[Ubuntu-US-PA] Fwd: Half a year of Jamming in Berlin

[Bret Fledderjohn]

Here's an email from Daniel Holbach (one of the movers and shakers behind
the Global Bug Jam), where he explains how he has been running bug jams in
Berlin.  This could be helpful with ours.


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Daniel Holbach <daniel.holbach at ubuntu.com>
Date: 2009/2/17
Subject: Half a year of Jamming in Berlin
To: "Ubuntu local community team (LoCo) contacts" <
loco-contacts at lists.ubuntu.com>, ubuntu-event-planners at lists.ubuntu.com


-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Hello everybody,

with the Global Bug Jam coming up at the end of the week, I thought I'd
share the experience we made in the Berlin team, where we had Jams every
two weeks for about half a year now.

The obvious aim of all Ubuntu Jams is: make Ubuntu better and have fun
in your local team. To answer the question "When is a Jam a success?",
I'd ask a bit more specific questions:

How many people
 - got to make Ubuntu better in a way they never did before?
 - brought along friends the next time or talked about it afterwards?
 - came back showing you a piece of work and asking for advice?
 - showed up in various other Ubuntu IRC channels and mailing lists?

As you can see none of the questions I ask revolves around "How many
bugs were touched? How many packages were uploaded?", etc. The key in my
mind is letting your fellow jammers have that experience of achieving
something. There's no substitute for having the experience of "Aha!
That's what it's all about!" yourself.

But how do you achieve that? How do you get people to the point where
they go from the point of learning, asking and listening to actually
doing it?

It sounds easy, so here it is:
 - show a few examples
 - get away from the front of "the audience" as soon as possible
 - set goals
 - get people to work in groups

Creating a "working atmosphere" isn't very easy if you get myriads of
good questions and you don't want to give the answers to everyone
individually. It's only natural that you answer them for the whole group
and you get follow-up questions and everybody naturally stops doing
whatever they were doing before.

Be prepared. Set goals, have a list of bugs/packages/whatever you want
to work on. You can always adapt the list of bugs to whatever your team
is interested in. Use gobby to share notes collectively.

Ask people to check out the documentation. We have good documentation
and if it's not good enough, we need to fix it.

Another hurdle is English for teams whose native language is something
else. It's not trivial to get people to ask in #ubuntu-bugs or
#ubuntu-motu or on a mailing list or even worse: fix documentation on
the wiki. Encourage them, ask people to collaborate on writing the text.

If you're running regular Jams you will notice that you attract new
people every time. In Berlin we had new people there almost every single
time. Even newcomers who did not even know about Launchpad yet. Still
they wanted to help out and get started. The only thing that works there
is: split up the group to avoid giving the same presentation to
everybody over and over again.

Another thing that happened every now and then was that people joined in
who were new and wanted to get "their bugs fixed" (sound not working,
etc). That's completely fine, but try to make sure the group files bugs
about it afterwards. :-)

If you lead the Jam talk about what collaborating in the bigger picture
of open source means to you. That it's all about "going out there" and
"doing it". That you're not safe from somebody saying "I don't like your
idea", but that it's important that you share in the first place and
create a topic of discussion. That you make the world a better place by
collaborating and getting in touch with other teams.

You might notice that I'm just giving advice on the first question I
asked. That's because I firmly believe that getting the first one right
will lead to positive answers of the other questions. Of course some
people might realise that packaging or bug triage is not their cup of
tea, which is fine. At least they tried.

Ask for feedback. Factor it in.

Share your stories!

Have a great day and jam on!
 Daniel

- --
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/GlobalBugJam - 20-22 February 2009
Join in on the fun with YOUR team!
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iEYEARECAAYFAkmahZ4ACgkQRjrlnQWd1etgDwCdGl6evgFeTWhN2zdSmS2zozOg
fZoAnidzXwQ6QVk6SX4twAe6lo96nc/W
=ExCQ
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

--
loco-contacts mailing list
loco-contacts at lists.ubuntu.com
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/loco-contacts



-- 
- Bret
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-us-pa/attachments/20090217/90d87b14/attachment.htm