The last day of the Ubuntu Developer Summit! This was a very good UDS for me, an excellent mix of work, socialization and rest, the last of which means that, while tired, I am not ready to go into a coma like I usually am afterwards! Plus we get an extra hour of sleep tonight, win.

It wasn’t a perfect week though. On Thursday evening we learned of the passing of André Gondim, an inspiring contributor from Brazil who, among other things, led the Brazilian Portuguese team (see note from the Community Council here: Ubuntu Community mourns the loss of André Gondim). I didn’t work with him directly, mostly in passing in LoCo work and we shared a taxi from the airport once at a UDS. I didn’t know the extent of his illness and so it came as a surprise to me (I had just seen him on IRC representing the Brazilian team in their team reapproval on October 18th). My condolences to his wife, friends and family.

The final day started off as others had for me, with the Community Roundtable.

– Community Roundtable –

We spent this roundtable summing up much of what we thought our main community core focus for 12.04 would be when it came to practicaly cultural changes we wish to promote and put our efforts behind.

• Create and share opportunities for all skills and skill levels to help everyone make Ubuntu successful.
• Support and motivate our leaders and governors to be successful to deliver leadership that furthers Ubuntu and the community.
• Create an environment of gratitude and appreciation.
• Create an environment of constructive criticism, and protect it against anti-social and unconstructive behaviour.
• Create an approachable and nurturing environment to help our community to contribute and be successful.

– Community Bug Involvement –

This was a very interesting session for me. As far as I can tell, there were a few things that prompted this session:

1. People are being pointed to the ReportingBugs page when they want to report a bug and it’s very, very long
2. People often don’t read it (do you blame them? I don’t!)
3. As the community grows, more people will be starting (or have started already?) to use the bug tracker as a support mechanism because it’s difficult to determine the difference between a bug and a support issue, and if it’s a support issue where to ask
4. Fundamentally people don’t want to submit bugs, they want to solve problems

Given this background, the discussion revolved around ways to make support more discoverable shortening the basic ReportingBugs page (all the information is valuable, but there is too much for a “here’s the basics of what you need to know” page) and making some very short (less than 2 minutes) videos on some of the bug basics. It was a great discussion and I’m interested to see where it goes from here.

I’ve uploaded full notes from the session here: community-p-bug-involvement

– Ubuntu Accomplishments and Trophies –

I don’t think I’ve ever been as vocally negative during a session as I was with this one. I’m not a fan of badge and trophy systems in online communities outside of games because I find it tends to change the culture in ways that make me uncomfortable. I’m also conscious of the additional administrative overhead this brings to projects within Ubuntu if such a system really takes off, no longer is a “thank you” from project leaders enough, we now have to buy into a system of badge rewards that we’ll need to manage (of course a project doesn’t have to use it, but if it becomes part of the accepted culture it becomes tricky). I do understand the problem they’re trying to solve (motivation and reward) but I think we’ll have to agree to disagree on this mechanism. There were others who supported the idea and volunteers to work on this so we’ll see where it goes.

I’ve uploaded full notes from the session here: community-p-ubuntu-accomplishments-and-trophies

– Should Ubuntu promote 64-bit images by default? –

This was a fascinating session and before you ask: this is just about changing what the default recommendation is, not getting rid of 32-bit (that would be crazy!). I’ve been using the 64-bit version of Ubuntu on my desktop for a few years now because I do a lot of virualization testing for work projects, and I need to be doing those on 64-bit, and it’s largely been without incident. The only issues I’ve had were with 32-bit only binaries that I had to put more effort than dpkg -i to install, and with the multiarch support much improved for most things this is less of a concern. There was a point made about RAM usage and the fact that a machine with 1G of RAM will run 32-bit well but not as well with 64-bit. There was discussion about the website itself using User Agent to determine the current arch running so the website could help point people in the right direction recommendation-wise. And since the week had put my in a very “community” mood I brought up LoCo teams who will be giving out the CDs of the recommended architecture and the question of what OEMs wanted to and would use. As a result, there are plans to reach out to the wider community, including LoCos and OEMs, for thoughts on whether we’re ready to make the leap.

I’ve uploaded full notes from the session here: foundations-p-64bit-by-default

Instead of going to the Lightning talks most of the Community Council had a meeting. We are a new CC with five of our eight members having been replaced with this most recent election so we felt it was important to get together to really meet, discuss some of our upcoming challenges and hopes for the council moving forward. We’d like to be a more active body in the community again since with the delegation of Membership and LoCo team overview the public work of the Community Council has largely been reserved to administrative announcements. Leadership was a big topic this UDS and the CC is in a good position to share our knowledge and help inspire others.

– IRC workshops for 12.04 –

This was a pretty small session and we kept it short, first determining exactly what major events take place in Classroom each cycle:

• Ubuntu Open Week
• Ubuntu Developer Week
• Ubuntu App Developer Week
• User Days
• Community Week
• Cloud Days

The general consensus was that while we don’t generally have problems finding instructors, it is felt that a whole week is too long, and that hour long sessions probably are too. So, we decided to make the following changes for the Week events:

• Default to 30 minute sessions (instructors can ask for 2 slots if they really need an hour)
• Move to 3.5-4 hour days
• Only run them Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday – 3 days instead of 5

I’m really happy with this change, we’ll see how it works out this cycle!

I’ve uploaded full notes from the session here: community-irc-workshops

Since this session wrapped up early I was able to sneak into another…

– Scaling the Ubuntu Community by Taking It Local –

Having arrived late I don’t have a proper summary of this session, but it did make me wonder about how the California team does promotion of events, and the use of meetup.com in particular. Currently our team uses the wiki, mailing list, LoCo Team Portal, IRC, identi.ca, twitter and facebook to promote our events, but the leader of the Vancouver team discussed their very successful use of meetup.com. Now meetup.com costs money and we already have the LoCo Team Portal for registration so on the face it wasn’t all that compelling to me, but I then realized that I learn about interesting events in my area via meetup all the time because they end up related to some interest I’ve defined in the meetup interface. Tons of people in the Bay area use it, maybe this will be the next way we grow the team?

I’ve uploaded full notes from the session here, which goes far beyond the nugget I personally gleaned from the session: community-scaling-by-localizing

– Ubuntu News Team Goals for -P cycle –

Another good, short session! The News Team (responsible for Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter and the Fridge) has work to do to get our documentation improved, team structure sorted and more people trained to fulfill key roles, but as far as our day to day workload we’re pretty much on track. Amber Graner has also established a dialog with Canonical so some members of the News Team can also be kept informed about certain pieces of upcoming news so we can be prepared to announce it on the fridge.

And with that, UDS sessions were over! From that last session it was over to the UDS wrap up.

Jono Bacon led a moment of silence for André and then it was on to the standard wrap-ups from the track leads. No announcement of where the next UDS will be, so I’m looking forward to that announcement hopefully in the near future.

The night wrapped up with a party!

I had some good conversations but around 10PM I decided it was time to head back to my room and spend the rest of the evening packing and getting ready so I could catch the 8AM shuttle over to Disney the next morning.

Great UDS, thanks everyone!

Day 4! It was very obviously day 4 at UDS as everyone was moving a bit slower this morning :)

– Community Roundtable –

We started off the roundtable by identifying subjects for the Leadership Mini-Summit that day and then launched a big discussion about the BuildingCommunity pages. The preliminary concern was that they weren’t been maintained, but this evolved into a discussion of whether they were even being used at all. There were ideas floated about doing some kind of other web-based documentation system that would still be easy for contributors to use (as easy as wiki is anyway) but would have a feedback mechanism to give us some kind of metrics beyond page hits as to usefulness (“Was this article helpful?” checkboxes? “Give feedback” option?). We’ll see where this goes, for now we’re going to first look to see if we can get some basic web statistics from IS.

– Making Community Very Obvious on the Desktop –

This was an interesting session, not least of which because it made me (of all people!) issue cautions about privacy. Part of making the community more obvious on the desktop was a proposal to make a “We Menu” which is speced out here: wiki.ubuntu.com/WeMenu. The spec is quite detailed and a very interesting read. The idea is really go make people aware of the Ubuntu community even in their area that many new users simply don’t realize exist and try to connect those people. There were also proposals to add practical notes about the community in the installer or to create a LoCo teams lense for Unity.

I’ve uploaded full notes from the session here: community-p-making-community-obvious-on-the-deskto

– Ubuntu LoCo Council Items for the Precise cycle –

The first core thing that came out of this session was the discussion of language-based (locale) teams in the LoCo Team Portal. These teams are translation teams who don’t have a physically shared location because they’re all over the world and they don’t necessarily have physical events and are not under the purview of the LoCo Council who helps administrate the directory. The general resolution I gathered from this is that they will remain there in spite of not being actual LoCo teams and perhaps just split off to a different section or renamed within the portal to avoid confusion. The second topic was the proposal to review some large countries and allow more localized LoCo teams like the United States has for all the states. I’m excited about this, it is pretty unfair that the United States was the only country which was allowed to have approved state-level teams so I think it’s a really great opportunity to finally move beyond this and allow for more truly local teams develop.

– Community Participation in User Experience –

For this session I was “kidnapped” into the center-of-the-room fishbowl to talk with the Design team about community involvement. As I’ve mentioned, I’m useless at design myself, but these sessions have been super valuable for me with my work in the community and being someone people come to when they want to get involved somewhere – like design and artwork. This session followed the one earlier in the week about developing a User Experience that a community team could focus on, so they will be blogging about it which I’ve taken a task item to cross-post to the Ubuntu Fridge and make sure it gets into the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. We were also able to start drawing from the community participating remotely to identify some individuals who would be willing to help with this community team. Win all around!

I’ve uploaded full notes from the session here: community-p-ux-participation

After lunch were three plenaries, all of which were interesting:

• How OpenStack integrates Launchpad and Continuous Integration
• Ubuntu Friendly Programme: What it is and How it Works
• Ubuntu and UEFI Secure Boot

The video was streamed and videos should be up later.

– Leadership Mini-Summit –

Finally, another three hours of the Leadership Mini-Summit!

I was very glad to have fleshed out a rough schedule in the morning and the whole group seemed motivated to stay on task today so I was very happy with the results of the session, we covered:

• Growing Motivation
• Canonical <-> Community Leadership Connection
• Role of the Canonical Community Team
• Role of the Community Council
• Leadership Futures with a growing community
• How do we grow leaders

And it’s far too much to summarize here! I’ve uploaded full notes from the session which has all our brainstorming discussion here: community-leadership-summit2 (notes from first session on Tuesday here)

I really hope we can get much of this into formal documents in the coming months.

Tonight was dinner in Downtown Disney with Penelope Stowe, Laura Czajkowski, Scott Richie and Martin Bogomolni. We ended up at Planet Hollywood and Scott departed for a bit while the rest of us went on the Characters in Flight tethered balloon. It was a beautiful ride, we lucked out majorly as we got to the high point and were able to see fireworks coming from both Magic Kingdom and Epcot! Plus we ended up being the last ride of the night due to the winds starting to pick up. We did a little shopping before heading back to the hotel.

It was my first night getting back to my room before 11 and I ended up having a great hour+ discussion with my roommate Karen Sandler of GNOME. She is truly an inspiration and I’ve really enjoyed talking with her and getting another perspective on the community.

It was a beautiful morning on this day three of UDS.

– Community Roundtable –

The Community Roundtable today began with discussing install parties and how we could help a representative from a LoCo team to run one in his area. We pointed him to the LoCo Running Installfests documentation and I gave him my card so he felt welcome to follow up with me for questions. Thoughts were gathered regarding the Leadership Mini-Summit the day before, whether there were improvements which could be made to our plans to continue the summit on Thursday and the suggestion to have each proposed subject presented by person who proposed it. We began to continue the review of the Ubuntu Community Survey (see: here) and then Mark joined us and we moved into discussing the balance between a community where people can always influence the direction of Ubuntu, but also empowers leaders to move past stalling points to make difficult and sometimes controversial decisions.

– Ask Ubuntu for the experts –

I don’t currently use askubuntu.com so if I ever decide I want to this session will be great to reflect upon. It was primarily a crash course for experts who may wish to contribute and included highlights of the About page, how does askubuntu work? and the available video tutorials for using the site. I was also very interested to learn that beyond just web-side filtering, there are email and RSS feed options available, making this a much more accessible option for me.

– LoCo Team Portal during the P Cycle –

The LoCo Team Portal is a big project and their action list is long – even without adding a lot of ambitious features. The team discussed looking into using Open Street Map, changes to photos, ability to have one-click “announce this even to mailing list/identica/twitter” functionality and a section for event recaps which would replace event recap wiki pages for teams who wish to use them.

The portal really needs volunteers familiar with Python since unfortunately rather than gaining volunteers over the past year the number of folks working on it has actually decreased. Toward the end of the session I asked if a quickstart guide to potential contributors could be drafted so I could more easily point people to the project instead of just saying “join #ubuntu-website and talk to them” so that’s now being added to the blueprint, yeah!

I’ve uploaded full notes from the session here: community-p-ltp

– Design and community roundtable –

This was a really, really great session. I am completely useless with design and art of any kind, but I frequently get questions from my fellow community members about how they can do art and design work. My general answer until now has been to read the ayatana/design mailing list and read the Canonical Design blog to learn more about what they do. There are a couple of public design contests per year: the wallpaper images and countdown banner, which I direct people to when they are going on. A suggestion was made to expand these calls for design/art to things like LibreOffice templates and more so that designers and artists will just need to go to a “what design/art thing can I contribute to now” page to learn how to quickly and easily find a path to contribute their skills. I followed up with Charline Poirier after the session to thank her and the team and she gave me her card to follow up if I have more suggestions.

I’ve uploaded full notes from the session here: design-p-design-and-community

– Reducing Community Bickering –

This session is another result of the Ubuntu Community Survey (see: here) and began with discussing how to deal with the demotivating nonconstructive criticism on blogs. From there we did some discussing about stepping into list threads which get out of hand more quickly and the example of the Perl community was brought up because they were able to transform the abrasive culture of their lists through similar effort over time. Admittedly, I think the Ubuntu Community is mostly really great, particularly when compared to other open source projects that I’ve worked with but it is good to identify these issues early.

– Accessibility Team Community Goals –

While I’m not involved, I really love the Accessibility Team. They do really great, important work and I love sitting in on some of their sessions at UDS. In addition to their typical plans (in notes linked just below), it was interesting to learn that they also wished to cater to learning or cognitive disabilities once they have the resources.

I’ve uploaded full notes from the session here: community-p-accessibility-team-community-goals

– Ubuntu Leadership Team Goals for -P cycle –

The first item on the agenda was a name change for this team, even I was thrown for a moment by the title of this session. The “Leadership Team” is actually a team created to be a team which writes leadership-related documentation and acts as an informal, public mentoring base for current and future leaders within the Ubuntu community. From there we had a lot of great discussion about scope, purpose and leveraging existing documents in the community like the Building Community documentation.

I’ve uploaded full notes from the session here: community-p-leadership-team

After all the sessions for the day the Community Council sat down for an in-person meeting. In the room we found an ominous “You guys are doomed :-(” note, presumably from a previous session, on the paper board in the room so Amber was quick to fix it:

We kept the stream on in the room we were sitting in and opened the #ubuntu-meeting channel up for discussion. We worked through our short agenda and a couple other items and spent the rest of the time discussing some of the current perceptions around Ubuntu and Unity from the community and users.

From there I attended the Ubuntu Testing BoF for a while, and at 9PM it was time for the Florida LoCo sponsored Classic Horror Film – with popcorn, candy and drinks!

We got to watch the ever-great Night of the Living Dead. Huge thanks to the Florida LoCo for setting it up!