When the salamander came up I was confident that a toy would be easy to find, and indeed they were! Even better, I found that the World Wildlife Fund offers a $50 Hellbender Salamander Adoption Kit that ships with 2 plush salamanders! Mine arrived yesterday, I’ll be keeping one to use at our events and will find a way to give away the other (perhaps as part of the Ubuntu Women contest we’re planning? Or at some LoCo event?).

Event decoration + helping to save the actual animal, hooray!

Oh, and it is a release late, but while I was in Mérida, Mexico we stopped in to Miniaturas where I picked up some adorable quetzal earrings:

I think I’ll wear them to our San Francisco Ubuntu Hour on June 12th, and bring along the salamander!

This was the first virtual UDS I was able to participate in, so it was all new to me. Essentially the the “fish bowl” (as seen here, I took this photo from my spot in the wider attendee seating) is replaced by a Google Hangout and the “wider attendee seating” is an IRC channel. For the 4 sessions I participated in this worked very well, session leads were pro-active about asking who wished to participate in the Hangout so everyone who wanted to was able to. A great deal of attention in all these sessions was given to the IRC channel, which is a contrast with in person UDS where the channel can sometimes get a bit left behind (even though it’s being projected, it was easy to forget once you get talking). I didn’t use the summit.ubuntu.com page for anything aside reference, preferring to pop out the etherpad and use my standard IRC client, but I appreciated it all being there as a resource (and I’m sure it was super helpful for newcomers to follow along!).

Cheri Francis and others in the Ubuntu Women session

I found the sessions I participated in to be productive and focused and when applicable resulted in a solid list of action items. I hope that the event also lessened the experience gap that was always present for in person vs. remote participants, we all got the same experience. Now I have to admit to not being a fan of using Google Hangouts for this (I like Google, but it is still a proprietary, closed-source tool that we have no control over), but I understand that the ease of use and immediate availability of videos on YouTube makes a compelling case. Perhaps my only other complaint is lack of cohesiveness that comes from an online event, I didn’t watch the introduction or the wrap up. I also didn’t participate in the “beer hangout” – I didn’t even know it was happening, and sitting in front of my computer with a beer in the middle of the day wasn’t particularly interesting to me. I only attended a few specific sessions and there was no “wandering into something that looks interesting” (instead I just went back to work) or the regular social down time we get to relax or sit down to hack on things. I do hope we can find some kind of replacement for the in-person events, it would be great to see something on the LoCo team level at conferences where we seek to have an expanded Ubuntu presence focused on contributors (perhaps an Ubucon with a participant track?).

And the venue… it was at home! In order to participate in the hangout I did feel the need to leverage my multiple monitors.

My desk is a bit chaotic

Now the sessions themselves…

– Planning for Ubuntu Community presence on the Ubuntu Website –

This was not a particularly productive session as far as action items were concerned, but it turns out that while I was gone the removal of the “Community” link from ubuntu.com took on a life of its own (and boy was I surprised to see my name end up in a recent Datamation article about it). Personally I was satisfied with Daniel Holbach’s blog post on the subject a day after the change was made, but it was nice to speak with with some folks from the Design team and allow everyone to confirm that no ill will was intended and that plans for a new and improved community site were moving forward. The session was kept short given the more structured session about the community site specifically planned for the following day.

YouTube video of the session here

– Ubuntu Women UDS-1305 Goals –

Huge thanks to Silvia Bindelli and Cheri Francis for doing all of the leg work for this session while I was gone, I felt very comfortable reviewing their pre-session notes and found a really great, collaborative environment upon joining in. The discussion began talking about an information scavenger-hung competition that the team will be doing in the coming months, seeking volunteers to assist. It then moved into a topic that I was really happy to see on the agenda – a user poll to see how the team could be most effective in serving our audience of women interested in Ubuntu. I find that the project needs a bit of an adjustment every couple of years to refocus on our current targets as Ubuntu and the open source ecosystem evolves, so I’m excited that we’re doing this. Finally, much of the session was spent discussing our intention to further collaborate with other groups seeking to encourage women in open source (and in technology in general).

YouTube video of the session here and I uploaded session notes here

– Revamping ubuntu.com/community –

Picking up from where discussion left off the previous day, this session was a focused on on concrete things that need to be done to get the proposed community website that was under development reviewed and published. I admit that job change + wedding planning had my attention diverted this past cycle so I wasn’t able to contribute to this project, but I made sure to spend time the night before to do a review of the content so I’d be prepared. I was able to go through some of my suggestions during the meeting and took a few action items to continue with a more thorough review and to collect some quotes and photos from the community to make the site more personal and approachable.

YouTube video of the session here and I uploaded session notes here

– Shaping a plan for the future of Ubuntu Documentation Team –

I can’t begin to say how pleased I was to see this session land on the agenda. The Ubuntu Doc team has been a very small team for a long time, and new contributors have struggled to participate as the docs for writing the docs got stale to a point where they were not useful. We’re at a very exciting time now where we have limited support from a couple of the (very busy!) former drivers of this team and at least two strong contributors who have committed to moving the project forward. The first thing on the agenda was addressing the updating of docs so that more contributors can get on-boarded. I was able to pitch in with a couple action items to nudge things along a bit, but I’m hopeful that this is the beginning of an exciting new phase for the team.

YouTube video of the session here and I uploaded session notes here

A Slimy Salamander (wait, you said Saucy?)

– Xubuntu –

Since the event was online, the Xubuntu team took advantage of the flexibility and ended up pulling their sessions from UDS proper and scheduling our sessions for the hour after UDS each day to tackle a series of blueprints designed for the coming months. I was able to use my YouTube account + Hangouts to replicate that portion of what main UDS was doing.

Discussion of most interest to me centered around our testing+release plans (should we do alphas? betas? which ones?) and documentation, but discussion of our limited developer force (want to grow it!), a proposal for a shortcut overlay and default applications also were discussed. A much better summary was posted on the Xubuntu website yesterday: Looking towards Xubuntu 13.10. Pasi Lallinaho also wrote bullet-point style summaries of Night 1 and Night 2 which include links to their respective YouTube videos.

In all, a productive UDS for me, I have a lot of work to do… :)

Since writing I’ve had dozens of conversations with fellow community members and leaders to tease out precisely where things went wrong. Instead of repeating any of those conversations, a couple of public comments on Jono’s Recent Ubuntu Community Refinements blog post reflect the concerns. Sam Spilsbury very clearly writes of the frustration that occurred when the project he was working on (compiz) was abruptly dropped after he put a significant amount of time into it:

One of the things which caused me so much concern which has effectively put my Ubuntu involvement on-hold at this point is the fact that there seems to be very little stability within the Canonical-run projects which means that you don’t know if you’re going to get pushed back over some internal thing that you don’t know about.
…
If those working on these projects were told that they were soon to be deprecated, or that Ubuntu didn’t want any more changes to them, then I wouldn’t have spent all that time fruitlessly doing something which turned out to be a waste of my time.

Jef Spaleta echos these concerns in his comment:

Late breaking announcements, esp. “game changers”, makes community contributors feel like they are wasting their time working on things that no longer relevant to the direction Canonical is pushing. If the community can’t know 6 months out what technology Ubuntu is going to be using, then you can’t really expect community to plan their invaluable volunteer hours doing support tasks associated with that tech.

You have to find a way to deal with the tada announcements in a different way that how its been handled if you want people to continue to contribute in technical areas. Because as it stands its not balanced, its pretty one sided. If you can’t build technology roadmaps in a way that includes your volunteer contributors, then you aren’t making optimal use of that resource and it will whither.

This extends beyond just the core technical contributions to those that surround many aspects of contributing to Ubuntu. Translations, documentation, accessibility and more have to be equipped to handle changes so they can build their roadmaps accordingly and not waste time working on things that are later deprecated or make plans based on a schedule which is being changed.

So I absolutely recognize that these are the things that need to be fixed.

That said, I’m currently pleased with the plans outlined in Jono’s blog post that came out of some of these recent discussions, and with buy in from stakeholders on the points he outlined I feel if we can make progress in these areas we’ll be going a long way to satisfying many of the community concerns. I also want to make clear that I believe Canonical places a high value on the importance and value of the Ubuntu community.

Today we started the series of “Regular leadership problem solving meetings” which are Q&A style Google hangouts which we hope will further make the councils more accessible.

I really need to clean my office

The video is available on youtube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9b1ysB16pvU

Finally, while I had a lot of people approaching me personally to chat, this has shaken out a lot of long-term concerns the Community Council hasn’t been able to address because they weren’t really brought to our attention (contrary to popular belief, I’m not actually omnipresent). So here’s the reminder that the Community Council meets twice a month, the 1st and 3rd Thursday of the month in #ubuntu-meeting on freenode. Anyone is welcome to add items to our agenda. We’re also open to doing quick chats (IRC or verbal) with community members as needed if you reach out to us. And as always, you can also send us email at community-council@lists.ubuntu.com. We’re a friendly bunch :)

What do we need help with?

Summary writers. Summary writers receive an email every Saturday (sometimes Sunday if we’re running late) with a link to the collaborative news links document for the past week which lists everything that needs summarizing. These people are vitally important to the newsletter. The time commitment is limited and it is easy to get started with from the first weekend you volunteer. No need to be shy about your writing skills, all summaries are reviewed before publishing so it’s easy to improve as you go on. We also provide Style Guidelines to help you out (and you can always look at past issues!).

Note: You may have noticed in the past couple of issues that we bullet-pointed the list of articles in a few sections where we usually had summaries – this is due to lack of summary writers!

Editors. Our editors receive an email every Sunday (or Monday morning, depending on our timing and your time zone) with a link to the wiki page ready to be reviewed. Editors check for grammar, spelling, formatting and other consistency issues. Good written English skills, attention to detail and willingness to adhere to our style guidelines required.

Interested in either of these? Email editor.ubuntu.news@ubuntu.com and we’ll get you added to the list of folks who are emailed each week and you can help as you have time. Please specify whether you are interested in summary writing or editing when you contact us. You can always be removed from the list of people contacted each week, just ask :)

47 LoCo Team Portal bugs with fixes committed. He let me know that the new version would be coming out soon and gave me a sneak peek at the new layout. Soon came on March 11th when 0.4.0 rolled out with an additional 19 bugs fixed, wow!

In addition to the high priority bugs, he tackled bugs my LoCo members had mentioned to me, like No easy way to find a Past Meeting and dozens of “low” priority and wishlist items, like including team blogroll or planet to the team pages (still need to work with the LoCo Council to get feeds added Edit: You can add your blog here!). On top of this, we have a new interface! Gone are those icons no one understood, we now have text links to mailing list, website, forums and more. When you start browsing around you’ll see that there has been a pretty extensive rewrite of the UI.

I’m also loving the spiffy new event page:

Huge thanks to Adnane for his commitment to this project and to Canonical IS for the work deploying the new release. The portal is hugely important for my team and many others, so it’s good to see it’s in good hands.

If you’re interested in helping him out (he’s super friendly to work with!) I wrote a blog post here back in September about how to deploy a development version using Vagrant and the necessary Django goodies to get you started. It’s probably a bit out-dated but if you swing by #ubuntu-website and ask for some help there are usually folks who can point you in the right direction.

As a leader in the community I have been bombarded by comments from fellow community members these past few days. On Monday several members of the Community Council jumped on a hangout to talk about how we were handling all the news coming out, where we felt the community was going and what our role in this was. Immediately following this discussion we reached out to Mark to have a chat ASAP and I wrote an email to the internal Community Council list saying, among other things:

“What is most painful about all these decisions is how so much work in the community has been tossed to the side due to announcements which Canonical has clearly been talking about for months. We spent a week in Copenhagen and 4 months since planning a release we’re not sure will happen. In my own work I’ve been coordinating a writing team 13.04 articles for a magazine which may never be published, I have work items around documentation and testing that are completely up in
the air because all of a sudden we’re so uncertain about timelines. Since last week I’ve stopped working on anything that depended upon the release cycle because I feel like I’m completely wasting my time. I use myself as an example here, but there are many folks in the community who are feeling this. Regardless of what’s happening behind the scenes at Canonical to cause this, it’s currently a very painful time to be a community member.

Ultimately, what does this mean to me? It seems like we’re becoming (have become?) a community that can have LoCo events, do support, have a news team and focus on LTS. It’s no longer one where individuals can get deeply involved in development of many of the pieces of the OS in a regular cadence – if you do you risk the carpet being pulled out from under you in the form of some new announcement that causes all your plans and work to be less valuable (or useless), to pour salt in the wound you also get this happening with the knowledge that people at Canonical have been talking about this for months and you feel like you’ve been duped.”

Now, perhaps my words were a bit harsh, but as a community member watching these discussions and talking with others all weekend, that is how it feels. A rolling release proposal throws into question all the release-dependent work I have on my plate and whether I should be continuing that, like helping the docs team with their onboarding process and working with translations teams to continue their work. I’m not aware of discussions with either of these teams about how the rolling release proposal will impact them (though with Mark’s encouragement, I have asked).

As for that talk with Mark the Community Council did finally have, I didn’t walk away from it with the same feeling of inspiration that Charles had. In fact, Scott Lavender summed up my impression precisely in a comment on Martin Owen’s blog this week:

“It would appear that Canonical has a chance to create or provide an amazing ecosystem of digital devices that are integrated as well, if not better, than Apple. I feel they are making the right decisions to support that goal. Frankly, I support this.

I believe that this is a transitional phase. The community as it has existed is changing, going through a metamorphosis, and a new community, one perhaps more potent and powerful, will develop and break out of its cocoon, ready to dominate the world.

I do not believe I am part of that new community.”

Posts by Thierry Carrez, Andrea Grandi and Pasi Lallinaho this week have echoed what Scott says about the changing of the platform. And it seems the writing has been on the wall for quite some time, Jono’s own team has shifted from supporting community efforts within the core development framework (from MOTU to translations) to focusing on application developers.

This is not the Ubuntu community that I became a recognized member of in 2007.

Ultimately what I believe every community member has to do at this time is pause and reflect upon the Ubuntu community as it stands now and start asking themselves a few questions, here are the ones I’m asking myself:

1. Is the vision of success defined by Mark (Ubuntu on all the things! Desktops! Phones! Tablets!) the same thing I believe in and want to continue moving forward with in my open source endeavors?
2. If so, where can I continue to contribute where the impact of surprising announcements won’t render my work less valuable (or useless)?

But the first step is communicating to the community that this shift has occurred and not pretending that we’re still the same community we always were. We need to know to ask ourselves these questions so we can be prepared for what the future brings and advise new contributors accordingly.

So tonight I had dinner with fellow Community Council member Scott Ritchie. The conversation over tacos was not for the faint of heart, and I was still feeling quite demotivated over these recent developments. We then took a walk and ended up at a smoothie shop, which is where we got to brainstorming how we make this better.

What we came up with was a need to get a clear picture of what Canonical brings to Ubuntu and what Ubuntu depends on the community for. No more pretending that everyone can work on everything on equal footing, or that we all have the same values and goals.

Off the top of our heads we came up with the following contributions to Ubuntu that community is still essential for, but for which the kinds of development and core changes proposed by Canonical would have less significant impact upon in the grander scheme of things:

• Support
• Quality Assurance/Testing
• Translations
• Bug triage and patch review
• Documentation

Obviously changes like moving to a rolling release will impact the schedule with which these are done on, but I believe a discussion will take place because of how important these things are. And most importantly, strong community members in all of these areas still have the opportunity to make an impact, make a name for themselves in the community and get very serious, important work done.

We decided over our respective tea and raspberry smoothie that the Community Council should work to draft a document that helps direct community members to these areas where their work is most valuable. We should also engage Canonical in a discussion about where they are putting their effort and I hope through these discussions we can also find solid core development tasks that community members can reliably participate in without risk and where they will find value, whatever their open source motivations are.

As a Community Council member I do feel like I’ve let the community down for not realizing what was happening to the community sooner. The duo of optimism and trust is not always a strength, it blinded me to some serious truths about how things have changed and our responsibility in this new community dynamic. I am, however, committed to fulfilling my duties within the Community Council to help shepherd community members through this. I hope you will join me, but this is a change of direction and I absolutely understand the decision to move on, this week I certainly was leaning in that direction myself for the first time since joining the Ubuntu community.

Ubucon this year was run by Richard Gaskin of Fourth World Systems. I was contacted a couple months ago and signed up to do an Ubuntu in the Cloud talk (slides here) where I covered some of the options for running Ubuntu “in the cloud” and introduced folks to DevStack as an easy mechanism for trying out and beginning to learn about OpenStack. Unfortunately I was struggling my way through a nasty cold all weekend so it wasn’t the optimal situation for giving a talk, but the audience was great.

Due to my cold, I ended up just camping out at Ubucon all day instead of exploring other tracks and was witness to a full day of standing room only sessions. Talks included David Rodriguez on using Ubuntu in an continuous integration enterprise environment, Aviv Meraro on hardware compatibility, Philip Ballew on finding help in Ubuntu and Richard Gaskin talking about the soon to be open sourced Live Code language and development environment. The day wrapped up with a presentation by Jono Bacon of the Ubuntu Phone.

Friday night a few of us headed down to the expo hall to begin setting up the Ubuntu booth, after which I grabbed some take-out from the hotel deli and headed up to my room to get some rest.

Saturday was the first full day of the expo hall and SCaLE proper talks. I’m really happy with how the booth came out this year, and System76 was kind enough to offer some systems for us to run as demo machines. The Ubuntu logo + California candy dishes got a number of laughs, kudos to Eric P. Scott for his cleverness there.

The team also lucked out in having Nathan Haines join the booth volunteers, along with his phone running Ubuntu! It was a great opportunity for visitors to the booth to finally get hands on with the phone, that’s also how I had my chance.

In all, a great weekend for Ubuntu at SCaLE! Huge thanks to all the booth volunteers who kept things staffed all weekend.

I’m happy to report that since then they were able to get the other 80 systems deployed!

50 of these remaining systems went to schools in the Gomoa East District:

12 to Akotsi Zion Basic School

Teacher training at Akotsi Zion Basic School

12 to Ekwamkrom Methodist Junior High School

Students on their computers at Ekwamkrom Methodist JHS

26 to Aboso -Benso District Assembly Junior High School

Teacher training at Aboso -Benso D/A JHS

Press releases about these deployments:

• AIR DONATES 50 COMPUTERS IN GOMOA EAST
• AIR TRAIN 30 TEACHERS IN GOMOA EAST

Finally, the Africa ICT Right team headed north to the West Gonja District to deploy the remaining 30 systems to Drive Aid Ghana.

One of the labs set up for Drive Aid Ghana

Press release about this deployment: Africa ICT Right (AIR) Intensifies Computer Education In Damongo

A quick calculation shows that for this deployment of 100 computers, over 1500 students will be given the opportunity to work on these systems by having them in their schools. Over 80 teachers and volunteers throughout these regions have also been trained the basics of Ubuntu and on the educational software software being shipped with these Edubuntu systems. It was quite an honor to be invited on this adventure that has come to such a successful completion, I hope I can do more in the future to help these organizations continue to support these deployments and more.

Time for me to go update the Edubuntu Deployments page.

4 photos above licensed CC BY 2.0

But my fiancé was able to get some really great shots:

Above 2 photos licensed CC BY-ND 2.0 by Mike Joseph

Happy Holidays!

The Ubuntu Learning project has been quiet for some time, but we’re hopeful that there are a lot of folks still interested in the efforts outlined in our initiative to develop class material for students learning about Ubuntu.

In order to get things going with this project again, I wanted to quickly re-introduce myself and my own current visions for the project.

I work as a Linux systems administrator by trade, but in my free time I volunteer with a non-profit that deploys Ubuntu in schools and earlier this year I had the opportunity to travel with another non-profit to Ghana to deploy Ubuntu and train the educators there. Through these projects, it’s become clear to me that the development of training materials is essential for Ubuntu and other free software to be successful in these deployments.

Now, when it comes to this project one of the things I feel most strongly about is that we are not a documentation writing project. Documentation writing is well-covered by the Ubuntu Documentation and Ubuntu Manual teams. In places where documentation is lacking in these projects we should take it upon ourselves to volunteer our time to improve their source material. I hope that several members of our project go on to make significant contributions to these projects.

So what do we do? We write the material for teachers to teach. Think of the Ubuntu Documentation or Manual as the textbook and what we’re doing is the supplemental lesson plan, learning objectives, assessments and other tools that the teacher receives with the textbook. We’re also be working to put material in the Moodle teaching framework.

To help us with this, Jasna Benčić has put together a document that gets deep into the methodologies that we should be using when developing course material. Her document is available here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pLqSuStmh5PGfiUBfamPQIYbUVSQDCrvbKX2J2VBFAI/edit?pli=1

Additionally, we’d also like to assemble a small team to write our first course which can then be used as an example for future ones. So please sign up for the mailing list to join the discussion and get involved!