Ubuntu Chicago and the Global Bug Jam

Per Daniel Holbach's recent blog post about the Global Bug Jam, I thought I'd add my two cents (or give you a penny for my thoughts, and donate the additional penny to charity) about what the Ubuntu-Chicago Local Community Team is planning for the Global Bug Jam.

There are still quite a few details for us to iron out, but we have the basics in place, and are gearing up for the event.  What have we done so far?  First, we've been able to secure a great location, the headquarters of Centro - an online media services company in downtown Chicago - for the event.  Centro uses a lot of FLOSS tools in their development, and they've been a consistent supporter of FLOSS events in the Chicagoland area for a number of years, so we're really grateful to them for allowing us to use their space.  (As a side note, one of their developers who helped to secure the location for the event is also the creator of "Open Sprints," an GPL'ed indoor bike-racing application that has garnered a lot of enthusiasm amongst the bike messenger crowd in the U.S.)

Ok, so we have a location.  We also have people who are going to attend.  Those people have (for the most part) been prepped on what we'll be doing.  We held an introductory session as part of a Chicago GNU/Linux User Group meeting a few weeks ago, where we were able to set people up with Launchpad accounts, PGP keys, SSH keys, and the 5-a-day application.  For those who weren't able to attend the meeting, I'm sure we'll be able to set them up online in advance of the event, or when they arrive for the bug jam.

Also, I mentioned it briefly above ("We also have people who are going to attend…"), but we are expanding the ranks of our loco team for this event.  Ubuntu-Chicago had been relatively quiet for a while, but we're doing what we can to involve people outside of regular X/K/Ubuntu users and developers in the bug jam.  One of the better things to see in this process is how members of the Chicago GNU/Linux User Group are joining in, and how we're also getting involvement of people who develop for FLOSS projects, but who aren't typically involved in local Ubuntu events.  (They don't even have to use Ubuntu . . .).  For example, I have heard of one Miro developer plans to attend portions of the bug jam, we hope to get some folks from Banshee and GNOME . . . and I've even heard that the entire Tildadevelopment team (ok . . . so it's just one person) may be involved, too.

Personally, I'm going to do my best to advocate testing and bug triage of Xfce 4.6 during the event.  I'm also excited that there will be a Lou Malnati's Pizzeria DIRECTLY ACROSS FROM OUR BUG JAM LOCATION.  OH HAI, UBUNTU-CHICAGO CAN HAS TEH BEST PIZZA.

So, yeah, if you're a X/K/Ubuntu user or FLOSS-coder who lives in / around Chicago . . . even if you're not an expert . . . Check out our wiki page (with the new NavBanner that I ganked from the Massachusetts team), join our mailing list, and make plans to see us the weekend of February 20th.  :)