/home/nand

A quick update on my professional and open source activities:

Firstly, I’ll go freelance as a Drupal web developper during the next month, after eight months as an employee. The big crazy jump. But that’s crazy stuff that keeps me alive After Ubuntu Brainstorm and France24, I’ll be looking for Drupal related work.

Then Ubuntu Brainstorm and Ubuntu news. Here, unfortunately, I’ve been in the low part of my open source cycle for a few months now. I don’t know how your motivation on open source works, but concerning me, so far, motivation comes in big cycles of three to four years, each cycle containing a high period of frequent contributions, and a low one, with contributions close to zero. This second part comes naturally as the burning out point is getting close. And I’m afraid I’m entering this period. That means that I don’t expect any progress on Ubuntu news before months, and I won’t come to the karmic UDS.

Fortunately, on the good news part, there may be a pretty good news for the Ubuntu news project pretty soon, I’ll keep you updated And the Brainstorm moderators team is doing an awesome job!

I discovered a new awesome guy : Abd Al Malik. Between slam and rap, this kind of music is quite new to me. And I like it. Abd Al Malik is a virtuoso with words, he plays we them. Far away from the classic rap clichés, his lyrics are poetic, truly close to earth, and won’t let anyone untouched.

One of my best title of the Dante album, “C’est du lourd”:

After being delayed a few months due to some technical requirements, the new Ubuntu Brainstorm is here! It was partially sponsored by the Stockholm airport back in august. It includes:

• The new moderator team (25 people!), which can now enter into action. It is also easier to contact them.
• An easier way for users to interact with moderators : ideas already being worked on, already implemented,offensive ideas/comments, spam, … can be reported
• Idea/Solution(s) separation, Idea Sandbox: for a better idea quality.
• Much more easy to browse ideas by application. Wanna see only Amarok-related ideas? Go to http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/amarok/
• Clarification of Brainstorm for new users : Brainstorm tour, FAQ
• …

BUT it is at the moment veeeeerrryyyy slllooowww, please be patient, we will tune this tomorrow!

Edit: Ubuntuforums.org are also under heavy load, down from time to time… not Brainstorm’s fault, they’re on separate machines

Just a quick note about an awesome new power metal group I have discovered. They called themselves “Pagan’s mind“, and if you liked music from Sonata Arctica, Stratovarius, you will definitely like their called “God’s equation”. Creative, original, powerful, … awesome!

Looking forward listening to their older albums!

At last UDS, Nick Ali and I felt that really, some real news website was needed, and I won’t go again through the rationale (see this post). The matter was discussed (see blueprint page), and summary of the session can be found here. (Nick, could you link it on the blueprint page?)

I’ve started working on this, and reached the first step: basic templates, so that people can realizes what we have in mind, and getting feedback.

(You can click on the templates to have the real HTML page)

What are the differences I would see with the current Fridge?

• Obviously a new theme. (Theme creation is not my best area, so I’ll be happy to receive suggestions!)
• Highlighted stories will be chosen: some news are more important than others. Henri Bergius proposed me a voting system on my last post, but I don’t think it good: there may be not popular news needing attention (e.g. a call for testing).
• 3 target audience, so 3 main sections : “World” targeted at the average user, “LoCos” targeted as LoCos members and people interested in it, “Development” targeted at people with technical knowlegde, developers, contributors. You can look at the stories title to get an idea. (Disregard the images in the developer section screenshot, I was too lazy to change them)
• Multi lingual support: thanks to Drupal, it would be possible to have interfaces to translate stories into others languages. Stories displayed in front page of the website in others languages could also be changed, according to available translated stories.
• A new name for the Fridge. Well, I’d like it. A more obvious name. Even “Ubuntu news” would make it. A poll I made returned 25% of people not even aware of the Fridge!
• Anyone will be allowed to post stories directly on the website. They will then be reviewed by the staff before being posted.
• All blog posts from the planet will be automatically imported unposted. Staff may post them, or use them as quotes for stories.
• Comment support. Finally. With Launchpad support, so we can display your picture and such.
• Video and flash support. Finally. Especially for all these nices videos sitting in an apache directory listing on videos.ubuntu.com!!!
• Inter website navigation bar: the little bar at the top. That’s the thing I’d like to see on every Ubuntu website, even LoCos ones. See for example in Brainstorm. Without it, how can the huge number of nice Ubuntu websites, like the Ubuntu Hall of Fame, be accessed if not linked prominentely?? The menu scheme would be stored somewhere, and websites would regularly fetch it. This top bar would be available in form of plugins for the major CMS.

Now, if I got time, next step will be to change this template according to feedback, and implement the basic functionality on a Drupal instance.

As we are getting regular news on the war on the Gaza strip, we may often lack background information. I’d like to share a very good set of small videos on the daily life of 6 peoples in Gaza and Sderot (in Israel, close to the border of the Gaza strip) despite the war situation. It happens to have been broadcast during one month just before the war made the headlines. It is called “Gaza-Sderot”, and it is available here.

Giant US pacman!

We got a UDS session about new ways to handle Ubuntu news today (blueprint, summary of the discussion). Basically, it comes down to three things :

1. Convince people and teams this is really needed
2. Posting restrictions : who can post, and how?
3. Visibility of this website: We want better than that.

1) Ubuntu teams need to communicate. Call for participation of average users/potential contributors, global feedback (Ubuntu Brainstorm answer, shutting up rumors,…), recruitment of potential contributors…. But the Fridge, the only Ubuntu news medium for both average users and power users, has few content, has a very bad visibility for the outsiders, and is barely read by ‘insiders’.

2) Two possibles suggestions raised : everybody can post via the web interface (NOT via a mailing list), and they’re approved by staff. Or only members of some Ubuntu LP teams can freely post, acceptation inside a given Ubuntu team giving the right to post.

3) It is in fact part of a much bigger problem: navigation between Ubuntu community website is a mess. A UDS session is scheduled to discuss that.

Ok, now what’s this screenshot? It’s a screenshot of France24, a international news channel website (where I happen to work ). And that’s a layout we thought could be much more interesting than the current blog layout for a news website!

Thoughts, opinions?

Community communications are essential. So are community news. A source of news (both technical and general public) is great when you want to keep in touch with the Ubuntu world, without having to digg around in IRC logs, mailing lists, external blog posts, forum posts,…Ok, So what do we have right now?

•  The Ubuntu Fridge. Great source of various news for the general public, non-technical audience. Unfortunately, it has a bad visibility and it is not read much (based on this small poll (30 answers, 37% not aware of the Fridge, 55% not reading it, 7% reading once in a while), the fact that it is only linked from ubuntu.com,and the number of reference to the fridge I’m seeing)
• Planet Ubuntu. Source of very various things, mainly technical. Solid pieces of technical Ubuntu news are rare, and the nature of the planet needs one to read it regularly, since history after 4 days is lost.
• Ubuntu team external news (I’m not talking about intra-team news) are quite non-existent. If some exists, their visibility is so bad that I’m not aware of them. The QA and Server team have set up a news blog, but only aggregaged to the technical Planet.

The situation is not optimal. Okay, now what’s the point? I mean, for us developers and regular contributors, all is ok, we don’t see the need of more news. Yes, for people heavily involved, there is not really a need for news. But for occasional contributors, people that spend only a few hours per week due to work and others duties, the time is precious. The need has already be made known on the ubuntu-devel ML. A good source of news for the general public should also not be neglected. It would make a better visibility for teams needs (e.g. QA call for testing, 5-a-day,…), it would avoid damaging rumors (Ubuntu killing harddrive, black theme going to be default, …), it would give feedback to users expressing their wishes on Ubuntu Brainstorm, …

In my opinion, how community news could be optimally organized:

• The Ubuntu Fridge gets a much broader visibility with an inter-community-websites navigation, which is really needed for the Ubuntu websites on the overall. The Fridge get a subsection for each Ubuntu Team, so that general-public news of Ubuntu teams can be published without having the team to host their own blog/other source of news.Optionally the Fridge get renammed to something less confusing, e.g. news.ubuntu.com. This setup is clearly focused on the general public and potential contributors audience.
• A similar setup is created, but for technical news : a blog where only technical news are posted, and with subcategories for each Ubuntu teams to let them post their news. This setup is clearly focused on the developers, power users and experienced contributers audience.

And no question of merging these two sources of news.

What’s your opinion? Thoughts?