I’m delighted to announce the availability of GNOME Developer Training at GUADEC this year. It’s been brewing for a while, but you can now register for the training sessions on the GUADEC website.

Fernando Herrera, Claudio Saavedra, Alberto Garcia and myself will be running the two-day course, covering the basics of a Linux development environment and developer tools, the GNOME stack, including freedesktop.org components, and the social aspects of working with a free software project, being a good community citizen, getting your code upstream, and gaining influence in projects you work with.

The developer tools section will go beyond getting you compiling the software to also present mobile development environments, and the tools you can use to profile your apps, or diagnose I/O or memory issues, dealing with the vast majority of performance issues developers encounter.

This is the first time I have seen a training course which treats the soft science of working with free software communities, and given the number of times that people working in companies have told me that they need help in this area, I believe that this is satisfying a real need.

We are keeping the numbers down to ensure that the highest quality training & individual attention is provided – only 20 places are available. The pricing for the training course is very competitive for this type of course – €1500 per person, including training, meals and printed training materials, and a professional registration to GUADEC, worth €250.

If you register before June 15th, you can even get an additional discount – the early bird registration price is only €1200 per person.

I’m really excited about this, and I hope others will be too. This is the first time that we will have done training like this in conjunction with GUADEC, and I really hope that this will bring some new developers to the conference for the week, as well as being a valuable addition to the GUADEC event.

While I’ve occasionally been critical of Ubuntu as a project, it is a distribution with very open processes, for the most part.

The voting tokens have just been sent out for the Q1 2010 Maemo Community Council elections.

I already have over 100 bounced emails, so if you think that you should have a vote and you have not received an email with a voting token yet, please send me an email or leave a comment, I will look up your Maemo username and send you on the voting token/email combo we have on record so that you can vote.

Voting runs until March 30th – you can find more information about the election and the council in the Maemo wiki.

I just realised this morning that after a very long call for participation period, we’re now in the last week before the call for participation deadline for GUADEC – you should have proposals in by 23:59 UTC on March 20th to be eligible for selection (although a little birdie tells me that might get extended to the end of the weekend). Of course, I knew that the deadline was sometime in the end of March, but I didn’t realise that we’d gotten so far through the calendar!

So get your proposals in about all things GNOME, GNOME 3, GNOME Mobile, usability, accessibility, webability, open data, free services, scaling the community, developer tools, whatever – but get them in quick. It’s better to get a poor proposal in now & improve it next week than wait until next week to polish what you have now.

For guidelines on a good talk proposal, I really like the OSCON guidelines as a list of good dos & don’ts for conference proposals – in general, make the proposal (and your presentation, if accepted) not about you or your project, but about your audience and what they can do with your project – so clearly identify the target audience & why they would attend, and make the title short & action-based, rather than vague, weird or overly clever.

Good luck to teuf and his merry band evaluating all the proposals!

Looking back on 2009, I wrote quite a bit on here which I would like to keep and reference for the future.

This is a collection of my blog entries which gave, in my opinion, the most food for thought this year.

Free software business practice

• Pure software is not the only way to go
• Free Software consulting: marketing & business model
• Too many platforms?
• The value of engagement
• Estimating merge costs

Community dynamics and governance

• How do you count your community size?
• Decision making & critical mass
• Governance best practices
• Community analysis as risk management
• Football clubs and free software projects
• Barriers to community growth

Software licensing & other legal issues

• Copyright assignment and other barriers to entry
• Why I disagree with RMS concerning Mono
• Side-effects of copyright assignment

Other general stuff

• Giving Great Presentations – speaker notes
• Running advice

Happy Christmas everyone, and have a great 2010.

Earlier today I gave a lightning talk on giving great presentations at the Maemo Summit. The response has been great, and here are the notes I wrote for the presentation, so that people can refer back tol the advice when the time comes.

After commenting on Mal Minhas’s “cost of non-participation” paper (PDF), I’ve been thinking about the cost of performing a merge back to a baseline, and I think I have something to work with.

(Reposted from Neary Consulting)

I wonder if it was a mistake to adopt the “evaluate as they come in” method for Maemo Summit presentations. As we received proposals, for each proposal on its merits we said yes, no or maybe. If you were a yes, you were added to the schedule. A no got a nice email. A maybe stayed in the queue.

We set a deadline for submissions of September 13th, but this was a deadline for us to finish the schedule, not for people who wanted to give presentations to submit. I said as much in the call for content: “The final deadline for submissions will be September 13th but the sooner you submit your proposal the better chances you will have to get a slot”.

After Nokia World, a bunch of people came out of the woodwork to propose quality presentations, and after reviewing pending proposals last week, we now have an agenda which is almost full – there are 5 open slots and about 8 open lightning talk slots, about half of which are potentially taken already.

So it’s slightly frustrating to see 16 new submissions come in over the past 2 days as people saw the deadline arriving and the schedule filling up. If they were all there before, our choices might have been different, but now we will unfortunately be obliged to reject otherwise great presentations, simply because the proposers waited too long to ask for a slot.

It’s a tough problem to solve, though – if we had set an earlier deadline, we would not have received many of those presentations, or they would have been vague proposals like “can’t say much yet, but this’ll be a cool presentation about something related to Fremantle”. Approving presentations early allowed the council to have better information for travel subsidies and allowed people to book travel earlier and thus cheaper. But we’re going to miss out on some presentations I think would be pretty good. Pity.

Ton Roosendaal (on the left)

I’m very pleased to share that the opening keynote for the community days during the Maemo Summit will be Ton Roosendaal of the Blender Foundation. It’s been my pleasure to know Ton, mostly from afar, for the past few years, and he is one of the most amazing people I know in the free software world.

Ton is one of those people who has a sense of doing things big, and doing them right. Over the past few years, Ton has raised money to hire artists and developers to work on commercial quality films and games, resulting in Project Orange, Project Apricot, Project Peach and now Project Durian is in pre-production (you can buy your copy now and get your name on the credits!), with the goal of showing off what Blender can do and making the program better by working closely with artists to see what needs work. The results are truly impressive, and the amount of foresight and hard work which went into getting each of these projects off the ground and completed is amazing.

The Blender community is also amazing. Ton has continually given passionate users a reason to stay around, and ways to help the project, and that has been rewarded by a diverse community of artists and developers working together. The BlenderNation fan/news site is a testament to the creativity and passion of the community.

I’m really looking forward to hearing Ton speak.