openSUSE Maintenance Team
• Henne helped to bring the the german wiki team up to speed with all the mediawiki and content changes. They are working on their own new instance now.
• Tom spent some of his ITO with Android
• Vincent wrote a pdiff plugin for osc
• Klaas boosted the openSUSE Invis project, a small to medium business server spinoff.

Events

The openSUSE Conference brings together users, contributors and friends of the openSUSE  in Nuremberg, Germany. The conference is the yearly get-together of  the openSUSE project to give its people a chance to meet face to face, talk to and inspire each other and the openSUSE Boosters of course attended this event! Klaas and Vincent we’re deeply involved with the Call for Papers and the program organization. From choosing content for the tracks to running the conference application at conference.opensuse.org. Egbert helped to organize the Birds of a Feather sessions and Tom and me made the social event of the conference a notable evening at the lizard lounge. Robert provided of course again great media and Klaas and me did quite some marketing around the conference. Now of course every booster carried his share of talks, sessions, discussions. Over 20 sessions were led by a booster, including but not limited to two of the conference keynotes!

Also in the area of events we did not only do one but many! See this list to get an idea what we covered since the last post.

• Klaas, Will, Tom and Robert helped to organize the 5th hackweek at Novell.
• The whole Team ran a hackathon around openSUSE Connect at FrosCon called HackMeck
• Henne took care that we got a great share of the LinuxTag programm and everybody afterwards participated with great talks, hack sessions and booth duty
• Vincent attended the latest GNOME Marketing hackfest
• Pavol and Michal went to OSSConf in Zilina, Slovakia to talk about the OBS and SUSE Studio.
• Both of them also went to LinuxWochen in Vienna and handled the booth together with Sirko. Pavol also gave a talk about the openSUSE GameStore.
• Vincent went to RMLL to share a booth with our friends from Mandriva
• The Nürnberg portion of the team prepared two local events in the SUSE offices. During the Strategy Meeting we held a public meet the openSUSE Board Event and we ran the very successful openSUSE 11.3 Release Party
• Of course the Prague portion of the team countered that with their openSUSE 11.3 + KDE SC 4.5 release party
• Lubos had a nice talk at Akademy, Vincent conquered GUADEC and Egbert held a strategy BoF at the SUSE Labs Conference.
• Michal and Pavol attended FrOSCamp and organized, again with Sirko and a few others, the openSUSE Booth there and held a talk about openSUSE Connect.
• Will went to the Telepathy KDE sprint
• Pavol presented his pet project SVG-edit at the SVG Open conference
• Vincent gave a talk about GNOME3 and the openSUSE Build Service at JDLL
• Egbert boosted around at the Linux Kongress in Nürnberg and the X Developer Summit in Toulouse.

Milestones

And now you think that’s it? Of course not. We also managed to finished up two milestones!

In July we finished the wiki milestone. The boosters squad worked together with the openSUSE Wiki team on the release of the totally revamped openSUSE wiki, you can read the announcement on http://news.opensuse.org/2010/07/05/a-new-hope/. We also finished the umbrella milestone that brings you a fresh and unique new look for all the openSUSE web applications. The team has posted a summary of the things they did also on news.opensuse.org. Because of the amount of work on 11.3 and the conference and especially because of the staff we had to cancel the Junior Jobs milestone and it went back to our backlog. That leaves us with two milestones running currently.

openFATE

The big things the team implemented so far were the port of openFATE to the bento design, the switch of the codebase to the latest rails and libxml versions and making nearly all data in the frontend editable.

What’s still missing is to proxy all product and role information (of opensuse products) in the keeperproxy to allow to set all states and roles. Additional tasks include making the transition between product states easier in openFATE, show the notification status of users, automatically set project and product managers for openSUSE features, combine the product and project manager priority in the user interface, hide evaluation states and make it possible to remove/edit unsaved comments. We also need to make the codebase able to run in partner / webfate mode so it can be deployed everywhere.

Connect

In the last couple of sprints and the hackathon at FrosCON the team has get connect up and running with the features on par with users.opensuse.org. We have implemented a dashboard with customizable widgets, user profiles with v- and business-cards, groups with multiple admins, activity streams, voting/polls that can cover the openSUSE Board elections and have imported all user data from users.o.o (around ~10000). The user data connect has, including a simple trust rating, is accessible as LDAP export so we can use the data in other services like the Build Service. Of course all of that styled in a bento theme.

But there are still a couple of things to do until we have reached this milestone. The most important thing is the iChain setup so we can provide single sign on, the LDAP export needs to handle groups too and the bento themeing needs to be finished up for a couple of views that have been added since the first round of styling.

Conclusion

We were very, very busy but had to neglect the important but not urgent tasks and this is something we are not so happy with. The milestones are the things that leap the openSUSE project forward and enable people to contribute and that is what we’re here for right? But we have identified that and will work on it, promised. On the other hand we think we can be proud about the things we achieved. Especially the new wiki, the bento theme, the release of 11.3 and the conference really rocked and energized the whole project. In our book that is time well spent!

What do you think? Let us know here in the comments or contact us on our mailinglist opensuse-boosters@opensuse.org

Summary

Long time no see! The last update on lizards is now over 2 months old and a lot of stuff happened. The Boosters have finished two Milestones: The build service project overview and the integration of web-apps with a common theme. Both results are awesome and enable people to be more productive. The build service project overview helps project maintainers, like Coolo for openSUSE:Factory, to keep up to date on what happens in their project. The overview includes things like packages that are not building, packages with a diff to the devel project and packages with a pending request. You know what’s the best part of this? To make the build service project overview possible we have put a lot of general work into the OBS webclient. So much that the webclient changes will be a big part of the upcoming OBS 2.0 release. The other Milestone we finished is the integration of our web-apps with a common theme: bento. Once we deployed bento to our apps everybody can navigate the opensuse web with a nice, task oriented design and find information where one expects them.

Events

The LinuxTag 2010 programm is final and online. We have 6 talks accepted ranging from packaging to kernel hacking. Most of them on Saturday which is traditionally the strongest day.

• Ruby on Rails in der openSUSE.org Infrastruktur – Thomas Schmidt
• Kernel Mode Setting – a Change in Paradigms for the Graphics Driver Stack – Egbert Eich
• The road to GNOME 3.0 Vincent Untz /Johannes Schmid
• Distribution Image building with KIWI – Christopher Hofmann
• The live A-Z Guide to openSUSE Contribution – Henne Vogelsang/Vincent Untz
• The Free Software Hell And How To Escape It – Adrian Schröter/Henne Vogelsang

We also got accepted as project for a booth and are currently working on the booth setup and program. Stay tuned for more news to come around this topic. Other events that we boosted are the Tokamak4 plasma hacking sprint Will successfully organized in our office. Vincent went to a GNOME Usability and a GSettings Hackfest. He also covered Solutions Linux 2010. Pavol, Michal and Petr went to the Chemnitz Linux Days 2010, Installfest.cz and LinuxExpo. Klaas to openExpo in Switzerland and a KDE Finance sprint in Frankfurt. Oh and Google Summer of Code sadly didn’t work out this year, maybe next time. As you can see we were busy event bees!

Milestones

We are currently trying to reach 3 Milestones. The Squad that is trying to create Discoverable Centralised Developer Documentation is progressing nicely. They fixed a lot of issues with mediawiki and Bento for the new wiki instance, transfered and re-worked the general wiki documentation so that people can help with the general transition and they also moved content like the Build Service pages and started with the Packaging side of things. The general focus is still on groundwork. The squad wants to transfer all the developer documentation as an example on how a topic in the new wiki should look and feel like. The next steps will be finishing that off and then to help with the attraction of contributors to the general transition.

Another squad is working on improving openFATE, especially to make it really usable for the screening team. In the end they want to have a new role of screener in the feature workflow. The role can change the status and reassign features between products. The first sprints where spend on educating themselves about the architecture of FATE and the structure of the web-app. The squad then worked on the proxy which is by now already passing changes through to the keeper. The next steps include changes to the web-app and hermes for reporting. During the course of these sprints discussions about introducing more roles and new features happened so the Milestone probably will get more Goals in the future.

The third squad is currently in transition away from the Bento/Umbrella milestone. The development of the theme for the Build Service, the Download Portal and the Wiki are done. They are currently working on a wrap-up post that will show you all the cool stuff. The remaining tasks of deploying all the services, and helping to create themes for openFATE, the Forums and our WordPress instances are new Milestones. Which Milestone this squad does next is not decided yet.

This is an appeal to you!

This is a incitement to kick ass!

You think that you are not entitled to decide something?
YOU ARE > GO KICK ASS!

Don’t be humble. You’re the man!

Despite the fact that our distribution is around for some time we are a very young open source project. We don’t have much organization. No hierarchy, very little processes, no roles or functions, no directions and only general rules. You participate in a time where it’s really you that makes a difference. If you’re humble now and try not to stick your neck out, this project will fail. Don’t be humble, KICK ASS!

Don’t wait for anything “official”. There is no one official.

There is only you and the people next to you. There is no one steering the openSUSE project, there is only you pushing your topic. There is no mastermind behind all this, there is only you thinking about your thing. There is no management (no also not from Novell), there is only you running your things. If you do something it’s what openSUSE does. If you decide something it’s what openSUSE decides. Don’t wait, KICK ASS!

You’re worried about your idea being liked?
THEY LOVE IT > GO KICK ASS!

Don’t let the nay-sayers stop you. Push for your goal.

We value others’ opinions. We value openness. We value critique. We do NOT value consensus. It’s nice if it happens, it makes you feel warm and fuzzy on the inside but consensus is not the prerequisite for action. Try to incorporate the feedback you get as good as you can. Be open minded and willing to try new things. But also keep your goal in mind. You started with an idea on how to do something, don’t let the feedback kill your idea. Remember, there are at least 20 people who just like your idea and don’t say anything. Don’t let the nay-sayers stop you, KICK ASS!

Don’t be afraid of contradiction. We are not a logical consistent universe.

We can have a team but no leader. We can have vim and emacs. We can be self-contradictory! openSUSE consists of so many projects, ideas, values and people that they can’t possibly be all on the same page. You don’t need to prove to yourself or anyone else that you are. There also can be two or more things of the same kind even if they do exactly the same thing. Don’t be afraid of contradiction or duplication, KICK ASS!

You are unsure about something?
TRY IT > GO KICK ASS!

Don’t think everything through to the end. Be playful!

We are an open source project. You need to release early, release often. Everything! Not only code but your frustrations, ideas and plans also. That means that people will see your early errors. People will spot your inconsistencies. People will get on your nerves with their own ideas about your stuff. But it also means you don’t have be 100% correct, don’t have to be 100% ready and you don’t have to do 100% yourself. Put everything out there, KICK ASS!

Don’t doubt it for a second. If you fall you will be picked up.

More often then we like it the things we dream of, the ideas we come up with, the lines of code we produce STINK. And that’s okay, shit happens. Don’t be afraid of making mistakes, nobody will think less of you. In this community people will scrape you off the ground and put you on your feet again. Failure is punished by a pat on the back and a smile. Don’t doubt that for a second, fail but KICK ASS!

Stop contemplating!
Stop holding back!
Stop worrying!
KICK ASS!

Summary

The last sprint was going from February 4th to February 16th. Even though it included all of us going to FOSDEM over the first weekend we were able to reach one milestone: Buildservice Project Overview Page (a.k.a. factory.o.o) hurray! The wiki milestone finally moved forward again and the umbrella milestone got a new push with limiting it’s scope to the Bentoo theme. All in all a pretty successful sprint.

Retrospectiva

We finished the evaluation of retrospectiva and deployed it to http://retro.opensuse.org. Retrospectiva is now our project management tool of choice. The best part is that everybody, yes that means you, can simply follow what we do with it. For this you need to understand a few things. Most importantly the Terminology we use.

Milestones are big things we want to achieve. Like

Rid the world of all Evil

Goals are simpler things than milestones. They are defined from the customers point of view. It can be for example something like

Destroy the One Ring so we can get rid of the Dark Lord

Stories are simple technical steps that need to be done to reach a goal. Stories can be done by people. In this example it would be something like:

Cast the ring into a Volcano (Frodo)

Pretend to have the One Ring to distract the Dark Lord (Aragon)

Be the backup for Frodo (Gollum)

Customers don’t really want to know all that, the important thing is that we reach the milestone (no more evil in the world).

Sprints are the time units in which goals are achieved through finishing all stories they consist of. If they are not achieved they are simply moved to the next sprint. Once all goals are finished the milestone is reached and a new milestone is sought after.

The interface of Retrospectiva is pretty straight forward. On the top navigation bar you can choose how detailed you want to look at what we do.

If you choose the milestone option you will always see the three milestones we currently work on. They provide you with a high level overview and are the main information you can gather from this tool. If you choose the goals option you can have a look at the goals in the current sprint, which you can choose at the right hand menu. In the stories view you do the same, choose a sprint at the right menu and you have very detailed overview about who currently works on what.

We hope that you will find this tool useful, we for sure do. Of course we will continue to update everybody what we’re up to in blogposts like this, our mailinglist and our IRC channel. You should see this as additional source of information.

Standup Meeting

Last but not least the report about our last standup meeting. In this every squad has to stand up and tell the others what they did do in the last sprint, what they are planing to do in the next sprint and what blocks them currently.

The Factory Status Page Squad

We did finish upstream version tracking and with it the whole milestone.
You can see the result at:

https://build.opensuse.org/project/status?project=$PROJECT

so for instance
https://build.opensuse.org/project/status?project=openSUSE:Factory

We plan to announce it properly on and tell people about it. AI: wstephenson

We are blocked by nothing.

Integrate all Infrastructure under one Umbrella Squad:

We did add a proof-of-concept API to connect.o.o and generally worked on it. Thought about group Membership request voting (eg. for opensuse members group). We also deployed a new VM to be able to deploy/incubate our project. It also serves as host for retrospectiva.

We plan to push the Bento theme to wiki.o.o in cooperation with Frank. Port software.o.o to bento theme. A couple of Bento problems also need to be solved. We need to find a solution for wiki specific links and the
left column. We also will start browser testing/debugging. And to be able to gather contributors for connect.o.o we plan to finish the deployment and announce it properly.

We are blocked by nothing at the moment.

Discoverable Centralised Developer Documentation Squad

We did help to prepare the new instance so we can actually transfer content into it. For this we are making sure that the current content on wiki.o.o, mainly templates, is functional and follows the various guidelines of the wiki team. This is proving to be more work than expected, but it’s going forward.

We plan to finish the overhaul of the content and work on some missing technical features of the wiki like change notification. After this is finished we plan to finally transfer developer documentation into it. This shall be the first really useful area in the new instance and serve as an example of all the new features and processes.

We are blocked by nothing at the moment.

As one squad is finished with its milestone we also talked about how to continue from there. The outcome was that we will go after the milestone “Improve the openFATE process” and shuffle people around. The resulting new squads are:

Wiki: Henne, Tom, Petr, Lubos
Umbrella: Coolo, Robert, Darix, Michal, Pavol
openFATE: Klaas, Vincent, Will, Egbert

Thats it for this week. Thanks for reading and remember to have a lot of fun!

Read at Lizards

And now the talks are underway and the hallway is more and more empty. So I thought its time for a short recap. The first hours today went great. We arrived at the venue at 9 and were setup by 9:30 thanks to our new and shiny TouchSmart desktops. Thank you HP! Apparently people love to touch stuff so the booth is always visited and people play around. We also give out free T-Shirts to everyone participating in our newest survey. So all in all everything is going smoothly.

General Things

First of all some general things. We are currently evaluating a project management tool called Retrospectiva. It supposed help us with two things: Keeping track of our work and inform people, in depth, about it. The first part is coming along pretty nicely already. In December we met and agreed on terminology and a way to use the tool. We will work on Milestones, that consist of one or more Goals which consist one or more Stories. Each Milestone can have one or more Sprints which are time boxes stretching for  2 weeks. In the last couple of weeks Michal pushed some patches that implemented features we missed upstream. Henne transfered all data from our test project to the one we want to seriously use now. And Darix is working on the deployment of the new version to the community.o.o host which is currently prepared by Berthold Gunreben from the Autobuild Team as a XEN instance. Of course there are still several things to do. The squad leaders need to take care of their milestone descriptions to be very specific and from the customers view so people can actually understand them. Also we have to check the transferred data that got migrated and darix needs to deploy the head branch and push Berthold to finish the server. Because of our general goal to create a lot of buzz about what we do we need to attach a default story “make buzz about it” to every goal. Michal is looking into that.

For everybody’s favourite FOSS show FOSDEM in February we are ready to go. Boosters have 4 talks on the distro devroom’s schedule:

• Klaas: Hermes message dispatching
• Coolo: Clicfs as perfect live cd file system
• Vincent: Working with GNOME upstream
• Pavol: RPM packaging collaboration

Another show in desperate need on Booster Talks is LinuxTag 2010. Their call for papers is running and every booster shoud put in a talk! There are instructions on the CFP about what they are interested in, what topics they want to focus on, what is expected of speakers and how to submit a talk. So all of us are currently thinking about what we could talk about to the FOSS community.

In general we talked a lot about how we can make more buzz about what we do.  We agreed that the least we can do is to write something to our own mailinglist so other boosters are aware of what you are doing. The next steps would be to keep the parts of the project up to date that you are working in (OBS, Wiki, Web) via reports to their mailinglist and then tell the world what you do via your blog/lizards/news. Henne got the action item to push out our sprint meeting minutes to other channels than our own mailinglist. And NO goal should be closed without reporting about it to the world. We also have to think about how to use Retrospectiva for this.

Standup Meetings

We also run so called Standup Meetings where every squad has to stand up and tell the others what they did do in the last sprint, what they are planning to do in the next sprint and what currently blocks them.

For the Centralized Developer Documentation squad this was for the first sprint this year:

What we have done:
The general wiki transition has gone forward. There are transition guidelines, the new instance is deployed, working and tested. Currently there are some bugs blocking the transition related to some extensions. Nearly all the templates are in place and the wiki meta documentation is starting to shape up.

What we want to do:
We will create a portal and go on from there. Collect all developer documentation and transfer it to the new instance.

What is blocking us:
The bugs that block the general transition.

The Factory Status Page squad also had a lot to report:

What we have done:
80% of the milestone is done. The old factory page that coolo implemented is nearly transferred into the OBS. It’s not “live” in the master branch yet but deployed on the staging instance of the OBS web client. The development also introduced some new features in general like requests for the project page, build status popups for submit requests or the forward submit requests button.

What we want to do:
Smaller things: code cleanup, get some more information onto the page without showing it by default. Outdated package version information

What is blocking us:
We don’t want to and can’t be in the 1.7 release so we are waiting with merging until this is out of the door. But before we have to split some things like the new css and so on.

The squad that cares about unifying the openSUSE web experience (they call it Umbrella Project) reported the following:

What we have done:
On the theme side nothing happened because robert is offline. On the technical side we investigated solutions to incorporate. The investigation phase is done now.

What we want to do:
Document the results of the investigations and then start to implement.

What is blocking us:
Nothing at the moment

Thats it for now. Expect to hear from us again as FOSDEM gets nearer, and when the public Retrospectiva instance is ready. Until then, we’ll be hard at work making openSUSE a better place to contribute your Free Software time.  And remember, if you want to join the Boosters, or just hang out with us, come to #opensuse-boosters on FreeNode!

Monday

Travel day. On Sunday I went home early from the conference. I tell you, 4 days of constant talking and sharing ideas with other humans is tiresome! Good that we choose a place to go to that is so remote that you have to hike there. I welcome another couple of hours doing non-geek activities. But first I have go to the main train station to buy some tickets for the team, then back to the office to unravel the rest of the conference party fallout and pick up everybody else at 9am. We are 15 people to go on the trip. So after everyone is in, and we pass on the luggage to Roland who goes by car, we head off to the central station. Then go to by Train/Bus to a small town (Gößweinstein) and from there hike to our destination: Gut Schönhof. Gut Schönhof is an old farm (still operating) that has some rooms attached. During the whole trip it’s the most beautiful weather and everything goes smoothly.

In Gößweinstein we had a quick look at the famous basilica and then went on along the river Wiesent. After a quick lunch stop at one of the local breweries (did you know that the Franconian Switzerland is the region with the highest density of private breweries in the world?) we arrive. The Schönhof people have prepared a couple of rooms and the barn for us. I decide to stay in the barn together with Tom and Robert.

By now it’s dinner time and it’s still very warm so we eat outside in the sun. The farm has also cows so we get the most amazing, fresh, organic steaks and fries you can imagine. Well-fed and satisfied we have our first session of talking. Mostly about what tasks everybody brings as baggage into the Team. After that the mood is slightly down because we discovered that some of us bring quite a lot. Anyway, this needed to be in the open so everybody knows what we can and can’t pick up. Then most of us quickly go to bed. After playing some cards for an hour or so with Klaas, Tom and Robert I go too.

Tuesday

The breakfast is as good as the dinner yesterday. This is not the usual supermarket stuff you get in the city. Superb self-made sausages, cheese and jam. Milk and Eggs that not long ago were in the cow/chicken and freshly baked bread/buns. Off to talking again, AJ and Michl join us today. This time we start to come up with things that we want to do in the future. The list is growing very fast. It contains very dull hands-on stuff like centralizing the widespread, messy developer documentation in the wiki but also cool new stuff like integrating the build service with the SUSE Studio Marketplace. This is awesome! We then start to pick out things to discuss in detail. Coolo is doing this as -1,0,+1 voting and it turns out that this works very well for our group. We pick 6 topics we want to discuss in detail.

In the coffee break some of us decide to explore one of the near by old castles.

We conclude the day by discussing some of the things in great detail. Everybody is eager to hand out Action Items and we wouldn’t be geeks if we didn’t drift off into implementation details all the time. But in the end everybody is on the same page. I must say, I expected productivity here but not that much. The people in the Team are all old dogs, but apparently old dogs that can learn new tricks! Everybody is very open minded, positive and honest.

Dinner and then we take the projector we brought and turn the barn into a cinema. I fall asleep shortly after the opening credits…

Wednesday

Today we are going to prioritize the tasks we want to do. But first things first. We talked a lot about what we do, what we want to do and so on. This morning is for the how. So we talk about development methods, structural things like communications channels, meeting culture and things like this. In the end we agree on trying one of the hip agile methods. It fits us perfectly because the general direction we worked out by now for the team is “Growing Community by Enabling Community”. This will require us to jump from task to task and from topic to topic. Everybody is very eager to try this out.

Now that we know how to do things and what we want to do we start the prioritization. We again do this by a -1,0,+1 vote. This is it, our first sprints are set and over Dinner we split up into 3 groups and have our first planning phase. Time to check out the second castle that is around the corner. We arrive there by nightfall so there is not much to see. But we find a nice tavern in the valley for some beverages. During the evening Vincent and Lubos get into an ice-cream eating contest.

After they battled it out we head home through the dark forests. 15 people and 2 flashlights but we make it back. That was fun!

Thursday

Wrap up time! We want to leave at 11am so we can be at the office at 4′ish. A lot of us have more travel to do afterwards. There are bits and pieces here and there we still need to talk about but mainly we gather the next steps we want to do, like when to meet, how to tell the world about this team event and “marketing” in general. We also do a small retrospective on this kick-off and try to come up with a nicer name than multiplier team. At 11 we do the obligatory group photo and afterwards head out to the next bus stop in Pottenstein. We go the hike route, mostly on the road. 100 meters out i manage to trash my camera by smashing it on the pavement. The rest of the walk I talk to Egbert about the ongoing Board effort to establish an openSUSE foundation. He was long enough in the X.org board who also started a foundation and has a lot of insights. At around 3pm we arrive in Pottenstein and an hour later we part at the central station again.

Conclusion: Holy Moly! This was productive! This is a bunch of people that will do great things for the openSUSE project. Not that they did not do so already, most of them are already leading figures in the project, but together we will rock the boat for sure. I’m looking forward to work with these guys to grow the community by enabling the community!

“The overlay display stuff is still pretty much in development and needs someone with some artistic ability (ie. not me :-)) to design a nicer display for the seeking/pause display.”

So i thought what the heck let me see if i can come up with something. My artistic skills are limited but i think i understand what about the freevo user interface attracts me and others so much. It’s the right mixture of Text and Graphics. Usually media center developers try to impress you with glowing, transparent 3D graphics that turn, slide, flip and flow. You have to memorize what each of those animations means and that makes it pretty complicated in my eyes. Freevo on the other hand uses Text a lot.

A directory for instance is no fancy folder icon, a file is neither, they are represented as Text. A directory with square brackets and a file without.  But of course there is also an area for things like a cover or descriptions.

The fancy stuff is good to have but navigation and general usage have to work without it. Graphics should support Text – thats what i like about the user interface  of Freevo. What did not have this right mixture in Freevo was the OSD.

So i tried to come up with an OSD that follows these principles. Here is what i ended up with after many tries.

So i fixed some bugs, had to add a couple fo features to the dialogs core and styled this OSD theme. I was done by Friday so no osc factory plugin. Luckily i hack a lot on my normal worktime too so you don’t have to wait too long for it ;-)

Update: The code is in the Freevo tracker…