Matthew Revell

Lately, I’ve been interviewing Launchpad users to learn more about how they work with Launchpad and what they think of new features we’re proposing.

Until now, this has been mostly face to face, either at the Ubuntu Developer Summits or Canonical’s London office. Talking in person seems to be the best way of doing this: as the interviewer, I can see exactly which part of a proposed page the person is looking at when they pull a certain face, for example.

However, doing it this way greatly limits who I get to speak to. Not everybody who uses Launchpad attends UDS or is within easy travelling distance of central London during the work day.

So, I’ve been looking at ways of doing this remotely. There are some important constraints:

• pretty much anyone should be able to take part
• no special equipment should be needed
• it should cost nothing, or very little, to conduct.

Recording Skype video calls in Ubuntu

As it seems to meet my requirements, I’m going to give Skype video calling a go. And I say “Skype”, rather than anything else, for reasons that I’ll now explain.

I’ve spent quite some time trying to find a straightforward way to record video calls in Ubuntu. I’ve come up with nothing, so here’s one way that seems to work:

• capture the audio using Skype Call Recorder
• capture video using GTK-RecordMyDesktop (apt-getable)
• splice the two together in a video editor.

Test calls have worked. I’ll post again with a report on how it worked in practice.

Each month, we in the Launchpad team make a new release.

Over the past couple of years, we’ve learnt some of what works — and what doesn’t — when announcing our releases. I thought I’d share some of that here.

Style and content

Keep it:

• Relevant: announce only what is of interest to the majority of your readers and what they can use “out of the box”. Direct your most ardent readers to the relevant milestone page in your bug tracker’ for the full details. Consider direct communication with those groups who are affected by a specific change. Ignore things that help you, the developer, rather than the reader.
• Personal: “The user” is not an abstract: they’re the person reading your text. Speak directly to them and show them how each change affects them. Use examples.
• Easily understood: don’t assume too much of your reader. Give them enough background to understand the problem you’re describing and your solution.
• Well ordered: start with the exciting, most relevant, stuff. Assume your reader has a limited attention span because, y’know, they do.
• Enticing: your readers are lazy and promiscuous. Suck them in by trailing the highlights in your headline.
  • Bad: ACME releases a RoadRunnerStop v1.2
  • Better: RoadRunnerStop 1.2: now easier to catch your lunch
  • Better: Catch more road runners with ACME RoadRunnerStop 1.2
• Benefit-led: tell your reader how you’ve fixed their life.
  • Good: Save time uploading branches to Launchpad
  • Not so good: Launchpad now supports Bazaar stacked branches
  • Bad: Launchpad will no longer OOPS when you attempt to alter a conjoined slave bug-task
• Plain-speaking: your readers aren’t stupid but you should err towards commonly used words and shorter sentences with fewer clauses.

Format

Launchpad release announcements have four parts, in order of importance:

• headline/subject line
• introduction
• detail of each change
• supplemental information: where to find more detail, other announcements, etc.

Examples

Take a look at the Launchpad releases page for some examples of our past release announcements.

Yesterday I recorded episode 2 of the Launchpad podcast, Launchpod, with Joey and Elliot.

In it we interviewed Launchpad developers Graham Binns and Jono Lange, who are over at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Prague. There’s also Joey’s number of the week and Elliot talks about the best way to register a project in Launchpad.

Let me know how you think we could improve the podcast.

I’ve just published the first episode of our new Launchpad team podcast!

Rather wittily, we’ve gone for the name “Launchpod”, which I think is rather excellent and was suggested by Launchpad user gschaefr.

In this first episode, amongst other things we talk to Tony Wright from RescueTime. RescueTime’s a service for tracking how you use your time and their community-developed Linux client is developed using Launchpad!

I love a good logo. The best find the simplest way to communicate a brand’s values.

Take a look at our very own Ubuntu logo, for a great example.

It’s recognisable whether it’s tiny or huge, black and white or in colour. With just three curves and three circles, it conveys Ubuntu’s commitment to community, humanity and cooperation.

Now, we – the Launchpad team – have been wondering if there might be a better logo for Launchpad. Whether it’s another interpretation of the rocket ship or something entirely different, we’re holding a competition to see what ideas other people have.

So, here are the details:

Closing date: 31 March 2008
Rules and all that: https://help.launchpad.net/logo
Prize: one of the snazzy new Ubuntu messenger bags.

You can submit as many entries as you like, although the competition isn’t open to Canonical staff or vendors. The Launchpad team will choose the winner by majority vote. If you want to see our current rocket logo in situ, take a look at the Launchpad project page.

Any questions? Find me (mrevell) in #launchpad on Freenode, leave a comment or send us a mail to feedback AT launchpad.net.

One of the goals we have for Launchpad is to offer different ways to get data in and out.

For example, in addition to the web interface we have an email interface for the Bug Tracker. For many people, the quickest way to file a bug is to fire off an email. Of course, it also provides a full range of options for editing and commenting on existing bugs.

In Launchpad 1.1.12 we introduced bug feeds. Now, each bug, person, team, project and distribution in Launchpad has an associated Atom feed. I’ve used my bug feed on the home page of my website to give a flavour of what I’m working on. As I use WordPress, which has built-in support for MagpieRSS, this was supremely easy.

Upgrade to the latest WordPress

Before you begin, you should upgrade to the latest WordPress. Previously, I was running 2.2.2 and it had some trouble with the Atom feed.

Pulling in the feed

First off, you need to pull in MagpieRSS, which is distributed with WordPress.

I’ve created a sidebar specifically for the my site’s home page and I’ve got the following at the top of my home-sidebar.php template file:

<?
include_once(ABSPATH . WPINC . '/rss.php');
$myBugs = fetch_rss("http://feeds.launchpad.net/~matthew.revell/latest-bugs.atom");
$myBugsItems = array_slice($myBugs->items, 0, 4);
?>

The first line includes MagpieRSS and the next creates an array of the feed’s posts in $myBugs. I don’t have too much room in my side bar, so I use the last line to cut it down to the top four entries.

Displaying the feed

Actually displaying the feed is simple:

<ul>
<? foreach ($myBugsItems as $item ) {
	$title = $item[title];
	$url   = $item[link];
	echo "<li><a href=$url>$title</a></li>";
}

?>
</ul>

I’m looking to seeing how other people, in particular projects, use these new feeds.

Please post a comment or
contact me if you’re using Launchpad’s feeds or you have a suggestion for how we can improve them.

Update: two suggestions of easier ways to achieve the same effect. Dave Murphy suggested Wigitize.com (hat-tip Joey) and Jeremy Visser commented that WordPress has a widget to embed a feed into your page.

Something I forget to put in the original post was that I’ve also used straight MagpieRSS (i.e. without WordPress) to create an ugly but functional page at http://launchpad.understated.co.uk/. The code is pretty much exactly as shown in the WordPress example above.

It’s not long now until Ubuntu Live! July 22 – 24 in Portland, Oregon.

Ubuntu Live will be a great opportunity to learn more about the technical and business background to both Canonical and Ubuntu and how Launchpad and Bazaar fit into that.

So, if you’re particularly interested in Launchpad and Bazaar, the sessions to look out for are:

• How Ubuntu uses Launchpad – Matt Zimmerman, Paul Alexander
• An introduction to Launchpad for collaboration and hosting – John Meinel
• Tutorial: Collaboration and code hosting with Launchpad and Bazaar – John Meinel

It probably goes without saying that the Ubuntu project is the largest user of Launchpad. Hearing Matt and Paul’s tale of how Ubuntu uses Launchpad will give you a practical understanding of what makes Launchpad unique.

John Meinel’s talk will be a great way to see how Launchpad and Bazaar – together – can work for your project. In John’s tutorial session, he’ll then show exactly how Launchpad and Bazaar work together, with plenty of opportunity for attendees to learn the ins and outs.

Now’s a good time to book, if you’re thinking of going, as you can get a fat discount with the super-special-Canonical-discount-code Enter the code ubu07ucm to get a 35% discount.

Taking your first steps into a free software project can be intimidating.

Whether you want to code, write documentation, help with marketing or whatever, there’s a learning curve to overcome.

Launchpad lets people help each other

Launchpad is all about making it easier for free software people to work together. Recently, we introduced a new feature to do just that: mentoring.

Mentoring is simple: it provides an easy way for new participants to learn the ropes of a Launchpad team that they want to join.

An example scenario

It works like this:

• Daniel is a member of the Telepathy team. He wants to encourage more people to join the team but knows that new participants need to learn some basics. He offers mentorship for some bugs that he feels would be easy for new people to tackle and would help them learn the ropes.
• Sarah is interested in Telepathy. She visits the team’s mentoring page and sees a list of bugs that she can get help with.
• Sarah has some questions, so contacts Daniel using the details on his Launchpad profile page. Daniel answers her and Sarah gets to work.
• Sarah produces a number of patches, with iterative improvements thanks to Daniel’s feedback. The conversation takes place in the bug’s comments, meaning other people can easily take part.

During that process, Sarah learnt how to contribute effectively to the Telepathy team. The Telepathy team not only got one of its bugs fixed but gained a new member. Daniel found satisfaction in helping Sarah and the team, whilst having time to work on other bugs.

Mentoring is easy to manage

Importantly, the only people who had to give time to the process were Daniel and Sarah. Although offers of mentorship are linked to teams, team administrators don’t have to become involved. Mentoring is about relationships between individuals who choose to work together, so there’s no need for time-consuming bureaucracy to manage it.

Mentoring for Ubuntu

You can find all the offers of mentorship, that are related to Ubuntu, at:

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+mentoring

There, you’ll see how recent each offer is, which team it’s linked to, who made the offer and which bug or blueprint it relates to.

You can find out more about mentoring in our guide at:

https://help.launchpad.net/MentoringManagement

What do you think?

I’m really keen to hear what you think of mentoring. To me, its simplicity is its strength. It’s so easy for both sides to use that I can see it quickly becoming a core way for communities to encourage and develop new members.

Comment here, drop me a mail, or join us on the launchpad-users mailing list.

Got a question about Launchpad? Want to make a suggestion or complaint? Or perhaps you just wanna say how much you love Launchpad
We’ve got another Launchpad Users Meeting coming up this Wednesday 2nd May. It’s the ideal time to tell the Launchpad team what you think, to ask for help and to make feature requests.

Add your question, comment or suggestion to the agenda and I’ll rally up the relevant members of the Launchpad team to talk to you.

Look forward to seeing you.

• Where: #launchpad, irc.freenode.net
• When: 16.00 UTC 2nd May 2007
• Why? To talk directly to the Launchpad team.

Agenda: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LaunchpadUserMeeting/2007-05-02

This week is Ubuntu Open Week!

Launchpad is a pretty important part of the Ubuntu ecosystem, so features fairly heavily in Ubuntu Open Week.

We’ve got sessions on each of Launchpad’s tools, as well as two sessions where I introduce the basic concepts of Launchpad and a general Launchpad Q&A session from Kiko. There’s also a great session on Bazaar from Martin Pool.

As with all Ubuntu Open Week sessions, simply join #ubuntu-classroom on irc.freenode.net.

• Introduction to Launchpad: 16.00 UTC, Friday 27 April (log from Monday’s session).
• Triaging bugs with Launchpad: log from Monday’s session.
• Launchpad Q&A: 18.00 UTC, Tuesday 24 April.
• Hosting code with Launchpad and Bazaar: 20.00 UTC, Tuesday 24 April.
• Community support with Launchpad: 19.00 UTC, Wednesday 25 April.
• Introduction to Bazaar version control: 20.00 UTC, Wednesday 25 April (log from Monday’s session).
• Translating with Launchpad: 18.00 UTC, Thursday 26 April.
• Launchpad’s Blueprint: 18.00 UTC, Friday 27 April.

If you can’t make it to a session, logs are available.

And if you have any questions, comments or suggestions about Launchpad, you can always join us in #launchpad on irc.freenode.net or in the Launchpad Users mailing list:

https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/launchpad-users