Day 4! It was very obviously day 4 at UDS as everyone was moving a bit slower this morning :)
– Community Roundtable –
We started off the roundtable by identifying subjects for the Leadership Mini-Summit that day and then launched a big discussion about the BuildingCommunity pages. The preliminary concern was that they weren’t been maintained, but this evolved into a discussion of whether they were even being used at all. There were ideas floated about doing some kind of other web-based documentation system that would still be easy for contributors to use (as easy as wiki is anyway) but would have a feedback mechanism to give us some kind of metrics beyond page hits as to usefulness (“Was this article helpful?” checkboxes? “Give feedback” option?). We’ll see where this goes, for now we’re going to first look to see if we can get some basic web statistics from IS.
– Making Community Very Obvious on the Desktop –
This was an interesting session, not least of which because it made me (of all people!) issue cautions about privacy. Part of making the community more obvious on the desktop was a proposal to make a “We Menu” which is speced out here: wiki.ubuntu.com/WeMenu. The spec is quite detailed and a very interesting read. The idea is really go make people aware of the Ubuntu community even in their area that many new users simply don’t realize exist and try to connect those people. There were also proposals to add practical notes about the community in the installer or to create a LoCo teams lense for Unity.
I’ve uploaded full notes from the session here: community-p-making-community-obvious-on-the-deskto
– Ubuntu LoCo Council Items for the Precise cycle –
The first core thing that came out of this session was the discussion of language-based (locale) teams in the LoCo Team Portal. These teams are translation teams who don’t have a physically shared location because they’re all over the world and they don’t necessarily have physical events and are not under the purview of the LoCo Council who helps administrate the directory. The general resolution I gathered from this is that they will remain there in spite of not being actual LoCo teams and perhaps just split off to a different section or renamed within the portal to avoid confusion. The second topic was the proposal to review some large countries and allow more localized LoCo teams like the United States has for all the states. I’m excited about this, it is pretty unfair that the United States was the only country which was allowed to have approved state-level teams so I think it’s a really great opportunity to finally move beyond this and allow for more truly local teams develop.
– Community Participation in User Experience –
For this session I was “kidnapped” into the center-of-the-room fishbowl to talk with the Design team about community involvement. As I’ve mentioned, I’m useless at design myself, but these sessions have been super valuable for me with my work in the community and being someone people come to when they want to get involved somewhere – like design and artwork. This session followed the one earlier in the week about developing a User Experience that a community team could focus on, so they will be blogging about it which I’ve taken a task item to cross-post to the Ubuntu Fridge and make sure it gets into the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. We were also able to start drawing from the community participating remotely to identify some individuals who would be willing to help with this community team. Win all around!
I’ve uploaded full notes from the session here: community-p-ux-participation
After lunch were three plenaries, all of which were interesting:
- How OpenStack integrates Launchpad and Continuous Integration
- Ubuntu Friendly Programme: What it is and How it Works
- Ubuntu and UEFI Secure Boot
The video was streamed and videos should be up later.
Finally, another three hours of the Leadership Mini-Summit!
I was very glad to have fleshed out a rough schedule in the morning and the whole group seemed motivated to stay on task today so I was very happy with the results of the session, we covered:
- Growing Motivation
- Canonical <-> Community Leadership Connection
- Role of the Canonical Community Team
- Role of the Community Council
- Leadership Futures with a growing community
- How do we grow leaders
And it’s far too much to summarize here! I’ve uploaded full notes from the session which has all our brainstorming discussion here: community-leadership-summit2 (notes from first session on Tuesday here)
I really hope we can get much of this into formal documents in the coming months.
Tonight was dinner in Downtown Disney with Penelope Stowe, Laura Czajkowski, Scott Richie and Martin Bogomolni. We ended up at Planet Hollywood and Scott departed for a bit while the rest of us went on the Characters in Flight tethered balloon. It was a beautiful ride, we lucked out majorly as we got to the high point and were able to see fireworks coming from both Magic Kingdom and Epcot! Plus we ended up being the last ride of the night due to the winds starting to pick up. We did a little shopping before heading back to the hotel.
It was my first night getting back to my room before 11 and I ended up having a great hour+ discussion with my roommate Karen Sandler of GNOME. She is truly an inspiration and I’ve really enjoyed talking with her and getting another perspective on the community.
Friday, Nov 4th, 2011 at 8:34
I am encouraged by the discussion on potentially removing artificial boundaries from the formation of loco teams. I did some research last night and found the following facts:
Europe
3,930,000 sq mi
population 731,000,000
181/sq mi
United States
3,794,101 sq mi
population 312,549,000
87.4/sq mi
It is interesting that the US is slightly larger than Europe, but holds under half the population.
In some cases states are larger than entire countries in Europe.
Texas — 2nd largest state
268,581 sq mi
population 25,145,561
96.3/sq mi
UK
94,060 sq mi
population 58,789,194
pop density 661.9/sq mi
While Texas almost three times larger than the United Kingdom it has less than half the population.
Contrast that with a more dense state
New York State
54,556 sq mi
population 19,378,102
408.7/sq mi
Still a lower population than Texas, but it is more condensed and more similar to the UK in density.
This leaves me supporting the idea, but concerned that we do so in a way that effectively addresses the issues of both geographic distance and population density.
Its a tough task the LoCo Council and Community Council have and I am positive that the elected Ubuntu Leaders will make the best decision possible.
Saturday, Nov 5th, 2011 at 17:03
US is slightly *larger* than Europe??
Sunday, Nov 6th, 2011 at 9:49
I just spent a week reviewing a survey which highlights how people feel unmotivated, unappreciated and dislike bickering. I really would have preferred a gentle correction rather than this kind of response (which reads rather snarky).
Monday, Nov 7th, 2011 at 4:09
Thank you, I appreciate your critic. Please don’t mix cause and effect. When there has been made ‘some research’ I’d expect research, which isn’t just taking numbers from Wikipedia and coming to a wrong conclusion. Well, coming from scientific background there is no reason to be falcultavive-emphatic on odd conclusions. The post wasn’t sarcastic it’s seriously asking the researcher to think before publishing, no more no less.