Richard A. Johnson

Thanks to Silke “If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, then it’s a duck” McCance for taking pictures during the entire weekend and uploading them.

The Official Pictures of the 2010 Desktop Help Summit.

What an amazing weekend! First off, I really want to thank the following people:

• Shaun “Is it Help? Hjelp? Yelp?” McCance – This entire event was his idea, his baby, and he pulled off one hell of an event. Thanks for showing off Mallard and Yelp.
• Kevin “Is my iPad here yet?” Harriss – The venue was hosted by Kevin at the always awesome IIT Institute of Design in downtown Chicago, IL. Also thanks for allowing me to crash on the futon.
• Jim “There are spy camera’s in my mansion” Campbell – Xfce and Xubuntu should be proud to have you on their teams, thanks for hosting that silly Brit Phil Bull and thanks for the coffee, donuts, and bagels.
• Milo “When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie” Casagrande – always good to see you again, and thank you for admitting that Italy could learn to make pizza from Chicago.
• John “Fedora has a bat cave” McDonough – Google thanks you for realizing you shouldn’t listen to me for directions, and it was great to get to hang out with some (somewhat) local Fedora peeps.
• Brian “GNOME is in the hizzy” Cameron – Thanks for spilling GNOME’s secrets so I can take them back to KDE Thanks for being a whicked cross-collab dude. Don’t think I didn’t hear you over there in the corner while I was writing American Idol’s next great hit!
• Phil “The Intern” Bull – Thanks for the surprise! It was awesome to finally meet you after working along side you for the past 5 years on the Ubuntu Documentation Project. I had no idea you were coming and then hearing some British voice yell my name in Chicago scared the hell out of me, I swore I paid those tickets, really I do!
• Silke “I’m with the Mallard” McCance – It was great to meet you, and great to see who it is that keeps Shaun in line Thanks for the spy videos of my computer voice song, and thanks for running across the street and picking up the utensils and drinks when there was free food, and thanks for getting Milo to admit that Chicago knows Pizza! Thanks for the coffee and bagels this morning too!

I would also like to thank Paul Cutler for trying to make it. I hope your family is feeling better, and I am sure this summer we can all get together for some documentation love!

So, the Desktop Help Summit 2010, the main reason for this post. We, members of GNOME, KDE, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Oracle/Sun/OpenSolaris, gathered in Chicago this weekend to hold the first, but hopefully not the last, Desktop Help Summit. It was all about collaborating on bringing help to our users and doing it better than everyone else. We collaborated, we learned, and we quacked! Heck, Shaun even gave the dancing Mallard some background music provided by Severed Fifth. Some of you who have followed me in the past know that for 3 years I chuckled at Project Mallard and called it nothing more than vapor-ware. Maybe I said it enough that Shaun, deciding to shut me up, has provided an amazing markup language specialized for topic-based help. If you doubt it for even a second, you should really see it in action. It is definitely something I would like to see make its way into the KDE SC one of these days. He showed off what he has been doing on Yelp 3.0, I think that is the version, that made be a bit envious and made me want something like it in the KDE SC.

To learn more about the event and what went on, check out the links to the people above, as I am sure they will post more information as well. I know John and Milo already have started blogging about it. There are pictures somewhere, as Silke was showin’ off her mad super camera skills. I really want a nice camera like that. I think Milo took some pictures and John has as well. Phil didn’t take any pictures because he was to busy looking up in the air at the tall buildings. We had to take him over to the zoo because he was missing the view of sheep on a daily basis, so to curb his home sickness, we looked out for him.

I also had some tweets (by @nixternal) and dents (by @nixternal) about the event as well. Thanks to those of you as well who participated on IRC. Notes are also available via Ether pad at http://etherpad.com/tUI4jbLm01 and http://etherpad.com/bnDi2pxN42.

This way here, Harald won’t be able to add to his count. Anyways, I am giving a presentation next week for Ubuntu Opportunistic Developer Week, it is on Friday, March 5^th, 2010 at 17:00 UTC. The topic I will be presenting is “Creating a PyKDE App.” I am slotted for one hour to attempt and teach everyone who shows up, how to create an application using KDE’s Python API. Seems easy enough right? It is, but I was thinking I would like to start some sort of application that has future potential, that hopefully an opportunistiK developer or two can take on, and maybe make something great in the future.

So what does this have to do with you? Easy, what would be a perfect application to start and present for this topic? I don’t want to create just a shell for something, I would like to at least have a little bit of functionality to it. Thus far, I have received one idea from @harriseldon on Identi.ca. Feel free to leave comments on this blog, or follow @nixternal on Identi.ca or @nixternal on Twitter and shoot me a message. Thanks everyone!

Hey everyone, just wanted to drop a quick note to those of you who are in or around the Chicago land area, on Sunday, January 17th from 12:30PM until 5:30PM the Ubuntu Chicago LoCo team will be meeting up in Chicago for a documentation jam. If you would like to show up, here is the address of where we will be hanging out:

On-Shore Inc‎.
1407 W. Chicago Ave.
Chicago, IL

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If you can’t make it to the event, no worries, as you can join us on IRC in #ubuntu-chicago channel on the freenode IRC network. Plans are to work on Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and Xubuntu system documentation, as well as cleaning up the team wiki pages as well as community documentation on https://help.ubuntu.com/community.

If you plan on working on system documentation, here is what you can do prior to joining us on Sunday:

READ how we use the Bazaar repository for doing system documentation.

Ubuntu Documentation
Install build dependencies for the ubuntu-docs package:

sudo apt-get build-dep ubuntu-docs

Kubuntu Documentation
Install build dependencies for the kubuntu-docs package:

sudo apt-get build-dep kubuntu-docs

Xubuntu Documentation
Install build dependencies for the xubuntu-docs package:

sudo apt-get build-dep xubuntu-docs

Once you have done that, then you need to check out the latest documentation for Lucid for the documentation you are going to work on:

Ubuntu Documentation

bzr branch lp:ubuntu-docs

Kubuntu Documentation

bzr branch lp:kubuntu-docs

Xubuntu Documentation

bzr branch lp:xubuntu-docs

System documentation is in DocBook/XML format, which is a very simple markup language. Don’t worry if you really don’t know it as Jim Campbell and myself can quickly teach you what you need to know, in order for you to get up and running.

Don’t worry, if you don’t feel you are ready to work on system documentation, there is also plenty of wiki documentation that needs to either be cleaned up or added.

Hope to see you Sunday!

That’s right, just like Chicago and their Olympic bid, the Global Jam has been olyminated! We spent the better part of 6 plus hours teaching quite a few new faces how to get involved in the Ubuntu Community. We covered everything from filing a bug to triaging that sucker, and even covered the packaging as well. We went over, in pretty good detail what all is involved with packaging as well as breaking down the files that are required and important for Debian and Ubuntu packaging. Typically our events are a lot of the same faces, however this time we went for a suburban Chicago feel for the get together and this collected a bunch of new faces. Awesome, as Jorge would say. Everyone of them was interested in learning how to contribute too. Hey Matt East, keep your eye out for my buddy Vaughn, he is interested in some Ubuntu docs! I know we will have a few more MOTU, or Ubuntu Developers, or whatever it will be called soon, hailing from Chicago. This rocks! During all of the instructing we actually triaged a bug, one bug! Of course it was a KDE bug too, go figure! Nonetheless, it was very productive and I feel we will have new contributors from Chicago in the near future as well. Anyways, here are just a couple of photos from the ones that I took:

Ubuntu Chicago

 
mr. swoody and ms. swoody

musikgoat

MIDWEST!

Can you hear me now?

OK, if you are reading this post from Planet Ubuntu, more than likely you have noticed the posts about the various teams and their participation in the Global Jam. What you haven’t seen yet is the report from the Ubuntu Chicago Team just yet. Well there is a reason. As it seemed that a great deal of the teams would be hosting their jams on Saturday, aka today, we decided to hold ours on Sunday. Various reasons of course, one being people don’t like geeking out on a Saturday, plus we all realized that all of the teams today would have messed up so much, that the Chicago team can then go in and fix every thing :p

OK, that isn’t the real reason, but anyways, just a heads up. If you are in or around Chicago tomorrow, the team will be meeting up at the Schaumburg Library from 12:00PM until 8:45PM. Here are more details. See you tomorrow!