Today was the last day of UDS. Ending a day sooner has been strange, but I’m spending my bonus day playing tourist tomorrow in Copenhagen.

– 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!

– Community Roundtable –

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.

– Community Roundtable –

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!