As part of an ongoing series of blogs about LoCo Team Jams, I spoke with Benjamin Kerensa (bkerensa), the team contact for Ubuntu Oregon about their Global Jam activities.
Tell me about yourself and how you are involved in Ubuntu
My name is Benjamin Kerensa and I’m Team Lead for Ubuntu Oregon and also actively contribute to the Ubuntu Weekly News, Ubuntu Developer News, Ubuntu Documentation, Ubuntu BugSquad and I write for OMG! Ubuntu!. I have been involved mostly behind the scenes for a number of years providing community support.
Have you organized a Global Jam event before, and if so what was your experience? How did you choose a venue and select activities?
I have organized a Global Jam before in fact I organized our event last year and I feel it turned out really nice however I did not fully take into account the amount of time needed to get people contributing at an event so our Jam last year was mostly social in nature but this year we are planning for a whole day from morning till late night. Last year I chose PuppetLabs to be our venue because I knew that the folks there shared a very common love for Free Open Source Software and also had facilities that were very accommodating for a crowd of our size. I selected documentation and bugs last cycle however due to the limited time we really didnt get to work on any tasks but we did however get to do a general overview of how to contribute in those areas.
What kinds of activities to you plan of doing as part of your upcoming jam?
This cycle we hope to focus on Bug Triaging and Bitesize Fixes with the help of Ubuntu BugMaster Brian Murray and potentially have a talk on packaging by
Steve Langasek. It is my hope that these focuses will not only benefit the LTS but also gear our community towards accelerated contributions in the area of development and continue to lay a foundation for future contributors in Oregon to be involved in more technical focused contributions.
Our LoCo is lucky to have the opportunity to work with Western Oregon University this year in a Mentorship Project for their students in which they have chosen to learn how to contribute to Ubuntu as such we anticipate a number of those students to be in attendance.
How do you spread the word about your event to get more people to participate?
I announce via our mailing list and the loco directory and then cross post those announcements to other LUG and Tech focused mailing lists in our region and then I use a mix of social media and IRC to encourage our existing Ubuntu LoCo folks and others to come and check out what we have going on.
Thanks Ben and the entire Ubuntu Oregon team!