Andrea Grandi

This day at UDS started a bit late for me, since i woke up pretty sick (damn air conditioned!!!). I did not follow any conferences in the morning. I relly wanted to follow the Wayland one, but when I arrived the room was already full and it was almost impossible to enter, so I decided not to enter.

I attended "What's wrong with UDS and how we can fix it" session before having lunch. We discussed the possibility to improve all the session in general, for example giving them a proper order so that a team can first discuss some API interface, then another team can discuss how to design them.

We had another wonderful and tasty lunch, even if I didn't eat so much, but food was very good anyway.

During the afternoon I followed an interesting track: "Recommend music based on current song playing or on users media library". We discussed the possibilities to implement a music suggestion service, based on user's tastes.

I spent the rest of theconference time writing these blog posts and uploading pictures.

After the sessions we had the Linaro Showcase: lot of demo running on Linaro and ARM processors. I was really impressed by a robot with Kinect that was able to follow people recognizing their faces. During the showcase there was a very nice dinner.

After dinner I went out with my friend Manrique Lopez who is here in Budapest for another conference, so we decided to meet for a good beer.

Before coming back to the hotel me, Marco Trevisan and Andrea Azzarone had a nice talk with Jorge Castro. He really make us feel part of the Ubuntu family!

My day started at 7:30 with a very nice breakfast! I was alone with just another guy this morning, in a very big breakbast room.

After it I grabbed my badge to avoid queue later and went back to my room to wake up Marco Trevisan (he was still sleeping ).

The keynote was opened by Jono Bacon (the Ubuntu Community manager), followed by Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth. The most interesting (and tweeted) part of the keynote was "how to prounounce Oneiric" (Oeniric will be the next Ubuntu release).

The keynote finished with a bit late, so all the other tracks were shifted forward. I followed "Unity 2D Oneiric Improvements", it was interesting because there were some Nokia/Qt guys and they looked very interested in helping the Unity 2D team and collaborating with them.

Now following "Shaping a strategy for Ubuntu user assistance", I just had the possibility my involvement into helping people that require Ubuntu assistance.

The lunch has been very tasty, I had the possibility to eat some local recipes, not bad at all.

After lunch we had a short session on Qt. The version 4.8 is going to be released in a couple of months, while 5.0 is announced to be released in 1 year from now: it will be almost code-compatible with 4.x, it will have an improved support for Qt Quick and QML.

As last track of the day I decided to follow "Personal Cloud". Not a perfect track, since the person who should have been here was only talking with us using Skype and it was more difficoult to hear what he said.

At the end of this day there was the "Meet & Greet" party, sponsored by Freescale and Openstack. They offered a dinner and we had some good music after it.

I left from Firenze with my friend Marco Trevisan, to go to Ubuntu Developer Summit in Budapest. We changed flight in Rome where we met also Andrea Azzarone. Unluckly Alitalia losts Marco's baggage, so he's still waiting for it.

We arrived at the hotel at 20:00 more or less where we met other people of the community. There are lot of italians at UDS. Most work for Canonical, other were sponsored by.

I met Marianna Raffaele (one of the UDS organizer... yeah, she's italian too!), I had to explain her a little problem I had with my booking (nothing bad) and she managed to help me. She also gave me a very nice guitar plettre with Ubuntu logo. Thank you Marianna for this!

We went out with Jorge Castro to drink some beers (he offered me one, thanks Jorge!!!) and we met lot of other Ubuntu people. A really amazing start!

Few days ago I received an email from Jorge O. Castro of the Ubuntu Community, announcing me that my request of sponsorization for Ubuntu Developer Summit has been accepted. I have never attended an UDS before, so I must admit I feel a bit disoriented at the moment and maybe I'm missing some important informations, but at least I'm a good test for the situation of a community member approaching it for the first time. Since I would like to actively help the organization of the Summit, I started looking for the right place to do it. I've a good experience about events organization and during these years I helped, for example, in the organization of Maemo Summit and MeeGo Conference, so I'd like to share my experience with the Ubuntu Community too.

USD Website

The Ubuntu Developer Summit website is http://uds.ubuntu.com/. It looks nice at first view, but it's missing a lot of important informations and it contains some errors. The Travel section, for example should be named "Travel and Accomodation" and should contains not only information about the main hotel where the Summit will take place, but also useful informations about cheap hotels/hostels for Community people who are not sponsored. The Tracks section is still empty. Is it possible that when less than 1 month is missing, official tracks are not available yet? I don't mean categories, I mean tracks inside them. The Schedule is still empty too. Clicking any track take to a page containing an error: I would like to submit this bug, but where? Even worse, clicking on Schedule takes the visitor to a different website and there is no ways to navigate back (except clicking the back button on browser).

Forum

I wasn't able to find any section in the official Ubuntu forum where to talk about Ubuntu Developer Summit. I think it would be useful to have a dedicated section to talk about UDS or about generic Ubuntu related events. It would be useful for people to be able to meet/know each other before attending. I was lucky to meet Marco Trevisan, from the Ubuntu Italian Community, so we will travel together (thanks to a Twitter message I sent!).

IRC

The #ubuntu-uds channel on FreeNode is not much populated and a couple of times I visited it nobody wrote anything. We should keep at least 2-3 people, in turns, always available to answer any question about UDS, it would be easier for people to find the informations they look for.

Wiki

It would be nice to have a page on the wiki to organize better the event. We could write a list of tasks to do and each Community member could pick one and help with it. In this way we could divide the jobs. I know there is a lot to do when we organize these kind of events and the help of the Community is something we cannot risk to miss.

Media

We should give some informations to people who will attend UDS to be sure they will use proper tags when they will publish pictures, tweets, blog entries ecc... Do we have a tag to use on Flickr? What is the right tag to use on Twitter? What keywords should we use when we will blog about the Summit? All these informations are important if we want to be sure other people will find our posts in an easy way.

Mailing List

Ubuntu has a lot of mailing lists, but it looks like none dedicated to events discussion. There is one called ubuntu-events-planners but nobody is using it since months ago. We should use a mailing list to discuss about events organization and/or create a dedicated one for UDS.

MeeGo Conference Updates

We have 315 registrants as of today for the conference, so numbers are looking good without having any agenda published yet! A good portion of sessions should be approved by April 8th, this Friday and you will receive an email when/if your session has been approved yet. Not all the sessions will be approved by Friday though so if you do not hear from the committee then do not worry they are probably just working through it. The program committee is tenatively planning to have a first draft of the Agenda up by April 15th. Sponsored Travel attendees should start receiving approvals during next week and approvals will continue through April 25th.

Warm-up

You can follow the updates and planning on the Warm-up at http://wiki.meego.com/MeeGo_Conference_Spring_2011#MeeGo_Conference_Warm-Up

T-shirt design contest

For anyone who didn't see it on the mailing list this morning from Brian the winner of the T-shirt contest will receive sponsored airfare and hotel for the event in San Francisco. The contest closes next Friday, so get drawing!

MeeGo Summit FI update

MeeGo Summit FI (15-16th Apr). Summit will be 2-day developer oriented event as planned. Program contains keynotes, three tracks, meegathon competition, AR.Drone fun, evening party, Intel AppUp Lab, BoFs and more. http://summit.meegonetwork.fi
Interest towards summit has been huge, beyond our expectations. We were fully booked after one week. We have ~350 participants (limited by facilities and other details), over 140 are (still) in queue for cancellation seat.

MeeGo Corporate Guidelines and Regional and Local Assets and Guidelines

We in conjunction with Jarkko and the Finland team, the many contributors from the community, the Linux foundation, the events team, and the Caffelli design team have pulled together the guidelines for MeeGo Events. Thank you all for your contributions in putting these together! The Guidelines and Collateral Assets are posted on the Event's page at http://wiki.meego.com/Events#MeeGo_Conferences we would like your feedback and input so please email me amy.l.leeland@intel.com please send us things that you think we missed or things we could change to make the guidelines better.

Note: you can find the original log here http://trac.tspre.org/meetbot/meego-meeting/2011/meego-meeting.2011-04-05-17.00.html