Ubuntu Global Jam events: jamming Catalan style

If you follow the Ubuntu channels, and unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll have noticed that this coming weekend we’re organizing the Ubuntu Global Jam, a worldwide event where Ubuntu local community teams (LoCos) join in a get-together fest to have some fun while improving Ubuntu.

As we’re ramping up to a Long Term Support release, this is a particularly important UGJ and we need all hands on deck to ensure that it does not only meet, but exceeds the high quality standard of previous Ubuntu LTS releases. This is another article in the series of blog posts showcasing the events our community is organizing, brought to you by Rafael Carreras, from the Ubuntu Catalan LoCo team.

Tell us a bit about your LoCo team

Our LoCo is language-oriented, and by language I mean Catalan (a Romanic one), not Perl or Python. In fact, the Catalan LoCo Team was the first language-oriented LoCo to be approved back in 2007. We manage our day-to-day in three mailing lists: technical doubts, team work and translations and do IRC meetings twice a month. We organise Ubuntu Global Jam events every 6 months (with some minor absences) and of course great release parties every 6 months along with some other little ones in between.

What kind of event are you organizing for this Ubuntu Global Jam?

As always, we will translate some new packages, discuss translation items, a bug triage session, some install release work and even evangelization to some passing people, as we organise UGJ this time in a civic centre.

Is this the first UGJ event you’re organizing?

No, it’s not, we are running UGJs since the first one and I think we only missed last one.

How do you think UGJ events help the Ubuntu community and Ubuntu?

It’s a great opportunity for meeting people you only know by email or chat. Also, as we sit down together, there is little room for procrastination. Well, more or less, anyway.

Why do you think Jono Bacon always features pictures of the Catalan team when announcing the UGJ? Are we the most good-looking LoCo?

Yeah, definitely. It must be that.

Join the party by registering your event at the Ubuntu LoCo Portal!

p1010458 by Alex Muntada

Upcoming Ubuntu Global Jam events: here’s how the Slovenian team rolls

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll have noticed that this coming weekend we’re organizing the Ubuntu Global Jam, a worldwide event where Ubuntu local community teams (LoCos) join in a get-together fest to have some fun while improving Ubuntu. As we’re ramping up to a Long Term Support release, this is a particularly important UGJ and we need every hand on deck to ensure it not only meets but exceeds the standard of previous Ubuntu LTS releases. This is another article in the series of blog posts showcasing the events our community is organizing, brought to you by Andrej Znidarsic, from the Ubuntu Slovenian LoCo team.

Tell us a bit about your LoCo team

The Slovenian Ubuntu LoCo team was founded in 2005 and we try to spread Ubuntu mainly by translation work and help and support to Slovenian Ubuntu users who don’t have the means (either language or technical knowledger barrier) to solve problems themselves. Slovenian has been among the top translated languages for a while, which is quite impressive considering there are only 2 million native speakers and we don’t have a big pool to get translators from. We operate an IRC channel, website, forum, Facebook, Twitter and Google+ page. Offline we meet at monthly Ubuntu hours and we do Global Jams

What kind of event are you organizing for the upcoming Ubuntu Global Jam (UGJ)?

We are mostly going to focus on translations. This has traditionally been our strong point, as we exceeded 90% translation of Ubuntu about 2 years ago. Now we are focusing on translation quality and consistency. This time we want to put extra polish into translation for the LTS. In addition to that, a couple of people will focus on creating videos explaining how to perform basic tasks in Ubuntu (installing Ubuntu, Installing/removing software, Unity “tricks”…) and how to contribute to Ubuntu (how to start translating in Launchpad, how to report a bug, common translation mistakes in Slovenian). We will also be testdriving Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and report bugs we find on the way. More info can be found in our Ubuntu Global Jam announcement (in Slovenian only).

Is this the first UGJ event you’re organizing?

Nope. We have already organized 3 Ubuntu Global Jams. The first one was online only and the last two have been organized offline. We are quite lucky to have Kiberpipa, which has kindly been providing us a great venue with a lot of space and internet access. So we mostly need to do marketing of the event, coordinate transport and grab some pizzas .

How do you think UGJ events help the Ubuntu community and Ubuntu?

The results of previous UGJs have typically meant about 4000-5000 translated messages for us which is amazing for one day. Good translation coverage helps to grow Ubuntu usage in Slovenia. We have also managed to report a couple of bugs which improved overall quality. More importantly, in average about 15 people attend our global jam, so we meet and hang out with people we usually only see online. This vastly improves team cohesiveness. In addition there are always some newcomers, which is fantastic for community growth. Also, it’s fun .

Join the party by registering your event at the Ubuntu LoCo Portal!

Ubuntu Global Jam Q+A Videocasts today!

In preparation for the Ubuntu Global Jam event next weekend, Jono and I will be running Q+A videocasts today

Jono’s videocast will be more convenient for the Americas and in the evening in Europe:

• 11am Pacific / 7pm UTC/UK / 8pm CET – watch live here!

My videocast coming up in about 2 hours time and is more convenient for Europe and surrounding areas:

• 12pm UTC/UK / 1pm CET / 7am Eastern – watch live here!

So if you are either thinking of organizing an event, you’re already organizing one, you’d like to participate in one, or simply want to learn more, do come along, ask your questions and have some fun!

Oh, and you should also check out the video about rolling your own event:

Can’t see it? Watch it here!

This Global Jam is going to be awesome, and it’s going to give that extra push to make Ubuntu 12.04 even a more rock-solid release. Have you already signed up for an event?

To ask your questions on the chat, you’ll need to sign up for a ustream account (it’s free, doesn’t take more than a couple of minutes and you can use your Launchpad OpenId), but I’ll also be answering your questions on the #ubuntu-locoteams IRC channel on Freenode.