…with a number of things recently. I haven’t blogged much about it, so here’s some collective notes.

  • LoCo Directory. I had the privilege of working with great people like Richard Johnson, Efrain Valles, Anthony Lenton, Kees Cook, Christophe Sauthier and the whole LoCo Council on a great Django adventure. It just passed a security review, so I guess we are going to get it online after my holidays. In the 0.1 version we are simply going to replace the current administration of LoCo teams, their status and so on. This is just the starting point but will make things probably a bit clearer and easier. Once that’s deployed and working sky’s the limit. If you’re interested, please stop by in #ubuntu-locoteams and help out.

  • Ubuntu Developer Week. It’s going to be from Aug 31st to Sep 4th and the schedule is almost sorted out, so you’ll see the big announcement in a few weeks. We will need all your help to spread the good news and invite as many interested people as possible.

  • NGO Team. This is an effort I’m very very very happy about. If you head to the NGO Team wiki page you will see that the initiative has a very diverse set of goals. The main driver behind the project is “make it as easy as possible for charities to do good work”. We have members of various NGOs and initiatives on the team and mailing list already and are making good progress on a number of activities:

    • Documentation of best practices (areas with no or little connectivity, using Ubuntu on old machines, etc.)
    • Writing up “Ubuntu NGO stories” - we got in touch with a number of NGOs to find out how they are using Ubuntu and what good they do in the world with it, expect more News on the topic soon
    • Packaging of applications needed in NGOs: we started packaging CiviCRM because a few NGOs need it and have good experience with it, some members expressed an interest in packaging FrontlineSMS and Sahana too. If you want to help out and have some experience packaging PHP and Java applications, please join the team mailing list.
    • Lots more.

  • Harvest. As I mentioned on the mailing list already,  Harvest needed a serious overhaul and luckily Django made it easy for us to get to something more maintainable. The “core” code is already done in the django branch, now we need people who are good with UI to help us shape it up slowly. This is really important stuff, as it’s going to be our one-stop answer to “I’m interested in Ubuntu Development. How can I help out?”

  • Meeeellions of small and not so small things: Ubuntu Global Jam organisation, Code of Conduct review, discussions about Permissions Reorganisation, lots of sponsoring, some Packaging Training organisation, and lots more.

I’m very very happy to be part of this community and being able to help out in a modest way. :-)

As I’ve been part of so many different conversatons recently, I felt I needed to change my organisation of work slightly and I have to say that I’m quite happy with how it is turning out right now:

  • I’m using Getting Things GNOME, which is a nice little GNOME application for tracking your tasks. I make heavy use of categorisation and coloured tags and due dates. It very much helps to note everything down, not just to not forget it, but also to get it out of my head, so I can focus on what I have in front of me. I break things up into small tasks and assign due dates based on how important the task is and how busy I am until the date. Even if I have to reschedule, I avoid a lot of roundtrips looking at my TODO list and thinking about the priority of the tasks.
  • Also I’m often in a position where I feel I need to “chase people up”, what I do as reminder to ping them again after a few days is marking a mail as unread. So after a few days, I revisit my “unread email” and ping people again to get the required input from them.

I know that it’s probably not much, but these simple steps helped me lot with my organisation. You all know what it’s like: it feels great to get things done… especially for our fantastic community. :-)