Read the press release: Desktop Summit 2011 Announced

As Ubuntu member and head member of c-base e.V. I am part of the Berlin team, together with Claudia Rauch from KDE e.V. and Mirko Boehm of KDE. Let me quote Mirko:

“We are honored and proud that our proposal was selected. What we look forward to the most is the inspiration our communities will draw from having the Desktop Summit together again, but also from visiting our bustling, welcoming city. We would like to thank all the supporters of the proposal, and will work hard to make the conference a big success.”

I am sure this event will become a success. And it’s a great opportunity to meet and greet across the letters before the “U” in “Ubuntu”.

1) Ubuntu Community booth

The “ubuntu Deutschland e.V.”, Ubuntu and Kubuntu community presented their work at a community hosted booth. A bunch of Ubuntu Berlin members supported the booth, answered hundreds of questions and helped with the proceedings.

2) Talks

Saturday Featured a lot of Ubuntu focussed talks. For the first time “Ubuntu Berlin” and its members hosted a remarkable amount of them, e.g.:

• Anselm Helbig – Ubuntu Berlin Lightning Talks (tmux)
• Benjamin Drung – Ubuntu in 50 minutes, Packaging for Debian and Ubuntu
• Caspar Clemens Mierau – Ubuntu Berlin Lightning Talks (Vimperator), Gnome-Do, Ubuntu in 50 minutes
• Daniel Holbach – Fixing Bugs in Ubuntu (see slides), Ubuntu in 50 minutes, Ubuntu Berlin Lightning Talks (liblaunchpad)
• Marcel Eichner – Ubuntu Berlin Lightning Talks (Franklin)
• Torsten Franz – Supporting Ubuntu

minutes before the “Ubuntu in 50 minutes” talk

3) Interviews for Radio Tux

Several members of Ubuntu Berlin gave interviews to the well known German Podcast “Radio Tux“. Daniel’s talk on bugjamming has been released already. Be sure to check the archive for other releases within the next days.

4) LinuxTag BBQ

Last but not least: The  ”End of LinuxTag BBQ” at c-base, sponsored by Canonical, has been a great success again. Three barbacues and about ten “Grillmeister” (you cannot translate this) provided more than hundred visitors with tasty food. Members of various types of open source communities had interesting chats while relaxing at the banks of the Spree.

As Ubuntu Berlin’s support for the LinuxTag continuously increased within the last years, I am sure next year will even better. We’ll see.

The BBQ opens around 6pm. If you don’t know how to get to c-base from the LinuxTag area, a friendly team will guide you – just have a look at the official announcement. The last two your showed, the LinuxTag BBQ is a perfect ending as a large crowd of open source developers and community members of all free project types take the possibility to chat and relax directly at the riverside of the Spree. Don’t miss that See you there.

Ada Lovelace

The “Ada Lovelace Day” celebrates the achievements of women in technology and science and pledges for blog posts about this topic. As the Ubuntu community tries to emphasize the involvement of women in the contribution to the project (e.g. see Ubuntu Women), there might interesting stories about an Ubuntu specific focus on this day’s topic.

I am looking forward the 24nd, there are over 1000 blog post pledges so far. In case you use twitter, have a look at the hash marks #AdaLovelace and #ald10.

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:

1. We found a place with power supply and network uplink: the c-base, where Ubuntu Berlin became some kind of resident.
2. 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.
3. We added our Global Jam to the official team list.
4. 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.
5. 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).
6. 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
7. Last but not least I dropped some lines on the Ikhaya-suggest-an-article box, one of the most read German Ubuntu ressources.
8. 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.

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.

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)

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.

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