Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter #121 -- Part 2

Interview with (huats), Leader of the Ubuntu-fr Team

- Who are you? Where do you live? What do you do for a living?

My name is Christophe Sauthier, and my nick is huats in IRC. I am 31, I live in Toulouse (France), and I am in a relationship. I work for a French service company (makina corpus) that only works in the open source world. I am involved with Ubuntu related training, assistance, and migration, but also some development in PHP (Drupal) and Python (Plone).

I am directly involved with Ubuntu as the leader of the French LoCo. My other main community role is coordinating the MOTU mentoring reception, which is geared at helping new comers in the Ubuntu development world. I also try to be active on a development level by helping with the packaging of some applications, mainly around the GNOME environment.

- How did you get involved with Linux and Ubuntu initially?

A long long time ago (something like 1996) I went to ask someone his opinion on a perl script I was working on (a cgi for a website in fact). He told me: "if you plan to develop a bit in Perl, you should use Linux. Here are some ways to install it...". That was my first contact with Linux. At that time, I mainly used Suse, and Debian. Then one day, I ran across something which was based on Debian but not named yet, it later became known as Ubuntu. That was in 2004, and since that day, Ubuntu has been the only distribution I have used.

- How did you get involved with the French LoCo?

I had been doing some French translations for some software (mainly in Gnome) for sometime, and one day I noticed a post on the French LoCo teams wiki that mentioned a bunch of projects that were about to be launched. One of them was the organization of interviews (and then translations) of some key members of the community. This project evolved later into various projects like BehindUbuntu.

- How did you come to lead the French LoCo?

After that first experience in the French Community, I decided to stay around, hanging out in the IRC of various French channels, or looking from time to time at the forums. That was where I saw the campaign to sell t-shirts for the LoCo. My first thought was 'I want one', and my second thought was 'I am sure I can help them to organize it'... After ordering mine, I contacted the guy who was leading the project, and there was so much work that my help was welcomed... it turned out that Yann (the guy I contacted), was the leader of the LoCo, and after lots of talks he told me that some help was also needed on the website development area. He asked me to show some proof that I able to help by developing a module for the punbb (the forum we are using for the French LoCo). I took on more and more work for the French LoCo, and when the leader decided to step down, they asked me if I was willing to face the challenge of trying to build a new team, with new organization. This is how I became the leader of the French LoCo, and I have tried to build the team using the "Team Work" concept.

- What are the challenges of running a large LoCo? How does your LoCo communicate, and reach such a large area?

There are many challenges, but it is also thrilling. The first challenge is of course trying to work everything into one day. There are some many solicitations that it is impossible to please everyone even though we want to try. So it ends up, that some people feel that we are just centered in one area, and that we don't care about the others. The fact is that it is usually a lack of manpower and/or time, and to show that, we are communicating more and more using a report blog. The blog is part of the French planet so it can be reached by everyone. We don't want to only limit ourself to the blog though, since we are also trying to be as transparent as we can on every decisions. Every month or so, we have a public IRC meeting. We try to deal with every aspect of our community: talking about the past actions (since the last meeting), the current ongoing actions, and the short/medium term ones. There is also an amount of time dedicated to questions where anyone can initiate a new topic for discussion. I think that this transparency interests people, for instance at the last meeting, something like 60 people attended.

- How is the French LoCo organized? Is it centralized or decentralized?

It is a mix. Of course there are a bunch of guys at the core of the LoCo, but with the new team organization, the core has grown a bit. The aim of each one of the cores is to have the big picture of everything that is happening in the LoCo, or at least to maximize its knowledge. By doing it that way, if we have someone who steps down, it makes it easier to replaced them. Around the core, is a bigger circle of people, who are more involved in one, or two areas. This second circle can be seen as dedicated teams for one area. So to sum up: a core of less than 10 people, that leads some team activities that are quite independent of the others. Each team has a wide perimeter of action, even though we like to be aware of big decisions.

- Sometimes LoCos go through a slow period, where member participation or motivation may have decreased? How does the French LoCo battle that?

I think there has been a slow period like that in the French LoCo too. But I think its effect has been lowered by the change in the team organization that I mentioned earlier. It was noticeable during the period when the 'leaders' of the community were slowing down a bit, but there was not a big slowing down in our activities. This is indicative of a bigger community, that can sustain themselves for sometime without major damage... As long as it doesn't last too much of course... Since then, the LoCo is again on a good track, and is very active. Good examples are the parties we had all over the country for Intrepid, and of course the Paris event with more than 4000 attendants over the weekend. Since we don't want to slow down again, we are launching some small projects that should help us to tackle some areas that we are interested in. That should help to keep our LoCo and the community growing. They are kind of the projects that made me want to get involved in the community, so you can clearly imagine that I am really attached to them. We feel that in this way we can offset a decrease, or slowdown in membership by adding some new areas of interest to get involved with.

- What are your short term and longer term plans for the LoCo?

I'd say to keep the current work we have just initiated: to complete the various teams (some are still a bit blurred, or are just taking shape). For instance, there was not really a web development team, since we were just gathering some resources when needed. Right now a group of very talented people are working to tackle the various aspects for long term use, not just on demand. This is necessary if we want to be able to always be innovative. So for the short term, it's finding a new skin for the whole pack of ubuntu-fr sites (www, documentation, forums and planet), to take advantages of our new www website (drupal), and give our editors the rights to many teams (the kubuntu or the edubuntu one). We hope to be able to do that in the next couple of months. For the longer term, we really want to continue our effort on spreading Ubuntu in France, which results in the organization of more parties all across the country (building on the success of the whole intrepid campaign). We want to have some regular events, where people can gather in real life instead of just in IRC. That should help the new user to feel that they are part of the community. It might be some bug jams, some documentation jams (like a bug jam but to verify the current available documentation), or even some translation jams. Finally we will try to set up a real policy for the attendance of events by offering people the chance to meet with the team personally to ask question and get answers.

- One of the ideas that you have talked about with the LoCo Council is twinning. What is that? And have you put it into practice yet?

Many meanings can be given to the twinning of LoCos. The one I really care about is the help that a big LoCo, like the French one, can provide to a smaller one. That help could be experience, helping to plan some large scale campaign, or even donating some money to help them to get their event started. This is something that we faced at the beginning with our team, and without the financial involvement of some French members we couldn't have done many of the things we have. Since the French LoCo has more power now, it might be a great thing to help other teams to get a start. In fact it is quite close to some of the key concepts that lead to the creation of ubuntu-eu some years ago. Ubuntu-eu is a joint German effort to share hosting of their website. Since its inception, many LoCos have found hosting there, which is clearly helpful for the newer teams. Back to the twinning process, we have started to work a bit on it, with the Tunesian LoCo, but we are not very far along in the process because of a lack of time lately. I am very confident that we will work on that soon again.

- The Ubuntu French Team had a release party attended by 4,000 people. Can you describe the event? How did you plan the event? How long did it take?

This event, that took place in Paris, was a mixture of all the various kind of parties that we could have: install, release, conference... That is why we simply call it an "Ubuntu Party." We are hosting this event every 6 months, on a weekend, about a month after each release. During the event, many people came to get an installation of Intrepid, or because they were facing a problem with their current ubuntu installation. We also offered more than 14 hours of conferences, and a bug jam... and even live radio during the whole weekend that was broadcasting from the event. The team has been planning the event since the end of the previous one(which was in early June), so it is the result of 6 months of work by the whole team. Some of us were working on the communication (with media, with the desired audience), some others on the materials needed for the event, or even planning the overall look and feel of the conference. We are currently doing the analysis of this event, which should help us to prepare the next one, in May 2009.

- What do you do for fun?

Besides my LoCo activities, I do some Ubuntu development. While I know it is still related to our community, this is clearly a separated activity from my point of view. But I also do quite a lot of sports: mainly basketball, but I also go hiking in the Pyrenees (some mountains which are very close to my home) sometimes. Beside that, I really enjoy cooking for my friends. In fact I clearly see a common link in cooking for others, and doing some of the activities associated with free software...

LoCo News

New York Team Asterisk Demonstration

The New York Team will be holding a demonstration of Asterisk PBXi (Private Branch Exchange, internet), at the Rochester Institute of Technology, in Rochester, New York.

Address:
BARNES & NOBLE @ RIT Bookstore

100 Park Point Drive

Rochester, NY 14623

(at the corner of John Street and Jefferson Road in Henrietta)

Date: January 8th, 2009

Time: 7pm until 9pm

Room: Upstairs group meeting room -- this room is a semi-private glass window room upstairs

Amenities: free wireless, cafe (food is allowed in the meeting room), a very nice computer book section and IT text books.

More information and a list of books on the subject can be seen at: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NewYorkTeam/Events/20090108

Software Freedom Day Nicaragua

The making of SFD 2008 Nicaragua, The best event worldwide. See the excitement, the preparation, the event, and the head-banging concert at (spoken dialog is in Spanish):

Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7e3riAMApDM

Or download the Og Vorbis file, at:

Ogv format: http://www.linuxtour.org/sfd/sfdni2008.ogv

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/lo...er/002595.html

Launchpad News

Launchpad Drupal modules

There are 2 new Drupal modules for Drupal 5.x:

openid-launchpad: delegate your Drupal site's user authentication to Launchpad
openid-teams: assign Drupal roles to logged-in users based on their membership of specific Launchpad teams.

These modules require the Launchpad modified version of the Drupal OpenID module. There is a help file for setting up these modulesf[1], and more information available here:[2] These modules allow you to set up the amount of participation a team member has as reflected in Launchpad.

[1] https://help.launchpad.net/DrupalPlugins

[2]http://news.launchpad.net/cool-new-stuff/new-launchpad-plugins-for-drupal

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/la...er/004572.html

Launchpad in Twitter and identi.ca

Matthew Revell is experimenting with posting Launchpad news and status updates to Twitter[1] and identi.ca[2], and is interested in feedback from readers. Of course, these are not meant to be official information. For terms of use changes[3] or notifications[4].

[1] http://twitter.com/launchpad_net

[2] http://identi.ca/launchpad

[3] http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/list...chpad-announce

[4] http://news.launchpad.net/category/notifications

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/la...er/004573.html

Launchpad off-line Dec. 17th

Launchpad will be offline Wednesday, December 17.