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Ubuntu Open Week: Something For Everyone

If you want to learn more about what it's like to be a part of an open source community but can't figure out where to jump in, Ubuntu Open Week is a great place to start. The yearly event features online meetings via IRC, where people with all levels of experience gather to hear presentations from other community members on a wide range of topics from triaging bugs to how to produce podcasts with Ubuntu. Have a look at the Ubuntu wiki for a complete schedule of events and be sure to check back here each day as we take a look at the day's highlights.

Ubuntu community manager Jono Bacon got things underway by explaining the reason for the sessions, how the meetings work, and how to ask questions.

"The aim of Ubuntu Open Week is to produce a week of interesting and informative IRC sessions explaining how to get involved in the Ubuntu community," he told a channel full of people. "We have a huge range of sessions on offer, given by real leaders in our community.This is an excellent opportunity to learn from the people who are very deeply involved with every aspect of Ubuntu, from development, to documentation, to bugs, to testing, to packaging, to virtualisation, to training and more. And with this Ubuntu Open Week, we have even more diversity in sessions."

Bacon told the group that, though it's hard to gauge what the overall attendance will be, some sessions attract as many as 300 people. He also noted that there's no one set of requisite skills needed to become an active member of the community. "We want to make the community welcoming to a range of skills, so if you like technical subjects such as packaging and development, we have teams such as MOTU to get started with. If you like testing software [or] finding and investigating bugs, the QA team is a great place to be. If you like writing, the Documentation Team is a great place to help."

"Ubuntu Bug Master" Brian Murray gave a very detailed presentation on the bug reporting process. Not only did he explain for newer users exactly what bugs are, but he also covered how to report them using the bug reporting system Launchpad, and what makes a bug report most likely to be fixed.

"Ubuntu Bug Squad" team member Pedro Villavicencio stepped up bug talk in a session later in the day that covered bug triaging. The Bug Squad is responsible for sorting and tracking bugs, then making sure the most serious bugs get seen my developers right away.

Villavicencio made a point to let attendees know that "You do not need any programming knowledge to join the team. In fact it is a great way to return something to our lovely Ubuntu project if you cannot program at all."

He welcomed interested members to participate by "confirming bugs reports by testing them, setting the right priority and status, searching for duplicates and marking them as such, sending bugs to their upstream authors when needed." As members help with bug management, they earn "karma" for their efforts, which means they become recognized within the community as someone who "knows what [they're] doing."

There are plenty of other interesting sessions planned for the rest of the week. Did you attend an Ubuntu Open Week meeting? What did you learn?

• ubuntu
• open week
• bug reports

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