Gioia e tripudio per tutti, nuovi problemi da risolvere per me!

PS: diciamo che l’ho fatto a posta a non dirlo prima, così evitavo di pagare da bere al meeting!

Right now I’m writing this post from the Ubuntu-it meeting in Bologna, with a great amount of people from the Italian community. Interesting talks and ideas are coming out from this day, discussion also about the role that our community is playing and what are our bonds with Canonical and the overall international community.

After returning to France, I will be at the fOSSa 2011 Conference, in Lyon (France), with Silvia Bindelli, where we have been invited to talk about our role in leading and managing part of the Italian community. It is an interesting opportunity and conference, also because I’ve never really gave a public talk with slides and everything in English. I’m really looking forward to traveling to Lyon and spending a couple of days there.

After this, I will be leaving for the USA to attend, thanks to Canonical for the sponsorship, UDS-P where as usual there will be a lot of interesting tracks. I do not have yet a schedule for myself, but I know it will be packed, and I will be running from room to room (this year I would also like to follow virtualization and server tracks).

Looking forward to meeting Ubuntu/GNOME people in Lyon and to leave for UDS!

Ma forse tutto il mondo non sa quanto lavoro venga fatto per ogni nuova versione di Ubuntu. Non basterebbe sicuramente un misero messaggio su un blog per descriverlo, ma per ringraziare chi ogni volta impegna tanta energia e dedizione per l’open source dovrebbe essere sufficiente, per lo meno per raggiungere una parte (quella più vicina) di questo mondo.

Sicuramente dimenticherò qualcuno per strada, ma il mio grazie va:

• A tutta la comunità di Ubuntu-it
• A chi si impegna a gestire e coordinare le varie attività
• A tutti i traduttori, che ogni volta fanno sempre di più per avere un sistema sempre più italiano
• A chi scrive o cura la documentazione, lavoro lungo e tante volte poco pubblicizzato
• A chi fa i test, e quanti ne fa!
• A chi segnala bug o ci riporta problemi
• A chi da supporto (IRC, forum, mailing list o sotto qualsiasi altra forma)
• A chi fa marketing e aiuta a divulgare Ubuntu
• A te che usi Ubuntu (e magari lo fai in italiano!)

Nei prossimi giorni passerò di casa in casa per l’estorsione di voti a mio favore.

Nel momento in cui comincia ad avvicinarsi, un guerriero della luce riconosce il Cammino.

Ogni pietra, ogni curva, gli danno il benvenuto.

Egli si identifica con le montagne e i corsi d’acqua, scorge parte della propria anima nelle piante, negli animali e negli uccelli della campagna.

Allora, accettando l’aiuto di Dio e dei Suoi segnali, si lascia condurre dalla propria Leggenda Personale verso le incombenze che la vita gli riserva.

Alcune sere non ha un posto dove dormire, altre soffre d’insonnia. “Questo è coerente“, pensa il guerriero, “Sono io che ho deciso di procedere lungo questa strada“.

In questa frase è riassunto tutto il suo Potere. Egli ha scelto la strada che sta percorrendo e non ha nulla da recriminare.

Paulo Coehlo

Grazie.

Things to take care of, new things to do, new adventures in front of me! I will probably be somewhat offline or less present for still a while: I’m moving out of Italy, living with my girlfriend, starting a new job, learning a new language! A little bit scared, but excited nonetheless!

We’ll be living in France (well… she’s already there since this week, I’ll reach her at the end of May) in Antibes, a very cute city between Nice and Cannes in the Cote d’Azur region! Next to the sea! Closer to it than where I’m living right now!

I will be working for INRIA in Sophia-Antipolis on a two years contract: the project is very interesting and exciting, and everything runs on Ubuntu! I couldn’t ask for more! It’s an European project that will be open-sourced (don’t know yet if under a GPL or an Apache license). They are building a P2P kind of social platform, using pretty cool technologies, and I’m looking forward to start working on it!

It’s is a little bit scaring leaving the place you grow up, your family, my little niece, your friends, your work, and start a new adventure also in such a short time (I found the job two weeks ago!), not knowing the language spoken there (I’m starting to study it, but luckily where I’ll be working they speak English!). Even if it’s not that far away from Italy, it’s a totally unknown place to me: new habits, a new culture to discover, new places and cities to visit… a new life to build!

It gives you strange sensations and feelings… a mixture of excitement, fear, and curiosity, something that you are eager to do, eager to start… something to you look at in some sort of awe, but you so want to start it that the happiness of all of this is overwhelming! It gives you excitement, and adrenaline that you can’t even sleep at night, thinking about things to do, things to buy, stuff to move; thinking about the new job, the new house, the new life…

I will need a little bit of time to settle down as soon as I reach my new place, but i will be back, more excited than ever!

PS: any Gnome/Ubuntu users from Antibes? Wouldn’t mind having a beer or two sometimes!

PPS: know any French teacher in Antibes or a cool place where to learn French? Apart for practicing it as much as you can by yourself with the local people

Abbiamo così deciso di incrementare i membri del Consiglio fino a un massimo di 7 (sette) attraverso lo svolgimento di elezioni biennali.

La struttura del Consiglio sarà composta dai tre membri attuali (Fabio, Lorenzo, Milo) a cui si affiencheranno i nuovi membri eletti dalla comunità. I membri attuali rivestirannoruolo di membri permanenti per garantire continutià a quanto svolto; i nuovi membri resteranno in carica per due anni e potranno nuovamente essere rieletti dalla comunità al termine dei due anni.

Tutte le informazioni sulle elezioni, su come potervi partecipare e sul metodo di voto adottato, possono essere trovate all’interno della pagine del Consiglio nel wiki di Ubuntu-it:

http://wiki.ubuntu-it.org/Consiglio

In particolare nelle seguenti pagine:

http://wiki.ubuntu-it.org/Consiglio/ComeFarneParte

http://wiki.ubuntu-it.org/Consiglio/Elezioni

Seguono alcune precisazioni.

= Come poter concorrere alle elezioni =

Per poter essere eletti come membri del Consiglio della comunità italiana, è necessario disporre della membership della comunità italiana [1].

Per chi fosse interessato a far parte del Consiglio, è necessario inviare una mai lal Consiglio, manifestando il proprio interesse, nel periodo tra i giorni 1 novembre e 7 novembre 2010 entro le ore 24.

Seguirà un periodo di 3 (tre) settimane, dal giorno 8 novembre al 30 novembre, in cui i candidati si presenteranno e in cui sarà possibile porre domande agli stessi attraverso la mailing list inter-gruppi.

= Come poter partecipare alle elezioni =

Per poter votare alle elezioni dei membri del Consiglio, è necessario disporre della membership della comunità italiana [1].

Per chi fosse interessato a votare, ma non dispone ancora della membership, le richieste di membership verranno prese in considerazione fino a *15* (quindici) giorni prima dell’inizio delle votazioni: in questo caso entro il giorno 15 novembre 2010. Richieste presentate dopo tale data verranno valutate, ma non saranno considerate valide ai fini dell’imminente votazione.

Grazie per l’attenzione.

[1] http://wiki.ubuntu-it.org/Comunita/Membership

Debian Ubuntu Community Conference – Italy

and that’s, to my knowledge, the first of its kind… but definitely not the last.

First of all, big kudos to the people behind the organization of this wonderful event (in totally casual order):

• the men and women behind FSUG Italia (Free Software User Group Italy) (I can’t remember all your names, apologies, but I think you know who you are!)
• Luca Bruno (kaeso) from the Debian Italian community
• Paolo Sammicheli (xdatap1) from the Ubuntu Italian community (and Monia too! also for their hospitality!)
• the men and the women from the Perugia hacklab “Projectz on Island”
• the Maths Department of the University of Perugia
• Stefano Zacchiroli for being there with us
• all the men and women that were there!!!

The DUCC-IT has been a remarkably experience: seeing gold old friends, and meeting new people from the FLOSS world, and in particular from Debian and Ubuntu, is always great.

DUCC is a joint Debian – Ubuntu conference born from an idea of the FSUG guys (if I’m not totally wrong) (I was wrong, thanks Zack for the heads up!) at the last UDS from Stefano, Paolo, and Sergio Zanchetta. Debian and Ubuntu hackers sharing the stage in their expertise fields, talking about what they love the most with the people from the other side of the barricade (if you pass me the expression).

I really loved the idea and the experiment of sharing my talk with somebody else (Francesca Ciceri in my case) from the Debian community. I think we should try to repeat it more often: it’s a great way to work more closely together even outside of the normal workflow we all stick to.

I have a lot of things to say about these last two days, but can’t make up my mind to find the right words… As usual, it’s sad to leave such great people after some wonderful days together, we don’t always know when we are going to see each other again.

Just to try to sum it up, ’cause words are really hard on me tonight:

• We decided that we will be holding another DUCC-IT next year (where and when not yet decided)
• We are going to open a neutral “forum” (mailing list or whatever) where our two communities can talk together (something that doesn’t have the Debian or Ubuntu word in it) (Stefano, if you will ever read this: remember to open the alioth project! )
• When the next DUCC-IT meeting will arrive, we have to know where and when the next one will be held
• After the Debian / Ubuntu Women talk, we need to take more action, and we need to have a women space again in our next meetings
• I hope the FSUG people, or whoever is behind the DUCC-IT acronym, will not kill me: to all the Debian and Ubuntu communities out there, take the DUCC-IT acronym, replace IT with your local country code, and repeat this experience with your local Debian/Ubuntu communities.
• My photo-stream of the conference

One world: AWESOME.

My first GUADEC, and I’m really enjoying it.

A lot of interesting talks, lots of great people, and also lots of work to do.

We had the documentation workshop the day before GUADEC started, and it has turned out really cool and interesting: lots of people are interested in documentation, users and developers documentation; and this is absolutely great!

We had interesting discussions with the Anjuta developer, the Evolution developers, people from Openismus, and many other I can’t probably even remember the names (apologies for that!).

Phil and I have also been working quite a lot in these days: Phil on the what is going to be the new GNOME users help, me mostly on the Rhythmbox docs.

Today we will have the BoF room at GUADEC for us and we will brainstorm a lot on new topics for the GNOME users help. If you want to help us out, or just to hang around and see how we work, please join us!

Last but not least: there are rumors about having a developers documentation hackfest, probably in Berlin, thanks to Openismus. It’s not confirmed yet, but it would be absolutely great! (I hope I can have days off from work to help out with that too).

But I’m not writing for that, I’m writing for this:

Yeah, the Ubuntu for Non-Geeks: 4th Edition.

I think it is better if I leave you to our own Phil Bull blog post describing the book, since he’s one of the author:

http://philbull.livejournal.com/55089.html

I had the opportunity to read the book while I was reviewing it (thanks to Phil that mentioned my name to someone!), and I have to sat that it is a very well written book, easy on you. A worth read if you are moving your first steps in the Linux and Ubuntu world. Spread the voice, it’s a really good book!

Oh, and by the way, I’ll be at GUADEC! (I’m really looking forward to my first GUADEC!) And remember, we are holding a documentation workshop on Tuesday the 27!

A big thank goes to the GNOME Foundation!

(Time taken to write this blog post: almost 20 minutes…)