I have to admit, when I attended my first UDS (for Lucid in November 2009) I wasn’t sure what to expect session and format-wise. How would sessions be organized? What sessions should I expect to attend? Would there be talks or are there strictly work sessions? I had a keen interest in Debian and Ubuntu collaboration (as I still do Debian work and manage a lot of Debian systems at work) and I do a lot of community work so the community track was of major interest to me. I ended up overwhelmingly pleased with my experience but more information early on would have helped ease some of my initial concerns.
As these summits have grown, work has been put into development of summit.ubuntu.com where, as of Lucid, you can easily check out schedules of past summits:
This can be super helpful when you’re trying to determine whether attending the summit is right for you.
If you’re interested in reading about my experiences at the summits I’ve attended, I have created a Category here on my blog that contains all UDS posts: http://princessleia.com/journal/?cat=26
For UDS-O coming up in May in Budapest, Hungary Jono Bacon reached out to the Ubuntu Women and Ubuntu Accessibility teams to work toward Improving Diversity at UDS. We’ve had three meetings since he first reached out, February 10th (minutes, log), February 17th (minutes, log) and finally one on February 22nd (logs).
Out of these meetings we identified a lot of challenges that women, minorities and folks with accessibility considerations face and were able to make real progress as far as making improvements. In addition to the typical encouragement we offer each other every UDS to apply for sponsorship, the Ubuntu Women team has put together our own UDS page and a team of application reviewers (including myself, lyz@ubuntu.com) who women can email if they want their application reviewed first, this can be found at wiki.ubuntu-women.org/UDS. The UDS organizers will also make their best effort to make sure the venue has accessibility considerations from food allergies and restrictions to wheel chair access taken care of. We’ll also be making it easier for teams and individuals to plan evening events with a clear contact for advertising these events and by providing literature to make sure their event can appeal to the widest possible audience should they choose to. We don’t want anyone to feel left out of all evening activities, and as someone who is quite shy but otherwise able these changes will certainly help me be more inclined to look for events to attend in the evening. This UDS also marks the first to have a formal Anti-Harassment Policy, which also includes venue-specific details for incident reporting, authorities to contact for emergencies and taxi services.
Today the community sponsorship for attendees from the community was announced and we’re now encouraging anyone interested in attending to apply. Instructions for applying for sponsorship can be found here: http://uds.ubuntu.com/participate/sponsorship/
Jono Bacon has written a great post about sponsorship here: Ubuntu Developer Summit Sponsorship Now Open!
I have confirmed the time off from work in to attend, I think it’s time for me to apply, and you should look into it too!