Fortunately it was available on youtube immediately following the broadcast and I was able to Chromecast it up to my TV a few days later: Intro by Jono Bacon, Keynote by Mark Shuttleworth

At 8AM I joined my trusty …tahr at my desk to kick off sessions for the week.

Trusty has a pink dragon friend, I call her Zuul

– Ubuntu Documentation Team Roundtable –

I spent a considerable amount of time with the Ubuntu Documentation team this past cycle, so I was really proud that several of us could get together to have a session and outline what we need to do in the next 6 months.

The focus was primarily on-boarding new contributors. It’s clear that there are portions of our process documentation that still need clean-up and there remains some confusion in the community over what exactly we have for documentation and the focus of each, so defining those more succinctly in all our resources is important, but for reference…

Ubuntu Desktop Guide

• Managed in bzr on launchpad, lp:ubuntu-docs
• Written in Mallard
• Official and ships with the desktop
• Committed to updating for every release
• Lives at help.ubuntu.com/$release-number/ubuntu-help/

Ubuntu Server Guide

• Managed in bzr on launchpad, lp:serverguide
• Written in DocBook
• Official and is published as html and PDF
• Committed to updating for every release
• Lives at help.ubuntu.com/$release-number/serverguide/

Community Help Wiki

• A MoinMoin wiki, anyone can edit
• Not strictly versioned, no solid committment for updating per release
• Lives at help.ubuntu.com/community/

Then we have flavor documentation. Xubuntu and Kubuntu manage shipped documentation in DocBook.

Oh there’s also this thing called wiki.ubuntu.com that we should only be using for notes related to Ubuntu teams, not documentation. And then there is the Ubuntu Manual which is a completely different project.

All clear? No more confusion? If only it were that easy :) We need some clicky buttons or something on our DocumentationTeam wiki page to make this all easier on the brain.

We came out of the session with several action items for continuing to improve things for new contributors.

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vb1AIVAsGkE
IRC Log: /2013/11/19/%23ubuntu-uds-community-1.html#t16:17
Notes: uds-1311-community-1311-docteam-roundtable.txt
Blueprint: community-1311-docteam-roundtable

– LoCo projects –

I was really excited about this session. There are always “tips” and encouragement going around for LoCo events, but many of us still spend time putting together packs of materials for things like Global Jams (as I did in September last year for our QA Jam), writing presentations for each new release to present at the local LUG (how many of us are doing this same work every cycle?) and more. It would be great if there were defined projects with materials, instructions and desired outcomes that teams could use to take some of the work out of planning events. And so it shall be! Stephen Michael Kellat of Ubuntu Ohio and the LoCo Council is now working with David Planella to begin putting this project of projects together.

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e99_s2rWJbk
IRC Log: /2013/11/19/%23ubuntu-uds-community-2.html#t18:02
Notes: uds-1311-community-1311-loco-projects.txt
Blueprint: community-1311-loco-projects

Stephen Michael Kellat talks about LoCo Projects!

– Ubuntu Women Trusty Goals –

I already wrote about this over on the Ubuntu Women blog, so I won’t repeat myself here, visit: Ubuntu Women at vUDS 1311 session summary

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AS22FRgrKe0
IRC Log: /2013/11/20/%23ubuntu-uds-community-1.html#t15:00
Notes: uds-1311-community-1311-ubuntu-women.txt
Blueprint: community-1311-ubuntu-women

– Community IRC Workshops and Classrooms for Trusty –

In spite of the rise of Ubuntu On-Air, my heart still belongs to text and IRC-based sessions in Ubuntu Classroom. In this session Daniel Holbach and I talked through some of the events we had planned for the cycle and lamented the inability to get a timely Ubuntu Open Week out the door for Saucy. We sketched out some plans based on our own schedules and now each have a list of folks to contact to firm up the schedule for our events. I’ve also taken some action items to follow up with teams who I hope will host sessions this cycle, including QA and Documentation.

I did land on a proposed date for Ubuntu User Days though: Saturday, January 25th 2014

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_Eyhu6JDuo
Notes: uds-1311-community-1311-classroom.txt
Blueprint: community-1311-classroom

Unfortunately I slept through the Community Council session due to a scheduling snafu, I could have sworn it was for later! But you can see what my fellow Community Council members Daniel Holbach, Laura Czajkowski, Elfy, Michael Hall, Scott Ritchie and Mark Shuttleworth got up to by checking out the video here: Community Council meeting

I watched the CC session on my TV too

To wrap up vUDS, Jono met with track leads to present results from each of the tracks. It gives a nice overview of the whole summit, check it out here: UDS Nov 2013 – Summaries

All the videos from the summit are available by browsing the schedule here. Click on the title of the session you want to watch, the videos are youtube videos embedded in the page and links are on the page to notes and blueprints.

This is the second virtual UDS I’ve attended, the first being vUDS 1305 which took place at the same time as the in person UDS would have. As someone who had the opportunity to attend the physical summits I still find these virtual summits greatly lacking. Many folks who used to go don’t take the time off of work for them anymore (myself included) so we only specifically target a very small subset of sessions we may have otherwise wandered into. I’ve also found that in the community sessions I was in the attendance was significantly lower than any sessions we had at physical UDS, probably due to the loss of the “wander in if it looks interesting since I’m here already” effect. The Ubuntu Women session is one which has perhaps suffered the most, several of our ideas over the years came from women who had never heard of us but happened to be at the summit and joined our session to offer new ideas and perspectives. So for sessions I was in, these virtual UDSes have only managed to attract a subset of existing contributors who could attend at the time it was scheduled and as a result just felt like just any other team meeting. Sadly, I don’t feel inspired following these new UDSes, instead I feel “wow, my to do list is very long, and I’m sick of meetings.”

That said, I understand Canonical is doing the best they can with their resources so I’ve done my best to take what value I can from this new format. It was great to see the schedule firmed up over a week in advance this time so I was able to adjust my work schedule accordingly. I’m also happy that they made it easier to join hangouts, as in the past it seemed like you had to scramble at the beginning of the session and know who to talk to in order to be a part of the video portion. I had no trouble submitting my blueprints this time around and found they had landed on the schedule through no actions of my own, hooray! Having recordings of every session has also been valuable, as in the past only a handful of sessions were recorded during each time slot and it was always somewhat unclear to attendees whether their session would be one of those select few or what the rationale was behind what got recorded or not.

Oh, and with virtual UDS we can bring our cats!

You may notice that popey did too, and I saw one walk behind Elfy in the Community Council session!

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… :)

– Community Roundtable –

We were able to have some web design folks from Canonical in the session so we could discuss the community page on Ubuntu.com. They were able to tell us that the ommunity can provide content and web team can handle design, but they weren’t able to commit to a timeframe to work on that. Instead, the proposal was made to create a separate site where community members can have access to editing and we will be creating a blueprint to spec this out. I’m really happy about going in this direction, onboarding new contributors is important and so I took a bunch of work here.

– Community IRC Workshops and Classrooms –

We have one of these sessions every cycle to sketch out the plans for the next Ubuntu Classroom events for the next cycle, paying close attention timing-wise for each event to the release cycle. Once those were sketched out, we also had some time to brainstorm what other classes outside of big events we’d like to have, including:

• HaveLoCos come in and showcase some of their work
• Session about the new localized ISO tracker
• Bug squad sessions
• QA/UTAH session (do this early in the cycle)
• IRC Team “how-to” – team and channel structure, what channels we have, how they work (in user level)
• Top 10 things to do after installing Ubuntu
• Cloud/juju and charm school online
• Enterprise-level sessions
• Lightning talk session (like roundtables)

It would be great to see some of these happen during this cycle, the Classroom is so often empty between the major events.

Full notes from the session: community-r-irc-workshops

– Xubuntu: General planning for R (II) –

In our second session of the week we spent a fair amount of time on how we would grow the core project community by continuing to reach out to our users. We also discussed some of the marketing initiatives, including some proposals for the formats of flyers we wish to design and some updates to the website. There was also some talk about artwork and it was generally agreed that while more default background options would be nice, if we wish to stay CD-sized space is precious and we probably don’t want to use it on those images.

Full notes here: community-r-xubuntu-planning-2

– Plenaries –

Today was lightning talk day! I did a 5 minute roundup of the work we did in Ghana.

I uploaded the photos I used in the talk here: http://people.ubuntu.com/~lyz/ghana/

Other presentations included overlayroot demonstration, datamining in Ubuntu related to bug handling in launchpad: showing improvements, see chrisarges.net/papers.html for more, askubuntu review feature, kde home run, getting opengl code on mobile devices (see jogamp.org for more), testing competition testing and review of winners, tips on improving compiling speed: replace Make with Ninja, replace LD with Gold, use precompiled headers (see: voices.canonical.com/jussi.pakkanen), a couple fun apps: variety wallpaper changer and livewallpaper, the developer of gottengeography (which allows you to put photos on maps) talked about GExiv2 for Vala but with added python bindings with GObject Introspection, and wrapped up with a presentation on a juju charm to get a running steam server which games can then be deployed against.

– Ubuntu Women UDS-R Goals –

We’ve been having an Ubuntu Women session at UDS for a few years now. While we do eventually get work items and a blueprint speced out, these sessions tend to lean more toward a great opportunity to meet women who are at UDS and can bring some fresh ideas and perspectives to the project. The main thing that came out of this session is the desire to do another big event this cycle where we give out prizes and get people excited about the project.

Full notes from the session here: community-r-ubuntu-women-project-goals

– LoCo Council –

A team brought up an issue with re-approval troubles and a team asked whether it was OK if their team doesn’t grow – yes, not all teams grow all the time.

Talked about some ideas for checking in with teams, perhaps encouraging them by offering help and showcasing their work, events and photos on the LoCo Council blog. Talked some about how regions should be encouraged to collaborate (ie United States, Scandinavia). Also discussed the proposal for having more state-based LoCos beyond just the United States.

And with that – UDS sessions were done! The closing plenary was the last thing on the schedule where track leads talked about what decisions were made at UDS.

The closing party was at Rosie McGee’s and we got a fun photo of the Xubuntu team:

It’s after midnight now, off for tourist things in the morning!

First up for the Community Roundtable today was a discussion about the /community page on ubuntu.com and possible redirect of /contribute to it see bug here. Tomorrow one of the website design folks from Canonical to talk with us about what we can do proposal-wise for improving it as we don’t want to ask people for mock-ups if they won’t be accepted.

The next topic was the ubuntuforums.org upgrade status. The OpenID plugin is done (thanks Kyle Baker!) and now it needs to be installed, tested and then hopefully deployed in the near future.

We then discussed some of the Ubuntu TV developments. This past cycle the community struggled somewhat with communication with Canonical as the project was back-burnered a bit for the 12.10 cycle with the dropping of Unity 2D (which the original prototype ran on). They confirmed that will have a PPA with a public prototype before a product launch which will be a good place for community to contribute, this is targeted for 13.04. It was also noted that the best places for community to keep up with the project are the #ubuntu-tv IRC channel, blog and the wiki.

Finally, we talked about how announcements in the community are done. If people aren’t following planet or ubuntu-dev – how will they know about important changes? It was generally agreed that the fridge should be used for this, but the fridge team itself isn’t always notified of things, encouraged more use of the ubuntu-news-team mailing list and informing volunteers in #ubuntu-news so that posts can be made. Volunteers are always welcome on this team, I’ll write a post about precisely what we need soon.

I then met up with Xubuntu project lead Pasi Lallinaho so we could talk about what he intended to include in the Xubuntu section of the flavors plenary after lunch. The Community Council then met to have a quick face-to-face discussion about the general community, and we got a photo!

Ubuntu App Review Board – Update and Planning for R cycle

One of the things the board wishes to do is streamline the approval process because the queue for reviews is growing faster than the review board itself can scale. Currently approval of a package by the ARB requires 3 members to review and approve the package. There was a proposal to allow any Ubuntu developer, beyond just ARB-contributors, do one of the reviews and just have a single ARB member required to approve it. They also discussed some more ways of automating tools to check things like licensing compliance and copyright. Full notes from the session here: appdev-r-arb-review

Plenaries

The plenaries for today began with presentations from the flavors.

Lubuntu – In the last cycle they created a new icon set, made look & feel improvements, new file manager, and managed to still fit the iso on the CD and keep the alternate installer and have builds on PowerPC and ARM. 13.04 they want more improvements to and additional icons (and other improvements with artwork), more testing and more devices (perhaps the Nexus 7?).

Kubuntu – Did a presentation introducing many of the Kubuntu developers who are attending UDS and the work they work on in Kubuntu. Lots of fun pictures of the Kubuntu folks!

Ubuntu Studio – Talked about the current state of Ubuntu Studio and the focus on multimedia creation with the Xfce desktop, low-latency kernel (required for audio) and is very workflow-oriented. Plans for the next cycle include recruiting more developers, improving team organization, collaborating with other flavors to improve developer docs and reach out more to the community through email, forums, social media and websites, settings GUI improvements, workflow manager and a system start-up script which does things like notify of bad settings (like ones which aren’t optimized for multimedia). They also wish to create a better user experience through more workflow-orientated documentation and videos.

Xubuntu – In the past cycle the strategy guide was completely rewritten, recruited members of the community to rewrite offline documentation, asked existing owners of social media outlets to make them “official” and on the dev side it now has Xfce 4.10, had to drop GIMP and Gnumeric to fit on the CD and dropped the alternate CDs. In 13.04 looking for more developers and keeping track of long-standing bugs to wish to polish up, improvements to documentation, a new and improved display dialog, replacing Alacarte with MenuLibre, introducing a dialog to control GTK theme colors and more. Finally, marketing materials, my stickers and case badges and of course the ping pong balls made with the eggbot!

Edubuntu – They win for brightest slides! Last cycle they decided to be more focused on long-term projects, reviving the Edubuntu Server project and seeing what they could do with tablets. They really are focused on LTS releases, so they’re aiming for these for landing the long-term projects.

Then it was on to talking about reliability and the reporting of crash bug reports from the desktop and encouraged more use of errors.ubuntu.com by developers who are looking to see that metric of how their programs are doing crash-wise. In 13.04 they are going to be extending this to recoverable errors so reports can be sent on those as well, like GPU hangs, debconf dialogs, kernel OOPSes, application hangs and installation failures. They’re always looking for contributors, more details about the project on their wiki page:

Improving Communications Outward

The reason for this session: “As Ubuntu members (and contributors), we understand Ubuntu (culture, community, technology, project, etc). How can we communicate Ubuntu to others outside the project (especially journalists/media) in a way that makes things easy to understand and reduces the tendency on the non-Ubuntu-community to “get the story wrong” or to “spin” stories with a default negative bias.”

There were a lot of ideas during this session about how to deliver Ubuntu community-based responses to some of the more contentious news that has come out of the Ubuntu project, and the possibility of a team being built to develop and offer these responses rather than having people (and the press) rely upon clarification from Mark’s blog or are just left guessing. There is a proposal to form an “Ubuntu Evangelists” group to handle such responses, but there were some reservations about the team being seen as a “spin” team and not really being taken seriously. A couple representatives from LoCos also raised concerns about how they are asked by the press to speak on releases and other news, but they don’t have translated release notes or anything, highlighting even problems within the project with communication. Full notes from the session here: community-r-improving-communications-outward

– Nexus7 Q&A –

This was quite the well-attended session! Ubuntu has been put on the Nexus 7, so the team in this session was available to answer questions about it, explain the “plumbing” work that Canonical is working on and reach out to the community for other parts. They’ll be adding cleaned up FAQ from the session to the wiki, but for the impatient the session notes are here: nexus7-qa

After this session Laura let me borrow her Nexus 7 to play around with the install of Ubuntu on it. Very fun.

This evening Flavia Weisghizzi and Na’Tosha Bard organized an Ubuntu Women dinner in the city. I had a great time and it was very fun to get out and have dinner in the city and have some time to talk to Na’Tosha and her husband about the work they do developing the Unity Game Engine to Linux.

Thanks to everyone who came out!

Hard to believe tomorrow is our last day of UDS, I have a lot going on tomorrow though, second Xubuntu session at noon, planning on doing a lightning talk about my trip to Ghana, and the Ubuntu Women session at 3PM.

My day started off with the Community Roundtable where we first discussed the Code of Conduct draft and then scheduled time during Wednesday’s roundtable to invite discussion about it (here). The next topic was the Google Summer of Code, which a couple community members volunteered to lead up and work with the Canonical community team as needed.

Next was some discussion about how the members of the community can be supportive and factual about news around Ubuntu when there are news sites that thrive on sensational headlines to get page clicks. The creation of a FAQ was also proposed for journalists who tend to get facts about Ubuntu and Canonical wrong, but it seemed unclear how useful it would actually be.

– UTAH School 1 –

I’ve been interested in and dabbling with testing for a few release cycles now, so I was interested to see the development of UTAH test automation harness since discussions at the last UDS. This was a hands on session where attendees could follow along writing some basic test cases in UTAH. For reference I put up notes for the first two here and the directory created so I could keep track of changes made to files in each step is here. The session resumed after a break but I had another session to attend and I really just wanted a glimpse at the progress of the tool anyway.

– Ubuntu LoCo Best Practices, Tips, & Tricks –

This session covered a few topics where representatives from several LoCos could weigh in on how their team handled them. Topics and suggestions included collaboration with non-profits and companies to handle money and materials and non-traditional locations for events and outreach to attract more interest in the team. There was also concern about LoCos feeling out of touch with news from Ubuntu due to communication and sometimes language barriers between Canonical and the teams, causing them to feel they can’t be authoritative, which we hope to discuss during an upcoming round table.

Full session notes here: community-r-ubuntuloco-best-practices

– Xubuntu: General planning for R –

Last cycle the Xubuntu team rewrote the offline documentation, but now it needs to be set up for translations, so that was one of the first action items of the meeting. The team would also like to get better about writing team reports, so hopefully we can get scripts to track Xubuntu packagesets bug changes so we have a script-able way to get a basic idea of what has been worked on in a given timeframe.

There have been improvements to display dialog upstream in Xfce by Xubuntu contributors, which will be soon put into a PPA for testing, but some screenshots are available now:

• Advanced dialog
• Minimal dialog
• display-identification popups

After some discussion about possibly using gtk-theme-config and options for screen locking it was time for a team photo!

Xubuntu team at UDS: Elizabeth Krumbach, Pasi Lallinaho, Micah Gersten and Christian Dywan

We’ll be having another session on Thursday to cover Artwork, Marketing and other remaining topics.

– Plenaries –

Chris Kenyon, Canonical’s head of Sales presented on “Ubuntu Means Business” by showing off some of the diverse places where Ubuntu is used. Began by talking about how “The future is being built on open options” with examples of many start-ups and key businesses. He also highlighted how they now shipping on a great deal of hardware that is certified to work with Ubuntu, particularly in China, explaining that the important thing is not that you can go buy a computer at your local shop (you largely can’t) but that Canonical is working with OEMs and getting hardware supported with Linux. He then moved into the topic of gaming on Ubuntu and how important gaming engines are and introduced Na’Tosha Bard, as Software Developer on Unity gaming platform who announced that in Unity 4 and Unity 4 Pro there will be support for Linux. In the enterprise the most compelling arguments for open desktops are security, cost, flexibility and manageability. New trends include additional devices on networks (not just desktop and laptops) and that a lot of work has been pushed to the cloud. Then had David Barth demonstrated the remote login capabilities to get into remotely running desktop sessions (ie – on a server), also talked about plans to stream single applications from Windows to an Ubuntu desktop. On to Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu is at the heart of a lot of cloud technologies.

It was then to the HP Plenary by Paul Morgan to talk about HP innovations for low-power hyperscale computing. He spoke about the need for most effective data centers and HP Project Moonshot: The future of extreme low-energy servers. They’re predicting explosive growth in scale, cost and complexity given the amount of cloud-related data being used by consumers and in this space it’s essential to have low-powered servers. Paolo Faraboschi of HP labs then spoke about some of the major pain points that we’re approaching with new workloads, metrics, complexity and technology scaling rules. Also talked about some of HP’s work to innovate in new hardware technologies including use of photonics, memristors, nanostore.

– Leadership Mini-Summit –

The leadership mini-summit took up 3 sessions and covered:

• Actively training successors and empowering contributors in your team
• How to most effectively respond to the “How can I get involved?” question from new contributors
• Encouraging people to apply for Ubuntu Membership once they have a proven record within a community
• Usefulness of team reports (and how they can be improved) and whether communities were using blueprints, milestones and having check points

Detailed notes from the session available here: leadership-mini-summit

– Ubuntu Testing Extravaganza –

This was an evening event that kicked off with lightning talks. First up Martin Pitt talked about the Mock UPower python script to do mock testing of power settings, which can do a variety of tests with power like when it’s plugged in or when battery is critical without actually being in that state, he’s planning on having it packaged for inclusion in Raring. The next talk was about some tests in checkbox including create_connection which creates a connection in network-manager, network_reconnect_resume_time to see how much time was taken for wifi to resume (only works on some chips) and rotation_test which performs a full screen rotation using X (and it even worked on the projector!), auto_test and audio_settings for audio testing, removable_storage_watcher to detect USB changes and removable_storage_test for file transfer tests. Then there was a “Testing Rant” by Thomi Richards where he talked about what qualifies as a unit test: the test can only fail in one way, in addition to be easier to test, it also makes your code more modular and in general better. Stéphane Graber was next up to talk about LXE containers to quick and easy testing on pristine installs, and also showed off some of the functions in the new python-lxc module. Finally, Daniel Manrique made a proposal for centralized automated testing repository, he covered an example of how UTAH and Checkbox are pretty much doing the same thing and that duplication of work could be avoided if the repository of tests existed.

I ended up heading out after this to have dinner in the city with a bunch of Finns, Pasi Lallinaho, Jussi Kekkonen and Timo Jyrinki. We had beers and steak along with some great conversations before coming back to the hotel.

Now time to rest, on to day 3 tomorrow!

There was lots of fruit on my plate at breakfast, and then it was off to registration and then the opening and keynote.

– Jono Bacon introduction by video –

Jono isn’t able to attend UDS this cycle because he and his wife are expecting a child any day now, so he recorded a video and that’s what we got to watch as a very standard introduction to how UDS works. Including a reminder to eat your vegetables.

– Mark Shuttleworth Keynote –

In this keynote Mark started off by discussing a subject that seems to be a theme this UDS: real convergence of Ubuntu on TV, tablets, desktops, phones, supercomputers and more. There is currently a working build of Ubuntu for the Nexus 7 and they’re working toward a really polished version of 13.04 that works on it, and not specific tablet edition. He also discussed the choice of the Nexus 7 specifically it’s highly available, inexpensive, they wanted to start somewhere with a single device. Then he did a demonstration of Ubuntu for Android.

He also talked about how he was happy to see Valve develop Steam for Linux, and that more gaming companies are following. There is a lot of work going into Ubuntu being preinstalled with partnered OEMs, in China HP Pavilions started shipping an option of Ubuntu preinstalled.

There was then a review of some of the cloud accomplishments in the past cycle, including improvements to the juju and MAAS products and the hurdles and out of the ordinary collaboration that had to be done to get Ubuntu running on Microsoft’s Azure cloud. Finally, there was discussion of Ubuntu on ARM, Linaro Connect is co-hosted with UDS, this cycle will show continuation of progress but also expansion of work with other low-power chipsets.

– Empowering Flavors –

This session was held because the plan is for changes to the Ubuntu release cycle to try and avoid having solid freeze moments to increase development velocity, but freezes may still be useful for flavors. The long term plan is for allowing flavors the ability to manage their own releases so that flavors have the ability to release on their own schedule and provide tools so flavors can do push-button creation of ISOs. This will need to be done in multiple steps, so they discussed engineering changes to both front and back ends. Work will also need to be done to determine what needs to be frozen for flavors if they want to ship alpha/betas, and how feasible this all will be while maintaining velocity of non-frozen Ubuntu.

Full session notes from the session’s etherpad here: foundations-r-empowered-flavors

– Ubuntu Development Videos –

This session began with a look through some of the older videos made about development and people discussed some of the issues with the older videos. The one comment that stood out the most is that they should be shorter, and if they were directed at specific answers or small topics they’d be much easier to watch.

Proposed videos to start off with:

• Introduction to Ubuntu Development (developer.ubuntu.com/packaging/html/introduction-to-ubuntu-development.html)
• Getting Set Up (launchpad, tools, etc.)(http://developer.ubuntu.com/packaging/html/getting-set-up.html)
• Fixing a small bug (http://developer.ubuntu.com/packaging/html/fixing-a-bug.html)
• Discussing an example package (developer.ubuntu.com/packaging/html/packaging-new-software.html)
• My bugfix in the bigger picture
• Request Merge

And lots more ideas in the session notes: community-r-dev-videos

– Feedback on Quantal Release and Improvements –

In this session they reviewed some of the changes made in the Quantal release cycle and what worked, and what needs more work. One of the things brought up of interest to me was how the ISO tracker displays images so testers know whether they should be tested or not, example: alternate images were kept for some time after it was largely decided we shouldn’t bother testing those images because they won’t be included in the release. Also discussed how collaborative editing and general handling of product release notes worked, and moved into the topic of blueprints not being managed well (not completed, etc). Then talked about the queue accepts process and generally agreed that to avoid duplication people should be more vocal on IRC when they’re reviewing something.

For everything discussed, see the meeting notes here: foundations-r-prior-release-feedback

Plenaries

In a Design and Community talk, Ivo Weevers really focused on how the various form factors (TV, Desktop, Tablet, Phone) impacts design and UI. Drew Bliss of Valve was next up, he introduced what Steam gaming platform is and the community that has been built up around it. Steam currently does run on Ubuntu and it’s an ongoing process to test and improve the experience and their release games on it. He explained the reason for selecting Ubuntu as the first distribution to target as it has a large, active user base and a company they can collaborate with. We were then treated by the fun announcement that UDS attendees will get access to their Beta testers program!

Next up was David Planella of the Canonical Community team on Ubuntu and App Developers, beginning by explaining why they are dedicating resources: attracting more developers who create desirable applications makes Ubuntu a more attractive operating system for users. He then explained some of the existing tools: the app developer site, My apps and the app showdown this past summer. Moving forward they wish to streamline the upload process, but retain a way to deliver the users in a secure way and continue to grow the community and the app developer site. Finally Nick Skaggs led a plenary on testing, including autopkgtest running against all developer uploads to -proposed and AutoPilot functional testing for Unity.

– Meeting for Ubuntu IRC ops –

This was a pretty sparsely attended session, so we discussed the current op application process and how more timely responses to people who apply on launchpad would be good. Also talked some of the ways that users can contribute aside from being ops, including factoid editing and documentation maintaining.

– Edubuntu Planning for “R” Cycle –

In this session the Edubuntu team reviewed previous work items for desktop, tablet and server to re-evaluate and assign for this cycle. Of particular interest to me work item-wise, there was also some discussion about documentation postponed from last cycle. One of the struggles we had in Ghana was lack of teacher-focused documentation for Edubuntu and I was happy to learn that they had thought about reaching out to the Ubuntu Manual team to see about doing an Edubuntu edition of the Manual. I hope to work with them on this, particularly if we can integrate some of the materials Nancy and I worked on, I’ve already shared the link with one fellow UDS attendee who is deploying Edubuntu in schools.

– IT Manager Meet up –

I wasn’t all that sure what to expect from this meeting since it was a bit impromptu, but it ended up being a very interesting discussion. There were a fair number of representatives from larger companies who were doing massive Ubuntu desktop deployments and working through the woes of finding good calendar replacements and interfacing with Active Directory and other proprietary infrastructure. Of course all the deployments I’ve been a part of where either SMBs at work or small schools, but I wasn’t alone in that boat either! There were also some representatives from Canonical products (including Ubuntu Advantage) attending the session who were engaged and very interested in these deployments. It ended up going so well that there is a second meetup now on the schedule this week.

This evening I headed over the nearby mall to pick up a Telia SIM and 1G of data (total for both was about $13) for when we adventure beyond the hotel wifi later this week. I also got a local charger for my 3DS as it’s not happy about the voltage situation here in Europe (wasn’t in Ghana either), $17 for that, not bad since I’ll use it again when I travel here next year. I then spent an hour or so at this evening’s Meet and Greet even to wrap up the first day of UDS.

Good first day, looking forward to tomorrow!

– Community Roundtable –

Started asking about UDS for first timers and what changes we can make to make it easier for them, clearer instructions about reimbursements, travel arrangements and scheduling. Then there was some discussion about using Etherpad Lite next time with chat integration rather than IRC. Quickly touched upon what kind of statistics are available for determining how many systems are out there using Ubuntu, there were several types of statistics discussed (iso downloads, updates, support resource usage) and wrapped up by taking a look at the Wikimedia Traffic Analysis Report – Operating Systems.

– Expanding the isotracker testcase management capabilities –

The session started off with a review of the current capabilities of the Ubuntu Testing Tracker, it’s used for ISO testing and links to a wiki for test cases. Reviewed some of the technical details of changes (database schema updates, where to allow modifications, test case ids). There was also some discussion about permissions, who can add test cases (including representatives from other flavors) and do other limited tasks.

I’ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

– IRC Workshops –

We have one of these during each UDS to plan out Ubuntu Open Week, Ubuntu App Developer Week and more IRC workshops. This session was a bit different as we discussed ways to expand this beyond the medium of IRC into other formats. There have been some experiments in the past with ustream and the like for a class on Inkscape, but now with the launch of Google Hangouts On Air for everyone we’re really excited about the possibility for making one of the workshop days into one where we use that instead. I still prefer IRC myself as it’s low-bandwidth, has searchable logs (rather than just an archived youtube video) and can be glanced at while at work, but it’s certainly not for everyone. It should be an interesting experiment this cycle.

I’ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

Lightning talks, including Partimus and Accessibility installer.

– Accessibility Community Team Plans –

Reviewed some of the successes of the Precise release, including accessible strings on the indicators, ability to determine wifi signal strength and installer improvements. In this next cycle they would like to focus on improvements to Unity 3D since development of Unity 2D is very likely to be discontinued. They are seeking new contributors throughout the Accessibility project, including in testing and bug triage. I volunteered to help via Ubuntu Women and there was some brainstorming about how to get other people without disabilities can become attracted to contributing.

I’ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

– Etherpad Lite Summit integration –

In this session the proposal to use Etherpad Lite was put forward and there was a test instance running for us to to try. This new etherpad has built in chat, so it could potentially be what is projected by default in each room rather than a full screen IRC window, so you would be able to see chat in the etherpad and the etherpad too. Much of the session focused on logistics of replacement of the current Etherpad and access controls (log in to summit?). The demonstration showed that the mobile access was event quite usable on Android. We also had someone from IRC come on via Google hangout on the second screen in the room to show off what we could do since we’re not using a screen for IRC and a screen for the etherpad.

I’ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

Sessions wrapped up at 5PM and we all headed to the final wrap-up talks for the summit by the track leads. Then it was off to the “California Dreamin’ Beach Party” themed end party. In a change of pace, instead of having attendees handle entertainment they ended up bringing in an outside band to do it, The Spazmatics. It was a lot of fun, and MJ came out so I was able to introduce him to a bunch of people.

And with that, UDS was over for another 6 months! I had a really great time being a local, talked to lots of people I wouldn’t otherwise talk to. Thanks everyone!

I’ve uploaded my photos from the week here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157629702430040/

– Community Roundtable –

We picked up discussion from the day before about announcements from Canonical, it was generally agreed that the community is less bothered by announcements which don’t impact them or require them to do a considerable amount of work, or makes work completed feel useless or ignored. It also seems like there may be missed opportunities to get the community involved in improvements. We then discussed the Unity Distilled list proposal, and compared it to the value that separating ubuntu-devel and ubuntu-devel-discuss has brought to the development community. With regard to UDS, I suggested that Canonical reach out to LoCo teams when planning so we can be more engaged. The session wrapped up by discussing UDS sponsorship and timing of announcements for venue and sponsorship, at this point timing-wise the contact for the next UDS hasn’t been signed. They’ll be working to open sponsorship earlier.

– IRC team meeting and IRCC review –

Generally good feedback about the status of the IRC Team and IRC Council. Quickly went through the process for operator recruitment, it has gone well and they’ve started syncing up calls for operators with the release cycle. They are seeking to clean up some of the access lists to better sync up with the launchpad lists, but won’t make changes where there aren’t problems. The IRCC only has 4 members, they’d like to fill their remaining seat so have added an agenda item to the next Community Council meeting and we’ll get that process started at that time. Reviewed no idling policy of -ops channel and agreed to explore some options moving forward. Wrapped up the session by discussing how IRC is used at UDS, newer versions of etherpad support a chat option which may improve interactions being noticed in the session, tomorrow there is a separate session about exploring this further in summit.ubuntu.com.

I’ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

– Community Council – Code of Conduct Review –

The message of the Code of Conduct has changed with the merging of the Leadership Code of Conduct. The main reason we wanted to do this is that we’d rather not like to persist the separation between community members and “Leaders” since we want to encourage all of our community members to strive for and be empowered to take leadership positions as their roles grow. We also wanted to integrate a diversity statement, which is now in this 2.0 version. The session clarified some of the reason for the changes, including protecting leaders (and potential leaders) from non-constructive and sometimes abusive backlash from other contributors when they have to make a tough decision, instead encourages more healthy engagement. We also discussed that we may want to make it simpler to sign, rather than using a PGP key, but still make it some kind of process so it doesn’t become a “Terms and Conditions” type document that people just click through. We also had a lot of great participation in the room to point out some changes we’ll need to make before we send out a more final revision for review, so thanks to everyone who came out and spoke up during the session. My fellow Community Council member Charles Profitt wrote a blog post about the session here.

– Ubuntu Women UDS-Q Goals –

I started off this session by reviewing some of the work we’ve done in the past cycle and will continue to do like Career Days and Full Circle Magazine columns and we brainstormed some about how to keep these going and who we can contact to encourage to participate. An action item was taken to take some of our older Full Circle Magazine posts and start posting them on our blog (with “originally appeared in FCM Issue # in $year…” etc notes). There were also some ideas about how visible the project was on some of the more core Ubuntu resources and within about an hour of our session a note about the project was up on edubuntu.org (thanks Jonathan!). We’ll also be reaching out to projects like OpenHatch and other groups that do very targeted mentoring. Finally, we’ll be taking a look at our leadership structure and electing new leader(s) this cycle.

I’ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

I was sorry to miss the Edubuntu plans for 12.10 and Ubuntu LoCo Council Items for the Quantal cycle sessions due to conflicts, so I’ll have to catch up with notes and participants later.

The first plenary session after lunch was on QA and focused on a series of FAQ around Ubuntu Automated Test Harness (UATH) and then a demonstration. Calexeda presentation about some of the facts and challenges of massive scale datacenter deployments, including power, space and cluster management and then noted that hardware hasn’t kept up with the demands of software and data. On the Ubuntu side Calexeda began getting involved at UDS-L in Dallas in 2009 and then Linaro was founded in 2010 to accelerate ARM and Open Source work. In the 11.10 release Ubuntu shipped with ARM support, and in 2012 they are seeking to deliver a complete solution and they anticipate an aggressive adoption of ARM servers and the rate and pace of innovation. The next plenary was on the current state of OpenStack. I saw a talk of the same name at SCALE in January and it was great to see how different this one was post release of Ubuntu 12.04 which shipped with Essex and will have an option to update OpenStack throughout its supported life. A list of known deployments was also shared, which includes HP Cloud, NASA Nebula, Rackspace and private clouds at Sony and Disney. Also reviewed some specific states and goals of the separate pieces of OpenStack. Wrapped up with note that all major Linux distributions have signed up to be founding members of the OpenStack Foundation. The last plenary was about MAAS (Metal as a Service), where there was a quick review of the history of the project and then did a live demonstration.

– Leadership Summit –

Started off with a couple lightning talks by some of the community leaders. Charles Profitt spoke about Tuckman’s stages of group development. Jorge Castro talked about AskUbuntu governance and conflict handling, since it’s a StackExchange site they go by their “A Theory of Moderation” and they use the Questions and upvotes mechanisms for site policy and even electing new moderators.

Then shifted into Q&A with the Canonical Community team. Led to a discussion about some of the collaborative meetings the team has, including regular one on ones, a public IRC meeting and some private casual meetings. Then moved into a discussion about the relationship between community and Canonical which led into a discussion about perceptions outside the project about the relationship. We then discussed some of the challenges as the LoCo communities grow and we expand beyond traditional contributors to companies and users with very different needs, motivations and interests. We also asked what other innovations could be made in the community moving forward.

After the break we picked up the Leadership Summit by discussing whether there are some core details that community members can focus upon. A proposal was made to get together some “more official” slide decks for some of the generic presentations (new features in $release, introduction to Ubuntu, introduction to getting involved). Leadership handbook was mentioned, the resources are available if someone wants to pick it up. We then continued the community lightning talks. Jono Bacon spoke about team planning and organization strategies. Then discussed some about getting through rough or lonely portions of projects, then on to the Learning team example – good to be clear about goals and expectations and being concise about making decisions.

– Drafting testcases for ubuntu flavors –

I ended up leaving the leadership summit to attend this session as the Xubuntu representative. We reviewed what the different flavors were already doing application QA-wise and discussed what the flavors teams need QA-wise. The Xubuntu team will be moving our Short and Long tests over to the QA wiki and there is a session Friday I’ll attend on Friday about expanding the isotracker’s test case capabilities.

I’ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

After all the sessions I sat down with Jose Antonio Rey to talk about the somewhat defunct Ubuntu Learning Materials and make plans to move forward so he can get some materials to a teacher of his who wants to teach about Ubuntu in his classroom.

I then met up with some folks from the Ubuntu Women Project to head over to my place in San Francisco for an Ubuntu Women Project dinner.

We had food!

And fired up a laptop with a Google+ Hangout so we could bring in some remote attendees as we sat around my livingroom and talked.

Ended up being a really fun night, 7 people came over, 3 participated remotely, and we wrapped up around 10:30. Thanks to everyone who came out! And for putting up with my over-friendly, chair-stealing cats :)

– Community Roundtable –

We talked some about Ubuntu Membership with regard to expectations, members not being siloed in their communities, and better documenting expectations for members as they cross into new communities within Ubuntu. There was also some discussion about some of the hardware (and other) reveals with Canonical partners that the community is not involved with, how to improve culture on both sides so that Canonical can protect relationships with clients and the community won’t be so troubled by Canonical not disclosing everything.

– Multi-Monitor Improvements –

Reviewed some of the improvements in multi-monitor support in precise, bug fixing (some of which are xorg and kernel fixes that all window managers benefit from, not just Unity), and features like the option of having launchers available on both screens. The Unity Multi-Monitor interactions toolkit is available here, including the Multiple Monitors UX Specification, Phase 1, which was used during the session. Went through sections on booting up, a proposed “presentation mode” where notify-osd does not activate (embarrassing or distracting notifications!) and power-saving isn’t enabled (display going blank during inactivity), laptop docking behavior, face lift of System Settings-Display Preferences, improvements to proper display focus, and more.

Iâ€ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

– Ubuntu Desktop in an Enterprise Setup –

Premise of the session: “We want to be able to use Ubuntu in an environment where it’s currently a small player and we believe a relatively small effort could grease the wheels significantly.” Currently there is not much Exchange calendaring support in Mozilla Lightning, there is some more in Evolution but it’s not all that reliable and doesn’t work in all instances (requires Exchange webmail option to be enabled). Simplifying authenticating against various types of LDAP-based implementations with different security profiles. Discussed management of keys for encrypted filesystems (so IT staff can hold encryption keys for systems they deploy so they can recover user systems in cases of password losses, diagnostics and such). Actual management of systems can be done with CFEngine or Puppet, but no great tools for machine inventory: packages installed, hardware details, users logged in (Landscape offers some of these, but it’s proprietary and Canonical-managed). Touched upon the issue of Windows or Mac-specific applications, but it’s not a problem that can easily be solved in the short term. Wrapped up by talking about Office formats integration, LibreOffice is fine for some users, but many are very closely tied to Microsoft Office specifically.

Iâ€ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

– Upstream App Developer Outreach –

The idea of this session is ways to more proactively reach out to application developers to get their applications into Ubuntu. One group is collecting a list of interesting applications and contacting the authors to see about getting them to package and submit it to Ubuntu. It was pointed out that personal contact is key for getting responses, automated emails or form mails don’t typically illicit replies. Also might want to go to gaming and programming conferences with fliers that have been proposed, which probably should point developers to developer.ubuntu.com/publish. The session wrapped up with brainstorming of suggestions of where else to look for potential applications.

Iâ€ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

First up for the plenaries was Rich Hilleman from Electronic Arts. He opened by discussing how the gaming environment has changed over the past 5 years, focusing on being more mobile, social and free apps that people pay for “on the way out” rather than “on the way in.” They are platform agnostic by developing for various platforms and have been discussing with Canonical how to release on specific hardware configurations on Ubuntu. Noted that they have open sourced some of their older codebases like Sim City back in 2008 (released as Micropolis). Next up was Vin Sharma of the Open Source Technology Center at Intel. Intel contributes both code and money on upstream upstream projects. Sharma’s work is also focused on downstreams like Ubuntu. Discussed some of the interests and requirements of Cloud vendors and customers and are seeking to fulfill some of those resource implementations with OpenStack.

– Review of the ARB process using MyApps –

MyApps is the webapp the Application Review Board uses to track application submissions and this session is reviewing how that’s working and what improvements could be made. There was discussion about teams with review permissions and allowing flexibility of sources on the PPA upload user interface. Reviewed some existing bugs in the developer registration portal to assess priority.

Iâ€ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

– LoCo Portal Design Iteration –

We want to keep the concrete plans somewhat simple due to low number of developers for the portal this cycle. Discussed possible redirection of users using GeoIP, but there have been very mixed results in accuracy. Proposed creating a “planet like” feed of blog posts by LoCo members which can be managed by team admins. We quickly reviewed the front page and decided to put out a survey to LoCo teams to see what they may find useful. Wrapped up by finding a few more volunteers in the room who may be able to help with development.

Iâ€ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

– QA Team Organization –

There are a lot of QA teams (see here), so the discussion centered around how they could best collaborate, it was generally felt that administrators of the QA teams may find value in all project meetings a couple times a cycle, rather than seeking to create more teams or consolidate diverse teams. There was also the topic of giving feedback and recognizing contributions and avoiding burnout. There was an item to see about collecting data from trackers about who is doing what to give to team leads so they can handle recognition of their team members. The session wrapped up by talking about non-desktop testing, with focus on servers and hardware.

Iâ€ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

That wrapped things up for the day, and it was on to the evening activities!

I planned an evening of San Francisco Tourism and met about 30 people in the hotel lobby at 6:30PM and passed out handouts detailing the plans for the night. James Tatum was kind enough to offer help for the evening as another local and so together we managed to get tickets for everyone and on to BART and over to San Francisco.

The tour started at Ferry Building where we were able to walk around the pier and get photos of the Bay Bridge and check out the ferries.

From there it was on to a street car which we all managed to fit in and head up to Pier 39 where about half the group went their own way to explore and get dinner. We took the other half of the group down the pier to see Alcatraz Island, the very distant Golden Gate Bridge and the sea lions. We then walked up to Fisherman’s Wharf for dinner at Boudin. Our dinner ran a bit late so I skipped down to the Fisherman’s Wharf sign at 9:30 to tell those gathered there that we would be running a bit late and encouraged them to head up to Ghirardelli Square for some ice cream while we finished up.

We all managed to finally meet up at the cable car turnaround across the street from the Buena Vista Cafe for a ride to Powell station.

James ended up taking most of the group on one cable car as the 6 or so of us remaining caught the next one. We all met at Powell station and hopped on BART, I got off at Montgomery station while everyone else headed back to the hotel. In all, quite a fun evening, it was great to have so many people come out!

– Community Roundtable –

The session started off with some discussion around the use of Trello.com boards. Several teams have found them to be useful and we’ll likely continue use, we do want to be mindful that we’re not duplicating the work of other methods for work item tracking (ie blueprints). There was also some discussion about community documentation which was picked up in a session later in the day. Finally, Jono let us in on EA’s announcement that was supposed to be big news tomorrow but had already leaked to several sources: Electronic Arts now have two games in the Ubuntu Software Center: Command & Conquer Tiberium Alliances and Lord of Ultima (he blogs about it here). For now these are just links to web applications, but it is very cool that a company like EA is showing interest in Ubuntu as a gaming platform.

– Continuing Packaging Guide Improvements –

The two biggest take-aways from this session was that they need more user testing and there is a fair amount of work to be done to consolidate and complete packaging documentation. There are several open bugs (here), so there is some feedback coming in, but to continue testing and feedback there was a proposal for user testing at packaging jams. On the consolidation side, there is still an Ubuntu packaging guide on the Ubuntu wiki, so the one on the wiki will be merged into the formal one here. The formal packaging guide is written in Sphinx and they are looking for volunteers to help with the transition. It was also noted that there is a translation infrastructure is available, but there will need to be milestones for when we can do calls from translations, so they began developing some milestones.

Iâ€ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

– Keybindings Health Check –

This session went through reviewing default keybindings in Unity and discussing what worked, what people where having trouble with and how changes can be made to alter how accessible it was. Representatives from the Accessibility team were available to chime in on changes. Throughout reviewed portions of the keyboard shortcut overly to see about whether additions/subtractions need to be made.

Iâ€ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

– Transition help.ubuntu.com to SUMO –

In this session we did an analysis of SUMO to replace the help.ubuntu.com/community/ moin wiki. There are a lot of complaints about the current infrastructure, including that wikis are difficult to maintain and aren’t really built for the dynamic support documents that organizations like Mozilla have, plus there is no real support for translations. I did have some concerns about who can edit it, particularly surrounding whether moderator approval would be required for edits, unlike the wiki, and who would be responsible for handling the additional moderator burden that such an infrastructure may bring (the docs team is already spread pretty thin!). A test instance will be deployed so we can explore some of this.

Iâ€ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

After lunch it was off to the plenaries! They started out with an Ubuntu at Google presentation with Thomas Bushnell, Tech Lead for Google’s Goobuntu team. He began by hinting at the size of their Ubuntu deployments at Google, saying “tens of thousands of employees” including graphic designers, managers, software engineers, systems engineers, translators and more. They push workstations to their limits, have very high costs for reboots and re-logins. Goobuntu is a light skin over standard Ubuntu in most cases, they don’t customize the UI, use centralized administration with Puppet and apt, LDAP-based user database and automated release testing. He went over some of the special demands based on security, including purging packages which may be dangerous and more secure network authentication, internal apt repository framework and very diverse developers they support. They use the Ubuntu LTS and make extensive use of multiple testing methods and automation.

Someone took notes from the plenary which I’ve uploaded here.

We then had the official flavors planery, where representatives from Kubuntu (David Wonderly), Xubuntu (me!), Lubuntu (Julien Lavergne), Studio (Scott Lavender) and Edubuntu (Jonathan Carter) gave quick updates on the status of their respective flavors.

Thanks to Benjamin Kerensa for taking a photo during my Xubuntu section!

The plenaries wrapped up with Jono Bacon discussing his journey creating the new Ubuntu Accomplishments system.

– Leadership Summit –

The rest of the afternoon was spent at the leadership summit. It was a small group and some of the topics we covered were nurturing leaders, handling conflict, best practices for leadership. The final hour ended up being quite a valuable time, with some of the core community contributors sharing personal stories about their rise into leadership within the project and some of the challenges they faced and lessons learned. I think one of the key take-aways is that some of our core struggles around recruiting and retaining great volunteers are very similar, and for every time we cast our net out for contributors there will be only a tiny percentage of that group who will be retained, whether due to changing interest, time constraints or other factors which prevent prolonged involvement.

I had some great “hallway discussions” before heading down to the Google-sponsored “Circus” themed party. All I want to say about the party itself right now is that it made me uncomfortable, I left pretty quickly. Instead I went with Michael Hall, Penelope Stowe, Alan Bell and Jamesha Fisher over to a sports bar down the street where we enjoyed beers and some sandwiches, which was quite enjoyable!