Sunday, February 7, 2016

Ubuntu Membership!

I recently obtained official Ubuntu Membership, hence this blog post being on Planet Ubuntu. I wanted to summarize a few concepts I learned while working towards this goal.

What is Ubuntu Membership?

From https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Membership, "Official Ubuntu Membership means recognition of significant and sustained contribution to Ubuntu or the Ubuntu community." I would suggest checking out that page if you would like to know more.

Details about the meeting

Meeting log: http://ubottu.com/meetingology/logs/ubuntu-meeting/2016/ubuntu-meeting.2016-02-04-22.01.moin.txt

Wiki page: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/tsimonq2

Launchpad page: https://launchpad.net/~tsimonq2

Contributions

I keep all my contributions up-to-date here, so if you would like to learn more about my contributions, that is where to start.

Lessons Learned/Advice I have received

If you plan on getting your membership in the future, this is the advice that I would give:

When applying:
  • Be yourself.
  • Have a statement prepared beforehand describing a bit about you and what you have done in the community, with links to wiki pages. My original statement was:
Wiki Page: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/tsimonq2 , Launchpad: https://launchpad.net/~tsimonq2 , Ubuntu US Wisconsin LoCo Team Wiki Page:https://wiki.ubuntu.com/WisconsinTeam
My name is Simon Quigley (tsimonq2) and I am from Wisconsin, USA. I am currently 13 years old(I turn 14 in March of 2016). I have been interested in computers for the past few years, and I started using Ubuntu in February 2015. In late July, I used Lubuntu due to the condition of my computer, and it really brought my computer back to life. So I switched, and I said to myself, "hey, I really should get involved with the community." So I did. I Googled a lot of things, wanting to contribute to Lubuntu, and I found QA. It seemed easy enough to start with, but I was really confused/unsure on what I had to do. I looked around, and I read something about IRC. At that point, I joined one of the Lubuntu IRC channels asking for help on this. I was greeted by the most friendly people, specifically wxl. They were all really kind to me, and soon thereafter, I figured out QA and started contributing. For a while I stuck around QA and Lubuntu, but in November of 2015, my contributions really took off. Due to the extensive amount of free time I get by being a kid combined with my fast learning capabilities and intelligence, I explored many different avenues of contributing and "attacked" them all. But before this started, I had some social problems with several individuals in an offtopic channel. That day in late November, I promised to exponentially increase my contributions and fine-tune my social interactions with other people. Ever since, I have contributed countless ways, in countless amounts, and even though it's only been about three months since I really started diving in, I believe I have contributed massively.
To highlight my contributions(which are on my wiki page if you would like more specifics), my first unintentional form of contribution was through Ask Ubuntu. I answered a few questions and it just sort of died down. After I actually knew what contribution meant, I started with Package QA(when Wily was in development), because at the time, all I had was my old Pentium 4(which I am actually on now). That is how I met the Lubuntu team. After I got my newer computer, I started with ISO QA. ISO QA was really one of the gateway form of contributions that got me familiar with a lot of the tools as well as the Ubuntu install process. I am currently the number one Xenial ISO QA tester, with 114 test cases completed. Right before this happened, I watched the Ubuntu Snappy Clinic, which really inspired me to get started contributing more regularly to Ubuntu. When this was starting, I was in talks with Anthony Hook(he *should* be here today, hello h00k!) to reincarnate the Ubuntu US Wisconsin Local Community team. I emailed him asking about it and he gave me the position of contact(the way he tells it, I stepped up to the position, but I guess it depends on how you look at it XD). Our team has monthly meetings and informal IRC meetings(the next one is tomorrow on #ubuntu-us-wi). I have worked to establish many resources and options for the team. Right now we are sort of in a transitional phase, where things are getting set up and we have a lot of works in progress. At this point, after the LoCo had it's first meeting, I started contributing to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. At first I just wrote summaries, but recently I have also helped with link hunting. This brings me to mid to late December. I started as a mentor for Google Code-in, which, to summarize it, is a project that is to help high school students with an introduction to Open Source. I just created tasks and "mentored" them. What that means is to help the student complete the task, and to review the task when it is done. balloons should be around, he was an "Admin" for Ubuntu. He helped with the technical side of things. He witnessed some of the mentoring I did for QA tasks. wxl co-mentored some tasks as well.
Those were my contributions leading up to recently. Recently I have been starting with the development(code) side of Ubuntu. I have been looking at FTBFS(Failed To Build From Source, http://qa.ubuntuwire.org/ftbfs/ ) issues and although I haven't fixed any issues that require packages, I have requested rebuilds and filed MIRs(Main Inclusion Request). Along with that, I have also recently been starting to fix QA test cases and I am shortly going to be working to formulate some documentation for the API(yes, there's an API :D).
So although this is a very long explanation and it probably fills up your IRC client's screen, I hope you look favorably upon my application for Ubuntu Membership. Thank you.
I showed this to Walter Lapchynski and he told me this was MILES too long. So I revised this a bit and here is what I pasted(if you look at the logs it got cut off but I think they know what I meant):
Wiki Page: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/tsimonq2 , Launchpad: https://launchpad.net/~tsimonq2 , Ubuntu US Wisconsin LoCo Team Wiki Page:https://wiki.ubuntu.com/WisconsinTeam
My name is Simon Quigley (tsimonq2) and I am from Wisconsin, USA. I am currently 13 years old(I turn 14 in March of 2016). I have been interested in computers for the past few years, and I started using Ubuntu in February 2015. My contributions started in late July after asking a question on a Lubuntu IRC channel and meeting friendly people. My forms of contribution include but are not limited to: Package and ISO QA, Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter summaries and link finding, complete reincarnation of the Ubuntu US Wisconsin Local Community Team, helping a lot with Lubuntu, being a Google Code-in mentor, Ask Ubuntu, and various manual QA test case fixes.
I hope you look favorably upon my application for Ubuntu Membership. If you have any questions/comments/concerns please let me know. Thank you.
So my suggestion here is, make a statement that is not TOO long, but not too short either. The suggested length is 1-5 sentences and I think this is a great amount.
  • Be prepared to answer questions about your contributions/community interactions.
In the meeting, Thomas Ward kept me on my feet, but from meeting logs that I have read, there aren't an overly excessive amount of questions.
  • The LoCo council will probably be silent.
As far as I remember, they have a special IRC channel that they communicate in. They also have a mailing list. This does NOT mean anything bad. I was really nervous, so this was the worst part(I went and got some spicy foods, I don't know why), but consider it a drumroll.

Here is some advice I can give for contributing in preparation for the meeting.
  • Be curious and learn as much as you can
Believe me, you don't know everything you can in the Ubuntu community already. If you do, you already have membership. :)

Always be curious. I used Ubuntu from February to July before contributing, and this is the reason I started contributing. I wanted hands-on knowledge about how Ubuntu works on the inside. Sure, you can watch other people contribute, but you really don't know much unless you get your hands dirty in my experience.

This is really the main premise of why I started/continued to contribute.
  • Don't be afraid to ask questions
Questions produce answers. Answers produce more questions. Those answers produce more questions. This can stretch your knowledge and contribution avenues more than you think. I wondered how packages were built in the Ubuntu archive, so I found FTBFS. FTBFS led me to build logs. This led me to schroots. And I now regularly use schroots today. Believe me, this helps more than you think.

This concludes my advice to new contributors and people who want to get their membership. If you would like to start contributing, check out find-a-task. If you want to explore more avenues to contribute, check out the Ubuntu Community page. And lastly, if you want one-on-one help with Linux in general(there are Ubuntu people around there so don't be afraid to ask about that), check out Linux Padawan.

If you have questions/comments/concerns about this article or you would like to work with me to get started with contributing to Ubuntu, my email is sqawesome99@gmail.com (tsimonq2@ubuntu.com should work in a week or two, but it doesn't seem to be working yet, :/) or I am tsimonq2 on Freenode(PMs and pings welcome).

4 comments:

  1. Congrats Simon. You've inspired me to be more active in the Ubuntu community.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you! :)

      Ping me on IRC if you would like any help or if you would like to share any accomplishments. :)

      Delete