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Global Jam Participation – Ubuntu Berlin is prepared – are you?

Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009

(Wow, I needed to type “Global Jam” more than once as I’s used to write “Global Bug Jam”.)

I am happy looking forward to the third “Ubuntu Global Jam” taking place from 2nd to 4th of October 2009. “We”, meaning “Ubuntu Berlin“, Daniel Holbach, Benjamin Drung and me, already managed to prepare the local Jam session as far as possible:

We found a place with power supply and network uplink: the c-base, where Ubuntu Berlin became some kind of resident.
We decided to schedule our Global Jam for Saturday, the 3rd of October, from 11 am to 7 pm, which should allow people with different personal schedules to join us at least for some hours.
We added our Global Jam to the official team list.
We set up a core team with responsibilities for different aspects of the Jam. Daniel Holbach and Benjamin Drung will care for bug triaging, bug squatting and packaging while I’ll work on and present translation and documentation.
We announced our Global Jam participation and invited more people to join us on several mailing lists (from Ubuntu Berlin lists over local Berlin Linux lists to c-base lists).
We started to announce our invitation on different twitter feeds, our facebook group, identi.ca and some blogs. One of them you are currently reading
Last but not least I dropped some lines on the Ikhaya-suggest-an-article box, one of the most read German Ubuntu ressources.
We will continue inviting people on personal basis as there are a bunch of people able to support us and just need a small friendly push…

I admit I am curious about this years participation and impact. And you? What are your hints for setting up a Global Jam session? Or do you need any more advices? Let me know. I am curious. Really.

Posted in Berlin, BugJam, Event, GlobalJam, Packaging, Ubuntu | No Comments »

What do director Tom Tykwer and Ubuntu have in common?

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009

What do director Tom Tykwer (”The International“) and Ubuntu have in common? Well, they seem to share the same passion for commitment in developing countries by focusing on media. This similarity came up when I read the schedule for the one day conference “Jour Fixe – media and development“.

While the first talk, held by Andrea Goetzke und Geraldine de Bastion from newthinking communications, titled “Ubuntu and the free toaster“, deals with free software and digital culture in Africa, the second talk, held by director Tom Tykwer and titled “The Making of Soulboy. A movie production in the slums of Nairobi“, deals with a movie project in Nairobi (and Tom Tykwers engagement in artistic education for youngsters in Africa with the ngo “one fine day”).

The “Jour Fixe” is scheduled for this Friday, the 24th of April, and takes place at “Hamburger Bahnhof” in Berlin/Germany. As I’m going to attend the conference, I’ll try to report back a short resume. Please note that there are more interesting talks besides Ubuntu/Tykwer – I just wanted to point out the interesting coincidence.

Posted in Berlin, Event, Ubuntu | No Comments »

Ubuntu developers visiting Ubuntu Berlin and c-base – plus interview with Mark Shuttleworth

Friday, February 6th, 2009

A couple of months ago I started annoying people by telling them, I’d like to show the Ubuntu Berlin community and c-base to Mark Shuttleworth as he is interested in community personally on one side and Ubuntu Berlin is a great example on the other. So this’s rather inviting an important member of the community than celebrating a “meet and greet”. Of course telling people plans like this makes them smile, but when you raise your finger and say “It will happen” with certainty, they’ll get uncertain. So the plan was actually to invite Mark to one of our great traditional release parties which you shouldn’t miss when you are around Berlin at release time.

By chance the Ubuntu Developer Sprint happened to be in Berlin for the next Jaunty release this week. If I got it right, the Canonical Ubuntu developers meet five days around two weeks before a release feature freeze and work in groups and issues that need to be decided/designed or just fixed immediatly. The incredible Daniel Holbach had the idea of inviting the bunch of developers right into the c-base after their work. So he did and we scheduled it for an evening when the Ubuntu Berlin crew also meets at c-base for their monthly jour fix.

We did not announce this meeting externally as we tried to make the whole evening as comfortable as possible for everyone. And we did, I think. Right in time at 19:30 this Wednesday evening about thirty Ubuntu developers entered the c-base. Just among them Mark who seemed to like the whole c-base hackerspace, Ubuntu Berlin, community, space and future thing a lot. The Canonical crowd got several guided tours through the whole base by __t, while housetier provided the others with “German beer” and Club Mate. We had a lot of chats in smaller groups, things, you always wanted to ask the developer of your choice and just relaxed smalltalks about space, canooeing the c-base project “OpenMoon” (trying to send a rocket to the moon), and more. Mark seemed to be amazed about asking people why they joined to Ubuntu Berlin team, what they were currently doing and so on – so, what the community thing is about right here and right now.

We had no schedule for the evening. Therefore we spent about two and a half hour at c-base without any official part and a cosy diner in smaller groups afterwards. We only asked some people for an interview for the c-base statement studio channel where already people like Nokias Peter Schneider and Mozillas CEO John Lilly showed up. Mark took the time for an interview by jocognito. The results of this short talks are already online on Youtube:

Interview #1: (when the inbound video doesn’t show up, click here)

Interview #2: (when the inbound video doesn’t show up, click here)

Another interview with Jorge Castro and James Westby has also been taped and will be published soon. Funny guys talking about Ubuntu on the moon. I’ll post the Youtube links, when the edited version is online.

So what’s next? I hope everybody liked (Ubuntu) Berlin and c-base and we got a good start for possible events in the future.

Thanks again to Daniel who initiated the visit!

Posted in Allgemein, Berlin, Community, Debian, Event, Ubuntu | 5 Comments »

From workshops over Jour Fix to free network games – one week in Berlin

Monday, February 2nd, 2009

This week seems to be a new hilight in the “Ubuntu Berlin” history. I already mentioned that we are really busy with event organisation, but we continue to outperform ourself: In the last weeks we noticed that we reached a point where it is impossible to plan events so that a majority of is can participate, as we are just running so many of them which has positive and negative side effects.

So how is this weeks schedule?

Monday: workshop with the incredible Sven Guckes about screen and irssi part one,
Tuesday: workshop with Sven Guckes part two,
Wednesday: Monthly Jour Fix at c-base with some very special guests – I’ll report back with interesting material,
Saturday: free game afternoon/evening/night – our first try for a free lan party with free games like “Battle for Wesnoth”, “Sauerbraten”, “Tetrinet” – at least one game for every taste.

This feels really great on one side as you can participate at Ubuntu events on four of seven evenings within this week. And it seems we wont run out of content for the next months as we still have a lot of ideas and volunteers for workshops, release parties, events, jams and technical projects.

On the other side most members of our user group face the new situation of not being able to participate in all events. While a year ago the core team showed up at nearly every event, nearly nobody is able to participate in an Ubuntu event every second day a week.

We discussed a lot about this issue: Is it possible to offer too many events? The main argument for this is the possibility of shooting one’s wad within a short time. I, personally, don’t agree with this right now. When your possible audience is large enough – Berlin has round about 3.5 million residents – you actually can not run out of visitors. Of course millions of them aren’t interested in Ubuntu at all right now (are they?), but you have to decide whether you want to build a community for the sake of a community – which is okay, meaning meetings, chats and similar in and for a closer core group. Or you decide that you use the community as a kind of incubator trying to reach out for all the different people out there. Not to include them all into the community but to spread knowledge, free software and yes, fun.

So I guess, we’ll continue to fire off events as they come in. Actually we came to the comfortable problem of having “too many” events by doing so for the last months, even years and we’ll see what this means for 2009. Think a lot of fun and a growing amount of happy Ubuntu users. Promised.

Posted in Berlin, Community, Event, Ubuntu | 1 Comment »

Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex Release Party on 1st of November at c-base (Berlin)

Sunday, October 26th, 2008

So, half a year has passed and it’s time again to celebrate a new Ubuntu release. This is an invitation for you, your friends and any other human being around to join our “Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex Release Party” on Saturday, the 1st of November, at the sunken starship c-base (Rungestraße 20), starting at 4pm.

Again, a couple of lectures will be held – ranging from new features in Intrepid (that’s my part, I’ll give the lecture at the same day also at the BLIT), over Gnome eyecandy stuff to presentations of Freifunk project and the DeepaMehta semantic desktop (don’t miss!) directly from it’s lead developer. So either if you are new to Ubuntu and want to make first steps and contact other Ubuntu users or you are a Linux guru – you’ll find somebody to have a chat with, I promise. There’ll even be a “tux tinker corner” where you or your girl friend have the possibility to try out some Tux Origami.

The event’ll mainly be in German, but a lot of people are speaking English, so don’t hesitate asking for help/translations.

Entrance is free, there is a free wifi, so feel free to bring your notebook in. You can also “buy” a freshly burned Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu cd for a service charge of 1 Euro or check the Ubuntu merchandising table.

See you there?

Links:
Official Party Announcement Page
how to get to c-base?
Freifunk
DeepaMehta
Ubuntu Berlin

Posted in Allgemein, Berlin, Debian, Event, IntrepidIbex, ReleaseParty, Ubuntu | No Comments »

Off for Ubucon – See you there?

Friday, October 17th, 2008

Just wanted to let you know that I’m visiting this years Ubucon (Göttingen/Germany) this weekend. If you like to, we can have a little chat there. Just drop me a line to “damokles at ubuntu dot com”. Maybe see you there.

Posted in Debian, Event, Ubuntu | No Comments »

Don’t complain about it – make it better? Bug Jamming for a better tomorrow

Wednesday, June 18th, 2008

Agreed, that was too much pathetic. But you got the point, didn’t you? Free software like every software is full of bugs and possibilities for enhancements. So is Ubuntu. But that’s okay, because we have the power to change it. No need to be a developer, no need to be an ubernerd. All you have to do is to spent some time. Need somebody to motivate you? Want to do it in a group? Then a Bug Jam is perfect for you!

No, it’s not a jam made of bugs It’s a get together where people work on eliminating software bugs by spending some time reading bug descriptions, checking them, writing new ones, informing developers about bugs or even patch the software by themselves. The Ubuntu community crew tries to push these events as they really help you to kick your ass and just get started as it’s much easier to get into the bug business in a group and it makes a lot of fun. And of course bugs fixed in Ubuntu can be ported to Debian and upstream quite often.

All you for a Bug Jam is… Ah, just come to one of the four Bug Jam irc sessions taking place in the next weeks, held by some Ubuntu people who already have some experiences with Bug Jamming and Ubuntu related events (I will support Daniel Holbach on two of them, one this Friday, 16:00 UTC). See the schedule on Daniel’s blog entry.

And keep in mind:

1. There is the 5-a-day project where you and your loco team, group or whatever can make a difference and pop up on the first line of the statistics.

2. There will be a Global Bug Jam which will be the first and biggest of it’s kind so far and you can be part of it.

Hope to see you there.

–
My 5 today: #156204 (pidgin-otr), #130443 (pidgin-otr), #144770 (pidgin-otr), #240420 (ubuntu), #231660 (ubuntu)
Do 5 a day – every day! https://wiki.ubuntu.com/5-A-Day

Posted in BugJam, Chat, Debian, Event, Linux, Ubuntu | No Comments »

First BBJ – Berlin Bug Jam – with MOTU Daniel Holbach on Monday, 16th of June at c-base Berlin

Thursday, June 12th, 2008

Ubuntu Berlin ist proud to present you the first BBJ: A “Berlin Bug Jam” with Ubuntu MOTU Daniel Holbach, who will rock the place, for sure. Don’t know what a “Bug Jam” is? Well, imagine it as a gettogether for working on bugs in a team. That does not mean, you have to be a developer: Everybody is welcome, who can do things from testing bug reports, triaging, patching or just wants to see how it all works. So this will rather be an “event” than a lecture/workshop and provide you with a lot of fun and knowledge. If you want to see a detailed description of a bug jam, check the wiki page.On the BBJ, we will try to persuade to join the 5-A-Day project, motivating people to continuously enhance the Ubuntu Distribution and helping you to spread the word (and yes, to compete if you like) by trying to work on five bugs every day. Let’s see, if we succeed…

Feel free to bring your notebook along. We have power and free wifi, of course.

Event: 1. Berlin Bug Jam (BBJ) with Daniel Holbach
Location: c-base Berlin, Rungestr. 20
Date: 16th of June
Time: 18:00

Please note: If you want to support the Global Ubuntu Bug Jam, which is taking place from 8th to 10th of August,
this is a perfect possibility for you to gather some hands on
experiences. Of course, Ubuntu Berlin, will bring up a great lineup and
event for the Global Bug Jam. We are already working on it.

Posted in Allgemein, Berlin, Debian, Event, HardyHeron, IntrepidIbex, Linux, Ubuntu | No Comments »

Ubuntu BBQ on 31th of May – End of Linuxtag

Wednesday, May 28th, 2008

Ubuntu Berlin strikes again! On the 31th of May, this Saturday (and last day of the “Linuxtag”), Ubuntu Berlin is proud to present the “Ubuntu BBQ” – an event you should not miss when staying in Berlin for attending “Linuxtag 2008“, live here or happen to be around by chance.

Hosted again by the sunken starship “c-base” we are happy to provide you with drinks at low prices, and BBQ and entrance for … free! Sponsorships from Canonical Ltd. (you might have heard of them) and ubuntu Deutschland e.V. (thank you!) and an invitation from the Linuxtag Community staff made this possible and we are anxious to see how many Linuxtag attendees make their way to the base.

But it’s not about eating and drinking: The event gives you the possibility to meet a lot of GNU/Linux and Ubuntu interested folks, even some of the well known free software gurus in a relaxed atmosphere. Of course you can use a free wifi network with you notebook/gadget/whatever, but don’t forget: It’s a party. Music will be around and you can sit directly at the rivercoast of the “Spree”. It’s said the weather will be great.

You are invited the join us starting from 4 pm – the BBQ will start from 7pm – so you have enough time to come over from Linuxtag. We will arrange some groups you can join on Linuxtag making it easier for you to find the c-base. See more on our (yet only German) announcement.

Tags: BBQ
Posted in BBQ, Berlin, Debian, Event, GNU, Linux, Ubuntu, c-base | No Comments »

Ubuntu landed on Berlin metro system

Thursday, April 24th, 2008

The guys from “Berliner Fenster”, a company responsible for the content of the television system installed inside underground vehicles (more than 3.700 displays) were so kind (thank you!) providing us with a spot for our release party this Saturday for free. So just on time with the release starting from today there are small spots viewable by an audience of about 1.5 million people per day according to their web site.

Don’t trust me? See this:

and this:

And come over on Saturday, the 26th of April to our release party. Lectures, demonstrations, freshly burned cds, a live Samba band, a button machine and Daniel Holbach as Drum’n'Bass dj and of course dozens of helpful and open source minded people are waiting for you. Entrance is free.

Posted in Berlin, Debian, Event, HardyHeron, ReleaseParty, Ubuntu | 14 Comments »

Screenage