Community Computing
Erstwhile scourge of the community Jonni Bidwell meets community hacker Jona Azizaj at the Open Source Summit to talk hacking and happiness (packets).
Erstwhile scourge of the community Jonni Bidwell meets community hacker Jona Azizaj at the Open Source Summit to talk hacking and happiness (packets).
JONA’S PERFECT WORK ENVIRONMENT “I enjoy the enthusiasm for open source at my work, and people really embrace it. That kind of makes work easier, being around people who share and understand your interests.”
Jona Azizaj is a FLOSS evangelist and community advocate for Kiwi.com, the virtual online travel agent. She’s a Fedora ambassador, mentor and diversity advisor. And she’s also cofounder of Open Source Diversity, which promotes inclusion in free software communities, and a contributor to Nextcloud (having been introduced through a Rails Girls Summer of Code internship) and Libreoffice.
Jona lives in the Czech city of Brno (where the Kiwi.com HQ is), but hails originally from Albania. Working with the Document Foundation, Jona was involved with migrating the Municipality of Tirana (Albania’s largest) to open source software and in particular Libreoffice (read more about this at https://bit.ly/lxf264-tiranalibreoffice). Jona was kind enough to chat with Jonni at the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit in Lyon in October 2019. And then she had to scurry off to address a room full of people.
Linux Format: You seem quite calm for someone who has to give a talk in about an hour. The numerous display panels tell me your talk is entitled ‘Why we care about open source at Kiwi.com’. What are you going to cover?
Jona Azizaj: I’m going to talk about how we contribute to open source at my company, and specifically Sourcelift, which is a project of ours that supports open source communities and developers. It helps them get together and so on. Kiwi.com is an online travel agency and people don’t usually relate that with open source. So I thought that it would be good to talk about what we do with it and why we care about it.
LXF: How long have you worked at Kiwi.com?
JA: Not that long actually, only seven months. That’s when I moved to
Brno in the Czech Republic, where its headquarters are. It’s been an interesting adventure. I really enjoy the enthusiasm for open source at my work, and people really embrace it. That kind of makes work easier, being around people who share and understand your interests.
LXF: One open source project that I rely on, and to some extent that my life depends on in fact, is Nextcloud. This audio I’m recording now gets beamed to a Nextcloud instance, so we’re not sending your voice to Google. This phone
I’m recording on is awfully old, and I sense it is not long for this world, so it’s not what you would call reliable storage. (Noteworthy fact: Three days later the phone met a concretey end. And now we suspect Jonni sees things before they happen). Anyway, I digress, you’ve contributed to that as well, right?
JA: My friend and I were part of Rails Girls Summer of Code in 2017, so we got to be an intern at Nextcloud for three months. We worked mostly on the Contacts app, and we mostly used Javascript and Angular.js. Again, it was another interesting experience, coding in such a huge project. The community is amazing.
In the beginning we were quite nervous, especially being new and having to ask strangers questions over IRC. However, when we attended its annual conference, the hack days were fun because we could ask our questions face to face. People would explain to you how everything worked, what was the correct way to do this weird thing in Javascript. It was great!
LXF: Javascript, and all things ending in dot js scare me nowadays. It just used to be this innocent thing for making web pages for interesting things and now it’s become something totally different. On the rare occasions when I’m allowed to code, I pretty much only use Python. And it’s usually more about math than code…
JA: Yes, your fear of Javascript is probably reasonable. I’ve seen some scary complicated things. I used Python for Fedora Happiness Packets actually. Ah, math was my favourite subject when
I was at school.
LXF: Mathematics is what got me into open source actually, although I’m not sure at what point algebra turned into this weird intersection of print media and Linux (you needed a job–ed). Wait. Tell me more about these Happy Packets. JA: Oh, Happiness Packets – yeah, there’s a project called Open Source Happiness Packets (www.happinesspackets.io).
It’s not a Fedora project, but we really
liked the idea behind it: you can write a short message of gratitude to a project contributor. We wanted to do this in our projects, we wanted to be able to thank people, whether they’d made a big contribution or just something small, it doesn’t matter. We just want to be able to say thank you and we really appreciate it, and your work is really valuable for the community.
So we ported the project to be able to do this specifically in Fedora. In 2018 we got an intern on board for three months through the Google Summer of Code (Gsoc) programme, which Fedora Happiness Packets was a part of. Then we picked up two more interns, this time through Gnome’s Outreachy programme. So that all worked out rather nicely – we were doing something good for the community, but also getting more people involved in our project.
LXF: What is your distro of choice and what glorious open source tooling to you use in your day-to-day Linux existence? JA: Well, I try and use open source wherever possible, but there are always proprietary exceptions. For example, my company does a lot of communication through Slack, so I have to use that from time to time. But I run Fedora, and Gnome is my desktop of choice.
LXF: Oh nice
JA: If I need to edit images I’ll use GIMP. I’m not an expert by any means, but it does everything I need it to do. I use Inkscape too. And Libreoffice, I’m part of that community too. It’s really fun to be able to convince people that it’s not that hard to use. Often people look at the interface and get scared because it doesn’t look like Word and they can’t find this or that option. They are scared of change more than anything else.
LXF: Change is scary sometimes. Just ask our website.
JA: Ha, I saw that. Really, most people just need to spend a little time with the new interface to get used to it. Then it stops looking so different and soon people discover that all the functionality they need is indeed there, just like I tried to tell them earlier, ha ha.
I use IRC a lot too. At Fedora we use it for a lot of communications, all of our meetings are held over IRC. We use Discourse on our forums – it’s become very powerful lately and I use it especially for another initiative which I co-founded: Open Source Diversity (https://opensourcediversity.org).
LXF: I had a look at that earlier. That’s a fantastic resource. It walks you through making your first Pull Request (PR) on Github, and there’s even a bunch of curated issues suitable for people’s first contributions.
JA: What about web browsers? I’m trying to tell people to use Firefox as much as possible nowadays, the new look in Firefox 75 is awesome. Plus from writing all these privacy features, I’m really into the multiaccount containers plugin.
Browser-wise I always try and use Firefox too. I guess sometimes I’ll use Chromium, not Chrome, for things like Hangouts. Or Google Meet as it’s supposed to be called now. Oh I use Zoom too. I try and always use an open source solution though – Jitsi is good for meetings, for example.
The Libreoffice community uses Jitsi a lot. Sometimes you need to make compromises. A lot of open source projects end up using tools that are proprietary. And if the whole project and
community are using those tools, then you sort of have too as well.
LXF: Our magazine, which is all about open source software, is produced entirely in Adobe Indesign. Isolated silo of maverick publishing though we are, we can’t do much to change that.
JA: Yes, sometimes you can’t do anything about other people’s software choices.
LXF: Documentation is something we hear quite a lot about. Mostly that it’s hard for normal people to parse, and sometimes that there isn’t any at all. I guess if all Linux documentation was perfect then there would be less of a need for Linux publications (such as this humble booklet), so we should be careful here. Are you involved with writing documentation at all?
JA: When I was working at Collabora Productivity I wrote some release notes. But I haven’t written much actual documentation myself. I do try to impress upon people the importance of good documentation though. Documentation increases diversity. If more people can understand a project then more people can jump aboard.
When people first want to open source a tool or a project, one of my first questions is, “Can you tell me about the documentation?” If there’s none, it’ll just be a project on Github that no one uses or even contributes to. So a first step is to try and get an overview of the project so that I can push the authors to getting some good documentation down.
LXF: When I started with Linux, back in 2000 and oatcake, whenever it was,
I found myself using Gentoo Linux. I didn’t necessarily like spending hours watching things compile, but the documentation was really good. This wasn’t necessarily the case for ‘easier’ distros back then; the situation is much better now though.
JA: It is better now. I hear a lot of people saying they use Ubuntu, or Debian, because their documentation is so good. Often there’s an easy step-by-step guide and if you follow that everything will just work. For most people, that’s all they require, whether it’s for a tool, operating system or other project. And that’s why communities are under a lot of pressure to have good documentation.
LXF: Going back to Collabora, I’ve just remembered a nightmare I had trying to set up Collabora Online, so that I could have multiple people edit Libreoffice documents through Nextcloud (see www. collaboraoffice.com/code). There’s a Docker image that I got working on my VPS no worries, but then I tried to install it natively and everything broke. This was a while ago, and the instructions look a lot simpler now. I think part of the problem was I had little idea what was going on with WOPI services and wotnot. JA: Ah sorry to hear that. It is quite a complicated setup because there’s a few different components talking to one another. A lot of people get confused at the installing Apache and Nextcloud stage, and Collabora Online is nothing without those. The team behind all that are amazing so hopefully that will get easier soon. But most people are happy with the Docker image – I think that’s what most people use.
LXF: It’s pretty amazing that we have a viable open source alternative to Google Docs now.
JA: Yes, and some of the changes they’ve done recently, I’m like, “Wow, this is so nice.” Hopefully more companies and in particular more communities will start using it soon. I think it just needs a little more time.
LXF: I’m sure there are still some bits of it still lying around on my server. I think the first problem I ran into was that with the Docker daemon running I kept running out of memory. So I first had to remove all those bits. Then I set everything up in what seemed to be a logical way that didn’t contradict the instructions, but no dice. I gave up and started removing packages. At one stage if I clicked the
Collabora Online app then the whole of Nextcloud crashed, but removing it fixed that.
JA: One day it’ll just be a one-click install, like it is for the Contacts app or anything else you’d find on the Nextcloud app store. That’s the goal.
LXF: What have you enjoyed about this conference? I’ve had a great time teaching Olly the photographer what Linux is, and speaking French badly.
JA: Aaah, I wish I had time to attend more talks. But conferences are always like this. It’s been really good for networking though. I’ve met a lot of people that I’ve only met online before, and I’ve made a lot of new connections too. It’s super nice.
I was actually part of the Networking and Mentorship event here. It was great to meet people and learn what they worked on day to day, and what they did in the community. It was great to figure out, from the questions they asked the mentors, what were the pain points in their jobs or communities. That was really interesting – there are a lot of things you don’t figure out until someone asks the right question.
Usually what I enjoy about conferences is not so much the talks, because you can download slides or even watch them later on Youtube (the main ones all get recorded). But meeting people, exchanging experiences with them, hearing what they’ve been doing… that’s more what it’s about for me. But I do like the talks too. I went to some great ones, and the ones that I didn’t go to, well they were probably great too.
LXF: I haven’t been to any talks yet. I usually only get to go to one or two, but it’s great they get recorded. I really only get to one conference a year too, Olly is much more rock n roll, and always going to things. Yeah, they don’t really let me out of the office much. But it’s nice when they do, I get to see another country, or at least a conference centre in another country.
JA: Ha ha ha. That happens to me a lot. People say, “Wow, you’re always travelling, you must see so much.” But as you say, most of what I see is the inside of conference centres.
LXF: What direction do you want to take your open source adventures in the future?
JA: So far I’ve done lots of code contributions, working with communities, trying to help them, especially from a diversity and inclusion perspective. What I’m trying to focus on a little more – and in fact it’s part of my role as Devrel Advocate – is experimenting with new ways to measure developer communities and improve them.
I’ve experienced quite a lot in the past few years, and you never really know about the future, but I’d hope mine involves doing more things with open source. For sure, communities is one of the things that I enjoy the most, so hopefully I’ll do more of that, and hopefully I’ll keep coming to more conferences.
LXF: A lot of people got excited when Munich moved away from Windows in 2004. And those same people got very upset when Windows was reinstated. But that’s just a single case that seems to have got a lot of attention because Linux journalism does tend to be a bit negative sometimes. In happier news, I hear Tirana’s (the largest municipality in Albania) government uses Libreoffice? JA: Yes, yes they do. It’s usually hard to convince organisations, and especially governments and municipalities to use open source. But Tirana were really open minded, and after a few meetings we managed to convince them to use
Libreoffice. Last year we had the annual Libreoffice conference in Tirana, so it was nice to bring the community there. In fact, the government of Tirana even gave a talk there. So they understood that it’s not just about a piece of software, it’s a very big community of people working on it and using it. And I think they understand the value of open source too, why they should use it. Using Libreoffice was an excellent first step for them. I think they’ve migrated fully now, but it was quite a slow, step by step operation. You can’t just do this overnight.
LXF: There’ve been a couple of times when Future Towers has upgraded overnight to a new version of macos, and this one time entirely new Macs running it. Those were not fun days. I have a dream that one day they’ll do that with Linux, but I doubt the IT team share that dream.
JA: They’d be like, “Aaah, what is this?!” I think the Libreoffice shift was a very smooth transition, I hope everyone’s okay with using it everyday now. We didn’t just throw them in at the deep end though, they had a lot of training, so I hope everyone’s happy. And I hope more municipalities will do the same. Albania’s quite a small country and not many people know about it. Maybe it’ll be a nice case study and will encourage other countries to embrace the same. I mean here in France especially I think there’s a lot of positive open source things happening. Not just government within government either – local companies are pushing hard to use it more in general. I’m really impressed.
I guess Munich was quite hard for the open source community, but there are always ups and downs.