17:59 <knome> #startmeeting Xubuntu community meeting
17:59 <meetingology> Meeting started Mon Nov 24 17:59:56 2014 UTC.  The chair is knome. Information about MeetBot at http://wiki.ubuntu.com/meetingology.
17:59 <meetingology> 
17:59 <meetingology> Available commands: action commands idea info link nick
17:59 <pleia2> o/
18:00 <knome> #chair pleia2
18:00 <meetingology> Current chairs: knome pleia2
18:00 <knome> i'll get a mouse and then we can start
18:00 <skellat> o/
18:00 <elfy> hi
18:00 <pleia2> mice are important for Xubuntu meetings
18:00 <skellat> Indeed
18:00 * pleia2 has a vervet
18:00 <knome> #topic Open action items
18:01 <knome> bluesabre did improbe widget naming
18:01 <knome> knome has completed the QA processes change but needs to send it out to the list
18:01 <knome> #action knome to send a proposal for the QA process to the -devel ML
18:01 * meetingology knome to send a proposal for the QA process to the -devel ML
18:02 <knome> exploratory testing mail is sent
18:02 <elfy> did I see the last draft?
18:02 <knome> and i've scheduled this meeting
18:02 <knome> elfy, yes, you've seen the one that's last
18:02 <elfy> k - thanks :)
18:02 <knome> i haven't integrated the last bit yet, but i got an ACK from ochosi so it's merely a small merge
18:02 <knome> so that's it for the action items
18:02 <knome> #topic Team updates
18:03 <knome> #info knome worked on responsive design for the website
18:03 <pleia2> #info pleia2 has been in contact with Unixstickers, they have a Xubuntu t-shirt now! http://www.unixstickers.com/tshirts/linux-and-tux-t-shirts/the-ultimate-xubuntu-linux-tshirt
18:03 * skellat just had the electricity go out & is on emergency power for broadband uplink
18:03 * skellat departs to start recovery
18:04 <knome> pleia2, if you are ordering one, let's see how it feels like and if it's ok, then add that to the website
18:04 <pleia2> #info Marketing blueprint for Vivid is finally filled out, discussion later this meeting https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/xubuntu-v-marketing
18:04 <knome> #action knome and pleia2 to update to update the website once the t-shirt quality is checked
18:04 * meetingology knome and pleia2 to update to update the website once the t-shirt quality is checked
18:04 <knome> to update to update?
18:04 <knome> #undo
18:04 <meetingology> Removing item from minutes: ACTION
18:04 <pleia2> knome: will do, trying to get them to toss one in with the QA sticker order (I'll pay for it if needed, but same shipment would be good)
18:04 <knome> #action knome and pleia2 to update the website once the t-shirt quality is checked
18:04 * meetingology knome and pleia2 to update the website once the t-shirt quality is checked
18:05 <knome> pleia2, sure. i think it would be fair to use the community funds to cover that
18:05 <knome> (the shipping, that is)
18:05 <knome> let's see how it goes and if you need to pay something, run it through ochosi/team
18:05 <knome> any other team updates?
18:06 <elfy> #info QA checking and updating tests as they come up
18:06 <elfy> #info QA not much commenting done on the exploratory testing idea - will mail -dev list with more details
18:07 <knome> elfy, did we set up a testcase for those reports yet?
18:07 <elfy> a seperate one?
18:07 <knome> yes, since exploratory testing doesn't really fit in the "do X, Y, Z" mindset
18:07 <elfy> (s)
18:07 <knome> or did we decide not to file one
18:07 <knome> err, to set up one :P
18:07 <elfy> I don't see much point tbh
18:08 <knome> ack
18:08 <knome> i'm fine with that
18:08 <elfy> there ARE places for people to report
18:08 <knome> yep
18:08 <knome> any other updates or shall we move on?
18:08 <elfy> I'm done
18:08 <knome> let's move on then
18:08 <knome> #topic Announcements
18:09 <knome> not really an announcement, but similar in nature... there has been some activity going on to awake the xfce team
18:09 <knome> if you are willing to help there (as well), see https://wiki.xfce.org/people
18:09 <pleia2> oh yes, I should social media their links now that it's a weekday
18:09 <pleia2> re: surveys
18:10 <knome> basically, we've signed up the xubuntu team in QA; not meaning we'll do all xfce QA
18:10 <elfy> nice to be consulted
18:10 <knome> but to tell the team that we are available if they need help
18:10 <knome> since we have a pretty large userbase
18:11 <pleia2> cool
18:11 <knome> so, until they ask for anything, we don't need to do anything :)
18:11 <knome> (unless we want to)
18:11 <knome> elfy, and of course that'll go through the xubuntu procedure, and we'll only do testing when it makes any sense to us
18:12 <knome> so no worries! :)
18:12 <elfy> well given that - I've got something to say I think
18:12 <knome> sure, go ahead
18:12 <elfy> I'm done, I'm losing interest rapidly
18:12 <pleia2> :(
18:12 <elfy> I'll carry on for this cycle - but I'll not be doing it again
18:13 <pleia2> is it just lack of testers?
18:13 <elfy> when it comes to milestones I'll not be spending hours of my time to make sure everything gets tested
18:13 <knome> elfy, sad to hear that - and if there is anything we can do to help you get motivated, let us know
18:13 <elfy> so if there's not enough done I will say that we need to not release said milestones
18:14 <habhatti> hmm
18:14 <knome> to me, that sounds fair, and maybe we should have done that already when any single person did most of the tests
18:14 <elfy> well - announcing in here that *we're* going to be helping xfce with testing without bothering to mention it to me just brought my thinking further forward than it was
18:15 <elfy> hardly a motivating thing to hear
18:15 <pleia2> :\
18:15 * knome shrugs
18:15 <knome> as i mentioned, it's just to let them know that we're available if they need, and we can cooperate with them at that point
18:15 <elfy> even so
18:16 <elfy> anyway - I said what I needed to - so we can move on
18:16 <knome> ok
18:16 <knome> any other announcements?
18:17 <sidi> can i have a word as a xfce person?
18:17 <pleia2> sidi: please
18:17 <sidi> for me the goal of this move is not to even ask the distros to do free QA
18:17 <sidi> but you guys especially at Xubuntu, already do testing
18:17 <sidi> and i think its clear that @xfce there is no longer any CI or testing running
18:18 <sidi> yet, we have many downstreams and cant keep up with you guys' own progress
18:18 <sidi> xub is one of the main
18:18 <sidi> along with debian and arch, which afaik do no testing
18:18 <sidi> so when you guys successfully tested some software, it's good to let us know
18:18 <sidi> when you didnt, we already believe you will file reports
18:19 <sidi> but its useful for us to know when the software was last tested
18:19 <sidi> and what is never tested, especially
18:20 <knome> as i see it, it's like a part of our regular testing routine
18:20 <knome> we use some 4.11 components already, so that's the organic testing we are running for xfce
18:21 <sidi> the only question that is really useful to the xfce devs, and especially to people like me who commit to triage some reports, is "when was this feature last working?"
18:21 <sidi> right now i need to test every bug report myself but i sometimes dont have the right setup
18:22 <sidi> if you guys for instance know that libxfce4ui features worked as expected in 10.foo.bar, and then i realise on my git arch that they dont, i can more easily trace the regression
18:22 <sidi> so there ought to be a xfce.org place where downstreams can tell us what last worked.
18:23 <sidi> it's up to you whether it's achievable or not given your workload, no pressure of course
18:23 <sidi> just wanting to avoid duplication
18:23 <knome> i totally agree with that
18:23 * pleia2 nods
18:23 <elfy> it's certainly a laudable aim
18:23 <habhatti> makes sense
18:23 <pleia2> sidi: I think having you here will help a lot, can be easy for communication to break down as we're doing tests on our end and forget to tell Xfce
18:24 <knome> and since we file bug reports and link them to upstream too, it isn't really far off from this point
18:24 <knome> well, so far, telling xfce has been kind of hard, because people working on it have been scarce
18:24 <pleia2> yep
18:25 <knome> maybe this new project to get things going on will help with that
18:25 <sidi> pleia2, it really needs to flow down to up rather than the other way around. i'm a former xub so i know where to find you lot, but it's hard for me to keep up with all the downstreams, there even are some that i'm not aware off. you guys and girls are doing an amazing work keeping up with bug reporting and pre-triaging your users' bugs
18:25 <sidi> it'd be good to also share testing outcomes, and if you feel we cant deal with your info properly then you can suggest better ways
18:26 <sidi> Sharing test results might require that we adopt your testing framework
18:26 <sidi> to me it makes sense distros test different features/user tasks
18:26 <knome> i think the biggest thing that we need from xfce is that bug reports are actually processed, eg. fixed ;)
18:26 <sidi> i believe xfce should host a web UI for testers to report trivially
18:26 <elfy> mmm
18:26 <sidi> elfy, how do you keep track of testing results at the moment?
18:26 <elfy> frankly it's hard enough to get people to report what they do
18:27 <elfy> ~10 users last cycle reported test results
18:27 <knome> sidi, iso.qa.ubuntu.com and packages.qa.ubuntu.com
18:27 <elfy> sidi: currently http://packages.qa.ubuntu.com/qatracker/milestones/327/builds/82959/testcases
18:27 <sidi> testing is a PITA indeed.
18:28 <knome> we've even been improving the testing trackers so that the information is more easy to get out
18:28 <sidi> thats cool
18:28 <sidi> do you know if there is a public web API that would allow us to pull this?
18:28 <sidi> so its all the same to you but we can unify this with other downstreams who start testing?
18:28 <knome> sidi, there is some API, you should talk about that in #ubuntu-quality
18:28 <habhatti> i signed up as a tester yesterday, the docs are very good
18:28 <sidi> knome, noted
18:29 <elfy> habhatti: I know you did \o/
18:29 * sidi will let people continue their meetings
18:29 <sidi> thanks for the info
18:30 <knome> so anyting else under announcements?
18:30 <elfy> sidi: it's a community meeting :)
18:30 <pleia2> thanks sidi
18:31 <knome> ok, let's move on
18:31 <knome> #topic Discussion
18:31 <pleia2> so I have a few marketing things
18:31 <knome> no items on the agenda, so anybody want to bring up something
18:31 <knome> there you go, just #subtopic it
18:31 <pleia2> #subtopic Vivid Marketing
18:32 <pleia2> I saw a talk at a conference recently about marketing open source projects, woo
18:32 <pleia2> a few things I learned:
18:32 <pleia2> 1. We need a press contact address on our website, all we have are dev and user list addresses
18:32 <pleia2> I added this to the blueprint as something to work with knome on
18:32 <knome> could that be another mailing list?
18:32 <pleia2> I dunno
18:33 <knome> for general contacts
18:33 <pleia2> I fear it would end up dead and people wouldn't post to it
18:33 <knome> directing that at anybody alone sounds bad
18:33 <pleia2> "no one uses this, must be a bad address"
18:33 <pleia2> well, I am the marketing lead
18:33 <pleia2> so I could take requests and share/respond as appropriate
18:33 <knome> if it doesn't sound like too much work for you, then ok
18:33 <elfy> pleia2: but who'd know it was *dead* ?
18:33 <pleia2> shouldn't be
18:33 <pleia2> elfy: list archives
18:34 <knome> i guess one more idea
18:34 <elfy> surely if foo is mailing us at it - then it would be active when it needs to be?
18:34 <knome> we really should set up @xubuntu.org emails, even just aliases
18:34 <pleia2> elfy: I doubt we'll have many folks contacting us
18:34 <knome> now feel free to continue :)
18:34 <knome> make list archive private?
18:34 <knome> :P
18:34 <pleia2> but right now they don't have a great way to contact us at all
18:34 <pleia2> knome: list members only perhaps
18:35 <pleia2> aside from tweeting at us or something, which is very meh
18:35 <knome> pleia2, something like that.
18:35 <pleia2> knome: that could work
18:35 <knome> pleia2, that would work even if you are on holiday or so
18:35 <pleia2> yeah
18:35 <knome> and it would be easy enough to pass on
18:36 <pleia2> xubuntu-contact @ lists.ubuntu.com maybe?
18:36 <knome> and discussion related to the requests could be done on the list
18:36 <knome> or contacts
18:36 <pleia2> sure
18:36 <knome> and i can be a list admin too
18:36 <pleia2> ok, I can submit the request to Canonical IS to set it up
18:37 <knome> please add me as a requestor
18:37 <pleia2> will do
18:37 <knome> ta
18:37 <pleia2> alright, next thing I learned
18:37 <pleia2> 2. We should have a better idea who our users are
18:38 <pleia2> in my head, I think these are just random people who install Xubuntu on their personal machines, but I routinely bump into all kinds of developers and interesting people using Xubuntu for work at conferences
18:38 <habhatti> web dev here, switched because of unity
18:39 <pleia2> so it might be nice to come up with some Personas for various users (developers, classrooms, etc) to make sure our Strat Doc meets their needs
18:39 <pleia2> my first inclination is to create a short user survey which pretty much just asks users how they'd classify themselves user-wise
18:39 <pleia2> like, one question
18:39 <pleia2> Developer, User, Educator, Student, <write in>
18:40 <knome> if we set up some user surveys, maybe we could ask the participants if they would be ok to be mentioned on the website
18:40 <knome> to create a parallel series to "Xubuntu at..."
18:40 <knome> could be 2-3 people per article
18:40 <pleia2> ooh, yeah, maybe "if you wish to be contacted about your usage for a possible blog post, put your name and address here"
18:40 <habhatti> that'd be nice
18:40 <knome> yep.
18:40 <ali1234> one question isn't enough, i think. unless the question is "please write 500 words describing yourself"
18:41 <knome> ali1234, it's a start.
18:41 <pleia2> ali1234: I want to keep this simple, otherwise people won't do it
18:41 <pleia2> we need to start somewhere :)
18:41 <ali1234> well i won't answer a one word survey which is so open-ended
18:41 <knome> as i told sidi... we really want to avoid open-ended questions unless we really need a lot of open-ended data
18:41 <ali1234> takes too long to write something. i can blast through multiple choice questions in no time
18:41 <pleia2> ali1234: based on surveys I've conducted in the past, I think you're in the minority
18:42 <knome> ali1234, you won't answer a survey with one question and a dropdown box?
18:42 <ali1234> sure, but unless there's like 100 items in the drop down that won't tell you anything useful
18:42 <pleia2> my short surveys always do considerably better than long ones (like, 10x as well)
18:43 <pleia2> anyway, this is just a baseline, currently we know pretty much nothing about our users :\
18:43 <knome> i would go with 5-10 different groups.
18:43 <pleia2> yeah, I'll draft up an etherpad we can collaborate on with options
18:43 <knome> great
18:43 <pleia2> #action pleia2 to contact Canonical IS to set up xubuntu-contacts mailing list
18:43 * meetingology pleia2 to contact Canonical IS to set up xubuntu-contacts mailing list
18:44 <pleia2> #action pleia2 to draft etherpad for user self-classification survey
18:44 * meetingology pleia2 to draft etherpad for user self-classification survey
18:44 <pleia2> ok, so that brings me to my last item
18:44 <knome> :)
18:44 <pleia2> 3. We should figure out if we're truly meeting the needs of our users
18:45 <pleia2> right now we tell them to help us in the dev process early on in the cycle to talk about default options, etc
18:45 <pleia2> but no one does this
18:45 <pleia2> even if they make it to the table, they often don't have the expertise to review our strategy document and help us effectively
18:45 <knome> so i guess the question is: how do we make participation easier but at the same time, useful for the team
18:45 <pleia2> yep
18:46 <pleia2> I'm thinking another survey around March or so
18:46 <knome> and the other question is
18:46 <pleia2> asking things like "what do you install after installing xubuntu"
18:46 <ali1234> yes, a basic survey now would inform later ones
18:46 <knome> how should we process the data from our users, eg. if 15 people say they want libreoffice installed, should we just do that?
18:46 <elfy> what do we supply that you remove/don't use
18:46 <pleia2> if we really do have an avalanche of libreoffice, that tells us something important
18:46 <elfy> yep
18:46 <pleia2> knome: no, it's a data point
18:47 <pleia2> we don't have to
18:47 <ali1234> there was a survey on reddit the other day, it had an avalanche of libreoffice
18:47 <knome> how do we make sure it's not only the vocal minority?
18:47 <elfy> knome: well at the moment the vocal minority do make their choices :)
18:47 <knome> i guess it ultimately boils down to: how do we stick to what we think is "xubuntu" and at the same time, listen to our users
18:47 <ali1234> https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1cHinunM_sGz9CUABKVSxWy5dLJAuGYcNRVc9GJ976r4/viewanalytics
18:48 <knome> if we do whatever the users say, xubuntu will soon have this, that and the other software and won't fit on a 1GB USB
18:48 <pleia2> knome: well, right now we have no idea except from people who yell at us :)
18:48 <habhatti> i think if you find out more about your users, you'll probably end up with requests for things that are sensibly minimal
18:49 <pleia2> habhatti: agreed
18:49 <elfy> surely it's better to have some data than just team hoping we're making sensible choices
18:49 <habhatti> correct
18:49 <pleia2> elfy: that's what I'm thinking
18:49 <knome> i don't disagree with that
18:49 <pleia2> we don't have to be influenced by the outcome, but it's a start
18:50 <elfy> yea
18:50 <knome> i'm just wondering that how will we know at the end of the day if libreoffice should be installed or not
18:50 <pleia2> maybe, maybe not
18:50 <pleia2> I think we won't know until we give it a try
18:50 <knome> and if we just stick to what we have decided so far, how does it help to even ask users? :)
18:50 <knome> sure, i'm just bringing out some food for thought
18:50 <ali1234> we won't know that unless we ask
18:50 <habhatti> it's always positive to solicit feedback
18:51 <pleia2> giving users a voice is important, even if it's only one piece of many in our decision
18:51 <habhatti> builds a sense of community
18:51 <elfy> knome: because it's not a dozen people's voices hopefully :)
18:51 <ali1234> how many replies did sidi get?
18:51 <knome> the other question related to preference on software is that how much has xubuntu-core helped people
18:51 <pleia2> we can make that clear in the survey too, "many considerations impact our decisions in direction, this survey seeks to bring in the direct user feedback piece" or somesuch
18:51 <habhatti> ^
18:52 <pleia2> knome: yeah, maybe break out the default apps into a checkbox question?
18:52 <knome> and how many would consider that a fair option for getting the system they want, instead of having libreoffice installed by default for example
18:52 <pleia2> "select tools you use"
18:52 <knome> maybe
18:52 <pleia2> anyway, I want to do this in March, so I figure we can start this work in Feburary after we have results from the first survey
18:53 <knome> yep, agree with pointing out that it isn't a shouting competition and the group who shouts the loudest, wins..
18:53 <pleia2> can etherpad up and discuss it more then
18:53 <pleia2> knome: yeah
18:53 <knome> please do so
18:53 <pleia2> that's all from me :)
18:53 <knome> any other discussions?
18:54 <elfy> not from me
18:54 <pleia2> and thanks to everyone for being so engaged \o/
18:54 <knome> :)
18:54 <knome> #topic Schedule next meeting
18:54 <pleia2> ali1234: this is an interesting survey, would be nice to see coorelation with default apps on their respective system (are they just using what's installed, or?)
18:55 <knome> ochosi is up next for XPL
18:55 <knome> #nick ochosi
18:55 <knome> #action ochosi (for XPL) to schedule next meeting
18:55 * meetingology ochosi (for XPL) to schedule next meeting
18:55 <knome> #endmeeting