I was pretty tired yesterday and had to spend some time working on the workshop materials, so I didn't end up blogging about it at all.

Yesterday went really well. We covered communication tools and the kinds of things you can do with them. It was a gorgeous day, S's mom came up, and we spent a few hours sitting on the beach and playing in the surf. Between hanging out with S's mom, playing at the beach, working on the workshop, and feeling really tired, I didn't get around to blogging the day at all.

Today we covered collaboration tools in the workshop. It was a cold and rainy day. Additionally, it's sort of the middle of a really high-energy week and everyone was pretty tired.

Afterwards, I noticed I missed a call on my cell phone. I checked my messages to discover my little sister L had a baby at 3am this morning. It's the first baby for my siblings, so I'm a new uncle.

I spent much of the rest of today thinking about what kind of uncle I will be.

Shelby from the UUA talked about using social media for outreach, Facebook, Facebook pages vs. groups, Twitter, child safety issues, and a variety of other important things. She also covered what resources the UUA has for churches and RE programs.

It was a really great session.

After it, I decided to retool the rest of the workshop to follow Shelby's flow. I think it really reached the participants plus I think it's the best model for maximizing the usefulness of the workshop for everyone involved.

I also decided to stop using social media presentation tools. I find them pretty silly looking and the interfaces are kind of irritating. I want to type a bunch of text and put the text in specific places. I don't want to fiddle with my presentation as if it were a page layout problem. Ugh. Anyhow, I'm now using s5 which I love because it's easy to use and portable.

Today was the introduction to the workshop. We had a hell of a time with the Internet connection, though, so that caused the activity not to work so well and was pretty frustrating.

I talked to Dan about it afterwards and we devised some alternatives for the rest of the week--it's hard to do a workshop on using social media if the Internet connection isn't reliable.

Fail snail:

Copyright 2008 `flickr <http://flickr.com/>`__ user `Todd Barnard <http://www.flickr.com/photos/ronin691/>`__

I spent the rest of the day talking to people and working on the workshop.

S and I are taking a "working vacation" this week. We're both at Ferry Beach in Maine and teaching workshops. Her workshop is one of the UU RE Renaissance modules--one on worship. My workshop is on using social media tools to run a RE program.

Copyright 2008 `Flickr <http://flickr.com/>`__ user `QXZ <http://www.flickr.com/photos/qxz/>`__

The UUA has a bunch of resources on using social media, but it's primarily focused on marketing, public relations, and announcements. That's great stuff, but the bigger impact for social media tools on RE programs is their ability to help people communicate, coordinate, and collaborate with communities of volunteers. I've never run an RE program, but I am involved in and run FLOSS communities--there's a lot of overlap between these two domains.

As such, I'm writing my own workshop. I spent most of last week banging out the material based on six months or so of notes and research. It's really coming together, but I still have a lot of work to do. I have full confidence that I can pull this off, though. At worst, I'll wing a few of the sections and codify them into workshop materials after the fact possibly with the help of my participants.

I checked in today and went to the Gardiner porch where I'm running the workshop to test out the Internet connection. It was awful about an hour ago (latency > 700ms); seems a bit better now. I'm hoping it's working well for the workshop hours since I've lined up a bunch of demos and activities.

After I'm done the workshop, I plan to post the materials online licensed under a Creative Commons license. This is going to be an awesome workshop. I dare to say that the information in this workshop will make a huge difference running an RE program and making sense of the chaotic landscape of social media.

Miro 3.1 status (roadmap)

• working on rebuilding the Windows build environment

• this release cycle has been pretty long; we're switching gears and going to focus on wrapping it up; help with this would be great, otherwise we'll get there as we get there.

Miro Community 1.0.1 status (roadmap)

• releasing soon

Janet:

• Universal Subtitles testing

• regression testing on Miro

Luc:

• continued working on Miro shutdown problems on OSX--problems with libtorrent

• worked on conversions preferences, but is going to put it aside for now because of complications

Paul:

• released Miro Community 1.0

• working on Miro Community 1.0.2 and 1.1

Will:

• worked on windows build environment stuff

• worked on Miro 3.1 bugs

bugzilla:

• 23 bugs/feature-requests created

• 1 bugs marked ---

• 3 bugs marked WONTFIX

• 10 bugs marked FIXED

• 5 bugs marked DUPLICATE

• 1 bugs marked INVALID

Miro 3.1 status (roadmap)

• working on rebuilding the Windows build environment

Miro Community 1.0.1 status (roadmap)

• releasing soon

Paul:

• continued working on MC server configuration and setup

• fixed some minor bugs for MC 1.0.1

Janet:

• tested universal subtitles project and other things

Luc:

• worked on conversion preferences

• worked on shutdown problem

Will:

• tweaked logging in the downloader

• got the downloader working in the new build environment

• spent an hour on agpl compliance for universal subtitles

• now working on getting VLC and XULRunner working

• 9 bugs/feature-requests created

• 1 bugs marked DUPLICATE

• 1 bugs marked FIXED

• 1 bugs marked WONTFIX

• 5 bugs marked INVALID

I was going through the videos tweaking tags and other metadata when I noticed that Python Miro Community has no videos that cover pygame.

pygame is a library for writing games. It has a huge community and it's a great way to introduce people to Python programming. I'd love to see some pygame material on the site.

If you know of video tutorials for pygame that could be added to the site, please submit them.

If you'd be interested in creating a video tutorial for pygame, let me know and we can work on it.

I spent 20 or so hours over the last few weeks working through the moderator queue for Python Miro Community and making changes to the site. We've almost posted all of the PyCon 2010 videos--I think there are three or four more still in the queue including one of the lightning talks.

I've created a bunch of bugs in the Miro Community bug tracker for bugs that I've encountered and enhancements that would make the site and curation of the site better. Miro Community is a Free Software project, so I'm hoping to find free time to fix/implement some of those.

Carl Karsten is now a curator on the site--that makes two of us. He's been a huge help so far. Having someone to bounce ideas off of makes it a lot easier and he brings a lot of enthusiasm to the site. Right now we're coordinating things through email and we're tentatively going to use the pycon-av mailing list for PMC discussion. If we need to switch to another mailing list, then we'll do that.

At Carl's suggestion, we added a new category of categories for Python user groups. The three groups we have listed now are ChiPy (Chicago, IL), BostonPy (Boston, MA), and PyAtl (Atlanta, GA). The PyAtl videos are mostly from last year--I need to catch up with a PyAtl member to find out what's going on. There are only two BostonPy videos now, but the group is interested in doing more. The ChiPy videos are fantastic. Additionally, Pior from Montreal-Python is working on getting their video workflow working--I really look forward to seeing their sessions.

I've been tagging videos that I think are good for Python beginners with the tag "python-basics". At some point in the near future, we're going to move some/all of those videos into a Learning Python category. There's a large amount of decent introductory material for Python out there ranging from videos on YouTube to tutorials at PyCon. I think this category will make it easier for people new to Python to get their feet wet quickly and easily.

On a slightly related note, the Universal Subtitles project recently launched an alpha demo of their system. I'm looking forward to this project reaching a stable status since I'm planning to use it on PMC to add subtitle/transcription to all videos on Python Miro Community. The project is in Django and it's Free Software. If you're interested in this work, they sure could use the help.

That's it for this status report. Any thoughts, questions or concerns--let me know.

For Miro 3.0, a couple of us sat down and wrote a Miro User Manual. Links to the manual are on the getmiro.com web-site. In Miro, the Help -> Help menu item brings up the Help page on the getmiro.com web-site.

With all that linkage, though, I haven't heard anything regarding whether the Miro User Manual is useful or not, whether there are issues, whether there are bits that are unclear or missing, ...

I encourage you to take a moment to skim the Miro User Manual today. I'd appreciate any feedback--leave it in the comments here or send me an email at willkg at bluesock dot org.

Also let me know if you're interested in helping. I'm hoping to do MUM sprints prior to Miro release using PiratePad.

Miro 3.1 status (roadmap)

• working on rebuilding the Windows build environment

Miro Community 1.0.1 status (roadmap)

• working on scaling issues

• working on minor bugs

Nick:

• first public demo of the subtitles widget. (see http://blog.universalsubtitles.org/2010/06/16/launching-an-alpha-demo-of-our-subtitling-tool/)

Paul:

• worked on documentation-y stuff for Miro Community.

• worked on scaling architecture

Luc:

• worked on table view crashes on OSX

• worked on downloader shutdown slowness on OSX

• add a conversions preference panel

Will:

• did a bunch of cleanup stuff:

  • put bugzilla overlay in a repository,

  • put the roadmap in the bugzilla-scripts repository to share with others,

  • worked with rob to get the userguide squared away in regards to the new getmiro.com workflow

• continued working on the downloader crashing problem in the new windows build environment--I've ruled out some issues, but I haven't figured it out, yet.

• volunteered at the FSF on Tuesday. spent a few hours talking to a friend about Windows build enviroments on Saturday.

bugzilla

• 8 bugs/feature-requests created

• 3 bugs marked WONTFIX

• 4 bugs marked FIXED