This week I’ll be flying down to Pasadena, California to attend the first UbuCon Summit, which is taking place at the the Fourteenth Annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE14x). The UbuCon Summit was the brain child of meetings we had over the summer that expressed concern over the lack of in person collaboration and connection in the Ubuntu community since the last Ubuntu Developer Summit back in 2012. Instead of creating a whole new event, we looked at the community-run UbuCon events around the world and worked with the organizers of the one for SCALE14x to bring in funding and planning help from Canonical, travel assistance to project members and speakers to provide a full two days of conference and unconference event content.
As an attendee of and speaker at these SCALE UbuCons for several years, I’m proud to see the work that Richard Gaskin and Nathan Haines has put into this event over the years turn into something bigger and more broadly supported. The event will feature two tracks on Thursday, one for Users and one for Developers. Friday will begin with a panel and then lead into an unconference all afternoon with attendee-driven content (don’t worry if you’ve never done an unconference before, a full introduction after the panel will be provided on to how to participate).
As we lead up to this the UbuCon Summit (you can still register here, it’s free!) on Thursday and Friday, I keep learning that more people from the Ubuntu community will be attending, several of whom I haven’t seen since that last Developer Summit in 2012. Mark Shuttleworth will be coming in to give a keynote for the event, along with various other speakers. On Thursday at 3PM, I’ll be giving a talk on Building a Career with Ubuntu and FOSS in the User track, and on Friday I’ll be one of several panelists participating in an Ubuntu Leadership Panel at 10:30AM, following the morning SCALE keynote by Cory Doctorow. Check out the full UbuCon schedule here: http://ubucon.org/en/events/ubucon-summit-us/schedule/
Over the past few months I’ve been able to hop on some of the weekly UbuCon Summit planning calls to provide feedback from folks preparing to participate and attend. During one of our calls, Abi Birrell of Canonical held up an origami werewolf that she’d be sending along instructions to make. Turns out, back in October the design team held a competition that included origami instructions and gave an award for creating an origami werewolf. I joked that I didn’t listen to the rest of the call after seeing the origami werewolf, I had already gone into planning mode!
With instructions in hand, I hosted an Ubuntu Hour in San Francisco last week where I brought along the instructions. I figured I’d use the Ubuntu Hour as a testing ground for UbuCon and SCALE14x. Good news: We had a lot of fun, it broke the ice with new attendees and we laughed a lot. Bad news: We’re not very good at origami. There were no completed animals at the end of the Ubuntu Hour!
The xerus helps at werewolf origami
At 40 steps to create the werewolf, one hour and a crowd inexperienced with origami, it was probably not the best activity if we wanted animals at the end, but it did give me a set of expectations. The success of how fun it was to try it (and even fail) did get me thinking though, what other creative things could we do at Ubuntu events? Then I read an article about adult coloring books. That’s it! I shot an email off to Ronnie Tucker, to see if he could come up with a coloring page. Most people in the Ubuntu community know Ronnie as the creator of Full Circle Magazine: the independent magazine for the Ubuntu Linux community, but he’s also a talented artist whose skills were a perfect matched for this task. Lucky for me, it was a stay-home snowy day in Glasgow yesterday and within a couple hours he had a werewolf draft to me. By this morning he had a final version ready for printing in my inbox.
You can download the creative commons licensed original here to print your own. I have printed off several (and ordered some packets of crayons) to bring along to the UbuCon Summit and Ubuntu booth in the SCALE14x expo hall. I’m also bringing along a bunch of origami paper, so people can try their hand at the werewolf… and unicorn too.
Finally, lest we forget that my actual paid job is a systems administrator on the OpenStack Infrastructure team, I’m also doing a talk at DevOpsDayLA on Open Source tools for distributed systems administration. If you think I geek out about Ubuntu and coloring werewolves, you should see how I act when I’m talking about the awesome systems work I get to do at my day job.