Fosdem 2018 – I was there

Like every year, the first international conference of the year is FOSDEM, which is always in Brussels between January and February.

CHOASScon

This year, the day before the Fosdem I attended this conference (the program with all the slides is available on http://grimoirelab.github.io/con/).

The name is Community Health Analytics Open Source Software conference. It is part of a larger community that deals with tools to analyse data about the life of communities living around software.

An example of this is https://dashboard.documentfoundation.org/ (which is public), and you can see that it allows you to make analysis on the health of a community as well as interests and needs. Many communities use this software to track and study their projects and be able to do future analysis.

Personally I invite you to check the slides of the talk of Mozilla and Linux Foundation that provide examples of use of this data.

I leave you with numerical data on what Mozilla is analyzing for the moment:

I leave you some mine notes of regarding several points presented during the conference:

• Metrics are tools that allow us to give numbers to what the community does over time. In any case, not everything is quantifiable in numbers, but allows you to make an argument on real data and not on the heard ones.
• A metric must have the following characteristics
  • Objective: its value is objective for everyone
  • Consistent: does not change over time
  • Continuous: it is measured over time and not on a specific day
  • Repeatable: its measurement must be performed several times
  • Transparent: its usefulness is clear for everyone
  • Duration: may have a specific duration but is not a single data</ li>
• A metric must answer the question: What do you want to measure and why?
• The code comments are part of the contributions of the code but modern tools often do not trace this type of contributions that are at the same time important
• Who contributes is the true hero

Participating in this conference as well as making me better understand the concept of metrics (which are very important in the community), allowed me to meet Stefano Zacchiroli personally. Those who do not know him can check with Wikipedia, but honestly I felt like a kid meeting a superstar. After all, I’m a nerd, what you want to do it.

Fosdem

4 years in a row at FOSDEM and 2 as a speaker and I thought that I understood now how this conference works. Instead this year more palaces were added with many more rooms but in any case there were too many people.

Often the rooms were full (now the app informs you about the state) and so it was almost impossible to go and follow a talk. In fact I have been able to follow very few but I’m recovering because they were broadcast live and many are already available with slides.

I gave a presentation WebExtension status API after Firefox 57, so I leave you some pictures and then some consideration.

https://twitter.com/lakatos88/status/959737552583438337

https://twitter.com/ioana_cis/status/959737437307187205

Moving on with Daniele Scasciafratte on #Webextension status after #Firefox 57 #FOSDEM pic.twitter.com/FMecSyrHbN

— Jutta Horstmann (@smphr) February 3, 2018

#WebExtensions talk by @Mte90Net starting now #fosdem pic.twitter.com/ujdoO61ANt

— Jorge Villalobos (@jorgevillalobos) February 3, 2018

• An error in my slides was reported to me after the talk (already correct), about the manual review issue that occurs after the automatic approval of AMO
• Others think like me that the Google portal for extensions is very bad and limited
• Several people confirmed that it now is very easy to make an extension (even after the conference)
• Porting from Chrome to Firefox often does not require any changes to the code
• Interest in the 2018 Firefox’s API plan but there is not much information about it

Personally I did the talk too quickly even though during my tests I was on schedule. Fault of my italish ehm english probably.

https://twitter.com/Mte90Net/status/959765878043750400

So I leave you to the list of talks that were interesting for me:

• Track Mozilla
  • I suggest you recover all of them because some are really interesting
  • The talk on the debugger was useful to better understand how it works and how you can debug much faster
  • The same thing for the talk on developer tools that allows you to update quickly on the topic
  • MOSS continues to make its mark in several projects
• EU-FOSSA 2: About European bugbounty
• Public money, Public code, the Italian way: That is how the Italian administrations don’t follow the law regarding the release of the software that publish as available
• Distributions are not democracies: One of the most interesting, which I have extrapolated some notes
  • The project does not exist for the benefit of users
  • Users benefit from a product of our projects
  • The project exists to benefit our contributors e volunteers
  • A developer does not need a vote, because he will do it anyway
    • For example, the Systemd issue in Debian was provided, which led to the birth of Devuan, which does not include this software.
  • If it works and you supports it, it’s enough to launch a project
  • Long-time volunteers can be seen as de-facto leaders in a community
  • The long-time contributors are a sufficient parameter to request evaluations or to be part of experimental or important groups
  • https://www.instagram.com/p/BexTJm6ATR8/?taken-by=mte90
• Python 3: 10 years later: An analysis of the state of art
• Italy: the most hacker-friendly country?: A digital team presentation about the plan for Italy
• Why People Do not Contribute To Your Open Source Project: Some useful information for people like me open source projects
  • Nobody contributes to a project unless you are a user
• An update on VLC and the VideoLAN community: New features for the next version of VLC
• Advocating For FOSS Inside Companies: Some goodies
• Why I forked my own project and my own company: The story of the founder of OwnCloud and NextCloud
• Consensus as a Service : The history of open source as a license and philosophy

They could not miss group photos:

https://twitter.com/mozTechSpeakers/status/960122203642703872

We're representing here at @fosdem #FOSDEM #FOSDEM2018 – hanging at the @mozilla booth. Stop by and say hi! (2nd floor of Building K) pic.twitter.com/ZioIHlybPY

— Thunderbird (@mozthunderbird) February 4, 2018

https://twitter.com/baelathefox/status/960245848696344577

Other

I finally allowed myself a visit to the museum of cartoon action figure and then …

https://twitter.com/Mte90Net/status/959791514296684545

Thanks to the Belgian Mozilla community that allowed the community to participate in the event!

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