Journal of an Open Sourcee

From the same people that brought you Frank Sumatra, I present you Bean Martin!

Today’s coffee flavor of the day at work: Frank Sumatra!

I have! I just recently got a hold of a US$30 Amazon gift certificate for participating of a 1-hour phone study. I could have used it and bought something for me, right? Instead, I decided to present it to Jacek Śliwerski, the guy behind Open-Tran. There is not a day that I don’t use it for my translations, as I can use its awesome comparisson tools to QA my work!

How about you? Have you hugged your favorite open source tool today?

This post is my 2 cents about Jad’s latest post trying to stir things up and attract more translators to the Ubuntu community! Having led the Brazilian team for a couple of years myself, I wanted to point out a couple of things I’ve learned along the way. Obviously advices are best taken when asked for, but here it goes anyway:

• Beware that 300 volunteers working at the same time without a robust and clear way of knowing who’s doing what will make it impossible for your team to manage;
• Also, with this many people contributing with single, hand picked strings is extremelly detrimental to the overal quality of the entire package, not to mention the entire suite;
• I have always liked the idea of contributions being done upstream first, and then tricklying it down to distros and what not. It is my dream and goal to make sure that Ubuntu reverses this trend and start sending contributions upstream (translations). Check out my blueprint: https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/rosetta/+spec/translation-workflow-and-notification-system

Well, back to work I go.

It’s been a while since I last wrote anything, mostly due to a few new changes that happened these last 3 weeks or so. Here’s a small list of some of the things that I can remember right now:

• My pet project BillReminder is now hosted in the GNOME SVN repository! It took me a while to get the right resources and free time to migrate everything, but I believe that it is now completed. The source code can be checked out from here and issues can be filed in Bugzilla. There’s also a new web site theme to go along with the changes, courtesy of my good friend Elyézer Mendes Rezende.
• With the move to GNOME SVN I was (obviously) granted commit access… and due to some schedule changes for the two current committers for the Brazilian translation team, I have now been performing translations reviews and commits. It is great to finally be able to do this as I already have been doing this type of work for the XFCE team.
• Speaking of the XFCE team, I have been on top of the Brazilian Portuguese translations and the next release (coming soon I’m told) will be 100% translated!
• I started attending one single class at the University of North Carolina (here in Chapel Hill) and this Tuesday was my first day. The class, “Database Design”, is listed as a graduate level class but so far it’s been fairly easy to follow. As I already have a bacchelors in BioChemistry, I’m looking forward to taking some bioinformatics classes in the near future.
• I’ve done some travelling these last 2 weeks. Two weekends ago we went to the North Carolina Aquarium at Fort Fisher. It was the first time I went to the Carolina beaches since I moved here and it was a great experience! We took lots of pictures and spent 2 great days soaking up in the sun!

• Last weekend we went do Ocean City in Delaware to celebrate my youngest’s sister wedding. My whole family got together and rented a nice house in a fancy complex with lots of activities. There was a lot of swimming and drinking beer with my dad and older sister. Every night we would go to where my younger sister was holding the reception, a nice house by the lake with its own private pier! There was a lot of drinking, eating, and the occasional fishing off the pier! The evenings were amazing with a full moon and even some fireworks (we don’t know who was doing it, but it looked really great from where we were). Needsless to say my kids loved it all! Unfortunately we forgot our camera there and now I have to wait for my sister to mail it back.

Well, I actually have more stuff but that will have to wait for an upcoming post.

Today I received a mysterious package in the mail. Turns out it was some swag from Pandora: a hat and some stickers.

You know what the best part was? Not the cool hat or stickers, but the letter that accompanied the items in the envelope. It was actually manually signed (i.e. not a print out) by Lucia Willow, Community Manager, and Tim Westergren, Founder. It is the kind of attention to details that makes a huge difference!

A while back I was asked by a member of a Ubuntu translation team (who shall remain anonymous) about how the Brazilian team’s workflow worked and how we managed to maintain our position among the top translated teams in Rosetta. What follows was my reply to this person. I hope it will prove to be useful to any other team out there who may be struggling with the same issues. I’m also interested to learn how other teams managed to keep their members involved and/or how others can benefit from their experience.

|> Now, the LOCALE translators have some organisation problems and some
|> problems to find good guys for translating ubuntu. When I saw, how
|> complete is the brasilian translation i get an idea. Maybe you or some
|> of the other translators may help us.

Hi there Anonymous! The translation process of free software has been the reason why I joined the masses of the free software world. It is a very rewarding experience when you see people being able to take advantage of open source software in their native tongue.

The Brazilian team has proved to be an interesting experience for me. I was the second person to take on the lidership of the team, and I’d like to offer your my opinion and insight as for why we have managed to grow and maintain a pretty decent track of quantity and quality.

I think that anyone who participates in open source communities likes to have a sense of direction and ownership. By that I mean that people like to know what is going on, what they can do (but not in generic terms; they need specifics) and what the roadmap is. When people see an organized team and specific goals set out, it makes them want to participate too.

How can you do this? Simple. Start simple… Schedule IRC meetings on a regular basis so people can “update” their status as well as discuss priorities and give feedback on what is working and what is not.  Speaking of priority, create a list with the software packages the translators should focus on during the period (a weekly sprint?  monthly?) so that once you reach that mark people will have a feeling of accomplishment! They will like that feeling, I can guarantee you… and they’ll comeback for more!

Also, set up a wiki where people can put their names next to the packages they’re currently working on, so that new collaboratores don’t work on the same packages as other people. Set up a program where current team members would have to “adopt” a new translator and show him/her how everything works, as well as be responsible for reviewing and providing feedback. The current member will feel that he he/she has ownership of the process and team as a whole, and that is very rewarding. The new translator will have a feeling of direction… and that is very rewarding as well! It is a very good cycle that can strengthen the entire team, no matter if they’re “veterans” or “newbies”.

Lastly, let everyone know that their word counts! Assign a current member as your right hand and share the responsibility of the administration of the team (ownership, remember?) It is the job of the administrator to make decisions on behalf of the team, but it is just as important to heed to the team’s members interests and ideas. Having someone who you trust to bounce off ideas is a sure way to make sure you stay on track as well.

As far as how we keep the quality of our translations? Many of our members, myself included, work with the upstream teams for GNOME, KDE, XFCE, etc and try to stick to their translation standards. I suggest you take a look at the following web site: www.open-tran.eu. It is a great service that allows you to see what terms the upstream teams are using in their translations and allows you to also follow the same pattern.

Well, these were the things I did back when I was the leader for the team. I’m sure the other guys will be able to provide you with some more tips.

This weekend I’ll be attending BarCamp Raleigh for the second year in a row. Together with a couple of fellow rPathians, I’m planning to pitch in the following talks:

• Building GNU/Linux appliances and deploying them in the clouds
• How to participate and contribute with open source projects like GNOME, KDE, XFCE, Openbox, etc

If you’re one of the lucky ones who managed to register in time for the event, tomorrow there will be a get together (think drinks, snacks and all the trilug geeks you can fit in a bar) at Tyler’s Tap Room (map). Check out this post for more info.

I look forward to attending this event and meeting some of you folks.

As some of you may know, I’ve been doing a great deal of testing for rBuilder Online, rPath’s online community service for all your GNU/Linux appliances needs. As a QA Enginner I have a chance to play with the most innovative technologies we create (and dare I say some of the coolest things in the system/package management world?) before it hits the general public.

It is because of this work and my recent super involvement with our products that I decided to create a videocast on how to create a virtual GNU/Linux appliance using rBuilder Online. My objective is to show just how easy it is to package your software and distribute it to as many different environments and architectures without having to do a lot of heavy lifting. This videocast is the first step toward this goal, recorded this morning with no script or preparation what so ever. Please be gentle.

* Direct link here.

Some useful links for you to follow along:

• Virtual Appliances
• rBuilder Online
• rPath Wiki
• Conary Package Management System
• rMake

Recently I have been working with another contributor for the XFCE desktop environment to build an appliance with code pulled directly from their versioning source control repository. This allow us to work with the applications as they currently exist in development and work on any issues that are sometimes hard to catch without actually using the software.

Please feel free to ask me anything related to the process of using rBuilder Online and sign up for a free account!

Snagged from the original “Cautionary” strip.

Talk to your kids about Linux