I missed the talk at GUADEC, but some very cool stats on Gnome participation were released. The full report is available and there is also a blog post summarising some of the information. Looks like my experience of mostly meeting people employed to work on or with Gnome is either a coincidence or more specific to GUADEC than to Gnome itself.

It's strange that I had to fly to the Netherlands and speak with some cool folks from Germany to learn about this, but the first MeeGo Conference is planned to occur in Dublin this November. Their call for papers includes talks targeting newcomers to the platform, and the event looks like it's going to be free... I wonder if I should take this as an invitation to give in and finally get myself a shiny, shiny N900.

EDIT (Aug 8th): Now with a shiny website!

This is the talk that was hijacked by the release team to make the announcement about the delay in releasing Gnome 3.

Gnome 3: Where we are

Vincent Untz began by reminding us that there is a lot of excitement around Gnome 3 and Gnome Shell. To encourage the initial development effort around Gnome 3, the release team boldly stated 2 years ago that Gnome 2.30 would be Gnome 3. The community then reached a level of activity never seen in years. It was a very aggressive schedule, and it was meant that way: perhaps the work would not have started or not have been so intense without it.

However, Gnome sticks to a predictable 6 months schedule, and quality matters more than anything else. We want people to love Gnome 3. After waiting 8 years since Gnome 2.0, we want this release to be amazing. That is why the release team decided to move Gnome 3.0 release date to March 2011, having closely following mailing lists and using GUADEC as an opportunity to get the latest from every team.

• Many modules, such as Gnome-shell are nearly there and could be okay for a release in September. But we want this release to be amazing, not simply okay.

• Platform-wise, most people have stopped using the deprecated stuff, which is good.

• Some modules will need more time to migrate, such as gsettings and the Human Interface Guidelines update which would not be ready in 2 months (Note: I attended a lightning talk about this and I like what they're planning on doing with this: a series of design patterns rather than a gigantic monolithic document that is hard to parse. They only started this the week before GUADEC though!)

The work for September

Some may worry that this is a bit late for such an announcement, and too much work to prepare Gnome 2.32 in September. Some modules will need to switch back to Gtk2.

There will also be a Gnome 3.0 beta release in September (\o/). The release team wants everyone to start using it, play with it, and report bugs. Application developers should start porting their application to Gtk3, as it will take time to get there and it would be better to start this work in September rather than next March.

The talk ended with a list of TODOs for the release team.

• Revert to gtk2. They believe it was not that hard to move to 3, therefore it should not be hard to move back to 2. They're happy to help if people are not sure how to do this. Ideally this should be done though a new flag, to give an option to compile with gtk2 or gtk3 so that people focusing on the gtk3 effort may keep working on it.

• They will keep pushing for Gnome 3, Gnome 2.32 is only a step. Keep porting!

• Some modules such as Shell will be in feature freeze, to polish and finish what they've started.

• The release team will also push the community to implement designs. Good mockups are being made and we're happy about it, but then nothing is done about them.

The questions part of the talk was interesting albeit a bit tense.

Gnome 2.32

The first question was about the 6 months release schedule, and whether it really was a valid reason to have a 2.32. What would be the content, wouldn't it only take time away from people's work on Gnome 3? Maintainers cannot be forced to do anything, and if they have better reasons to work on 3 it's okay. Perhaps other maintainers will have built new features and will want them to be used by people without having to wait 9 months. The audience still worried about the maintenance burden and cost for people already depending on Gtk3 features, but the speaker seemed confident that switching back to 2 was mostly about changing some configure options, and that no one had to do if it was too much overhead.

Still maintainers in the audience insisted that having both 2.32 and a Beta meant twice the work. Why spend time on something that matters less and less? They also disagreed that having gnome-shell and 2.32 in the background was a good idea, as it's not how the design is done nor how it's meant to work. Gnome 3 should be more than the Shell. Untz seems to believe that many features do not rely on Gtk3 or the Shell.

Maintainers contended that it wasn't the same amount of work for an application like Cheese compared to the core desktop. There is a burden to support 2 desktop environments in parallel. To which Untz answered that feature freeze was still planned for the following week, leading to a "what's the point?" question. Once again, if people don't want to do it, they don't have to.

Marketing

Concerns about the marketing message were quickly relieved by someone from the marketing team, who said that the "Beta" label generates excitement. Anyone with a feature that is stable enough should stick it in, although the control centre is another matter. We still want to ship a quality product, if it only has half the features it's okay as long as they're stable. It will generate the buzz.

There was a question about working with distros to help ship 3.0 in a way that is easier to install, to encourage people to try out the beta. There are instructions for many distros already, but it was suggested to also offer clear and prominent instructions on the Gnome front page once the beta's out.

The last question was about what the schedule would look like for the next 6 months. Although the schedule will be mostly normal, with new modules and new features, some rules will be similar to now in that new applications won't be accepted in just because they're great. Likewise, it doesn't make sense to have a freeze for everything, but for some modules it does.

Final words

Keep working on Gnome 3.0!

I finally started to put the whole organisational part in motion before going to GUADEC, and now I'm finally starting to publicise the course! I'm going to teach again my Python course, for adults this time, for people with no programming background. The course will start on August 23rd and last 5 weeks. More information about it on Tog's website!

Any question or query, please do not hesitate to contact me.

I wonder how teaching adults will differ from teaching teenagers... That should be very interesting (and scary, of course! :))

There hasn't been much public info about it yet, but inspired by Cheryl's Hackerspace Week teaser I'm going to start speaking about it too! The first Irish Hackerspaces week will happen soon in August, from the 14th to 22nd, and I'll be talking about Sugar.

My talk will last about 30 minutes, in the evening of the 17th in Tog.

Come and learn about Sugar, the learning platform for children. Sugar offers an innovative desktop environment designed to encourage collaboration and critical thinking through Activities. Initially developed as part of the One Laptop Per Child project, Sugar is now community led and can run on any machine thanks to Sugar on a Stick.

There will be plenty of other interesting talks, workshops, demos and more... that I will happily link to once more information starts surfacing!

EDIT: It's alive! Full schedule of the week now available.

The talks

I happily went along to the August meetup of Python Ireland last Wednesday, where as I expected the community talk was very interesting. Kevin showed us the results of the surveys he sent out after PyCon Ireland (survey says: 100% satisfaction!), and a second one to understand the Irish Python community better -- mostly, "who we are" since we don't really know! Some people show up at meetups, or events, many many more are on the mailing list. Vicky posted up her notes of the talk for an idea of what the survey touched on. I was interested in the results although they are to be taken with a grain of salt: not everyone filled out the survey, and perhaps some questions could have been phrased differently as I found myself realising a couple of times that I completely misunderstood the question as Kevin was explaining "we asked about blah blah blah". Oops! I'm sure the data is mostly valid still :o)

An important section of the survey and thus of the talk was about what we we could -- and wanted to -- do as a community to raise Python's profile and reach in Ireland. The survey had many cool ideas, asking non-anonymously what people would be willing to *actually* help out with. Likely subgroups of 5 people or so will be formed to follow up on some of these ideas, with people with not as much time welcome to chime in if they're interested.

The Redis presentation got cancelled, but Brian gave us a quick tour of the highlights of EuroPycon. I've never been, but from what I understand despite being quite good it was not as good as the previous years.

Pub topics

We headed out to the pub afterwards, where we promptly tried the concept of "topics" that Kevin had brought up in his talk. Basically you divide people/tables by topics and interested people can gather around and discuss and/or make progress on something. I'm not sure whether that kind of structure can really work in a pub context, it tends to be more ad-hoc. You start something along and then you call people over you know would be interested. It was a bit difficult to get started but based on the interesting conversations that ensued I'd be willing and curious to try it again.

If someone dangles a piece of paper with "Education" written on it there's no way I can *not* pay attention so I broke from my current conversation to sit at the table.

Education: Second level

We basically divided the group of people we could reach out to ("educate" I guess) into 4 groups: secondary level, third level, professionals and hobbyists, kinda merging the 2 latter as the discussion progressed. For some reason I just don't care about reaching out to professionals, or about certifications. Those topics are plain uninteresting to me. Ah well. Teaching high school students and somehow getting through to college students is a lot more interesting, and we agreed transition year students were really the best target for the secondary level cause. I want to look into this again once I'm done with my adult course.

There were suggestions of training secondary level teachers so they can teach how to program, which struck me first as a bit unfair. If there are interested teachers though, that's very very cool and I'm more than willing to help out! But I wonder how realistic that would be. The few teachers I met seemed either overwhelmed or stoically accepting of how much more knowledgeable and comfortable their students are with computers. On the other hand I was never asked any particularly complex questions by my teenage students during my short course, so it might very well be worthwhile to focus on teaching the basics of programming to teachers instead. They would certainly have a better reach.

Education: Third level

Third level outreach would be about giving more perspective and teach an additional language to students, who tend to be only exposed to Java through college years. That's the strange relationship between employers and Universities, employers want graduates they can put to work instantly, Universities would like to teach computer science, and students would like to learn something that will get them a job. So I understand why students might limit themselves to Java initially, but still if we present Python correctly, as an alternative it would be very worthwhile. There was the idea of helping students through their homework, using Python to solve the problems. I wonder if it would attract the right kind of students but it sounds worth a try. Outside of the meetup I had also talked about this with Cheryl who suggested I might try to teach an introduction to programming (using Python) to college students before their course begins. Particularly targeting women to help even the playing field a little (see this link about meritocracy & third level computing courses) though of course open to everyone.

Alan and Kevin should be posting their notes from the evening and the various "what we can do" for each target group. What I'm transcribing here is a mix of the actual conversation and my bubbling thoughts :)

I left as the group kind of disbanded to crash the "website / online presence" table topic, as this came up many times while we were talking: we should highlight what companies are using Python, and link to resources for people looking to get started with the language. From the response to my course, people in Ireland definitely have an interest in learning!

As part of my quest of becoming better at public speaking, I recently finished reading Presentation Zen. The first striking thing about the book is how beautifully designed it is all along (probably another one that wouldn't work well on an e-reader), which of course highlights the principles the book aims to impart.

The structure flows well, and every chapter contains lots of tips and clear steps to look at when preparing a presentation. Often a chapter will offer some background on why something work, or why you should try to get away from the traditional (and boring) way of doing presentations. Also why it might be difficult to do so, depending on the culture you live in.

The book is nowhere only about slides, but in the chapters about designing and preparing them I really enjoyed that there were so many examples, including "before" (traditional) and "after" (following the presentation zen principles). Mostly what the book really describes is a general attitude one should develop with regard to presenting, preparing for a presentation and respecting your audience.

It's an absolutely fantastic read if you want to get better at presenting and generally get away from being boring and hampered by bullet points, but you don't know where to start.

I'm trying these new principles now for my Sugar talk. I think it definitely improved my preparation, by helping me think more about flow and using slides to support what I say rather than as a crutch. When it comes to being able to deliver the talk though, it'll be another story. We'll see!

I did my talk in TOG tonight. I think it went quite well! I certainly got some positive feedback afterwards. Lots of room for improvements still, of course, many "um"s especially at the beginning, and it probably would have been better if I had rehearsed more, to remove the attachment to my notes for prompts when I got stuck, but otherwise it flowed well and people seemed clear and happy on what Sugar was, what it looks like and the type of learning it tries to encourage. Very nice audience, smallish and I knew most people! Many interesting questions, and having 4 laptops running Sugar (2 XOs with 0.82, 2 Eee with Mirabelle) for people to try out afterwards was a hit, I was delighted to see people rushing toward them and trying out all sorts of activities. (Delightful, noisy Tam Tam!)

The "Presentation Zen" style of presenting worked well too, I think, and I got a few questions about this and the pictures I used. I still need to practice more and become a stronger speaker to support this style better, though. (Motivated!)

Here are the presentation slides, for the curious. In true "Presentation Zen" style they are much less useful without me chatting in front of them, but you'll find most of the information I used for content on http://sugarlabs.org and http://wiki.sugarlabs.org ! :)

The new shiny OSS Bar Camp website is up! University College Dublin, week-end of the 25th and 26th of September. Many awesome people already signed up. Register now!

This sounds so, so cool: Mozilla Drumbeat Festival. "Join us in Barcelona for three days of making, teaching, hacking, inventing and shaping the future of education and the web."

Three days in the middle of the week, in another country, it's unlikely I'll be able to go, but damn... I'll certainly follow closely.