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Xubuntu Website Sprint on Saturday November 19th at 22:00 UTC

Several months ago I tossed up a devel site on one of my servers so Pasi Lallinaho and I could get to work on the newly planned Xubuntu website. He blogged about it with a teaser here back in August.

It’s taken some time, but we now have a formal staging server on one of Canonical’s servers and have pulled over all the content from the current site and are now wrapping up the last task items before we launch and doing a final, thorough, content review.

Want to help?

This weekend, on Saturday, November 19th, at 22:00 UTC, the Xubuntu website team will be hosting a Website Sprint in #xubuntu-devel on irc.freenode.net. Everyone is welcome to join us!

During this sprint we will:

Unable to attend? We’ll be updating https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Xubuntu/Website/Sprint throughout the next couple days to provide a full list of tasks we wish to get to during this sprint so even if you’re not available during the IRC-based sprint itself we invite you to review that page to see what tasks we have available and outstanding. You’re also welcome to email me directly at lyz@ubuntu.com with suggestions or join #xubuntu-devel to talk to myself (pleia2) or Pasi (knome) at any time to offer suggestions. Or, of course, leave comments here!

We went to Disney World!

Our visit to Disney World was wonderful. After waiting 17 years I was somewhat concerned that I had built myself up for something that would just be another amusement park so I was happy to learn that my fears were unfounded. Disney World really focuses on attractions and stories rather than thrill rides, every employee (“cast member”) of Disney I encountered was cheerful and friendly and their FastPass ticketing system which allows you to reserve a ticket for a ride rather than waiting in the full line for everything worked out really, really well.

We checked in at the brand new Wyndham Grand Orlando Resort, Bonnet Creek on Thursday morning after our redeye flight into Orlando Wednesday night, very thankful for their ability to accommodate our early check-in. We took a nap and then headed over to Epcot where we were planning on meeting my aunt Mary Ellen and uncle Joe to spend the evening with them enjoying the Epcot International Food and Wine Festival.

Epcot was the park I actually got to visit on my failed trip to Disney 17 years ago but I was still feeling a bit sick that day and Spaceship Earth (the big ball thing) was closed for repairs. This time I was finally able to enjoy and remember it! Upon arrival we grabbed some food and wandered around some attractions in Future World, including my first ride on Spaceship Earth (hooray!) and visiting a couple attractions in The Land. We met up with my aunt and uncle in the early evening. We went into Imagination! – perhaps the only attraction I did remember from my last visit and I picked up a Figment stuffed animal. We spent the rest of the evening enjoying the International Food and Wine Festival where you walk around the World Showcase and buy small portions of dinner and dessert cuisine from all the different countries (with a few countries like “cheese” and “desserts” thrown in). The night finished off by watching the fireworks.

Friday we spent the whole day at Epcot. We ended up taking a hotel shuttle to the Disney transportation center and taking the monorail to Epcot, my first Disney monorail ride! Their monorail system is pretty cool, on the one to Epcot they do a quick loop around Epcot to give you the basics of what to visit.

The day began with a bit of rain, but it had mostly cleared up by the time we got to the park. We spent the day going around Future Land to catch several of the big rides, including Mission: SPACE, Test Track and Soarin’. We had lunch at the amazing Restaurant Marrakesh on the Morocco Pavilion for a wonderful meal complete with entertainment of live musicians and a belly dancer. It’s amazing how quickly a day goes by, there are still some rides in the World Showcase that I want to go on. In the evening we met up with a couple of MJ’s colleagues who also happened to be at Disney for the weekend with their young daughter. Dinner was in Italy and once again we wrapped up the night by watching the Epcot fireworks.

Saturday was Magic Kingdom day!

We took a hotel shuttle over and then the Ferry from the transportation center to the Magic Kingdom itself. We took a quick train ride around the park and then it was off to Tomorrowland. We took the PeopleMover around to get a view of everything and then enjoyed the Carousel of Progress, Stitch’s Great Escape and Space Mountain! Throughout the day we got to take part in other classics, including the Jungle Cruise, Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, a walk through Cinderella’s Castle. The only disappointing thing about the Magical Kingdom was the food, which was mostly a selection of hot dogs and hamburgers and distinctly pales in comparison to the amazing food over at Epcot. In the early evening I waited in the 35 minute line for a short ride on Dumbo the Flying Elephant, after which we met up again with MJ’s colleagues and went on It’s a Small World, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh and then watched the spectacular Magic Kingdom fireworks over Cinderella’s Castle. Wow. The evening was wrapped up with a bit of shopping.

Sunday was Animal Kingdom day! But first we had to check out of our hotel and spent breakfast with my grandfather, his wife, Jo, and my uncle Joe. It was nice to get to see them again so soon (we had just seen my grandfather in Phoenix a couple weeks before) and start the day with a tasty breakfast at the hotel buffet. Once checked out of the hotel we loaded our suitcases into my uncle’s car and the three of us headed over to Animal Kingdom for the day.

Obviously I love animals, so I was always excited about the existence of this park and I was very happy to finally visit it. The first thing we did was go on the Safari, which is really the highlight of the whole park, taking you through different African ecosystems to see a variety of animals. We saw Festival of the Lion King, Flights of Wonder with several birds showcasing natural bird behaviors and explored the Maharajah Jungle Trek where we got to see their tigers actually awake and wandering around their enclosure! We had a delicious lunch at Yak & Yeti Restaurant and then unfortunately it was time for my uncle Joe to drive MJ to the airport for his evening flight back home. Sad!

I stayed at the park until closing, going on the safari again and, my uncle rejoined me again after dropping MJ at the airport. We went into the It’s Tough to be a Bug! attraction and went on the Expedition Everest roller coaster. When the park closed my uncle drove me to my hotel to begin my week at the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS).

I extended my Disney ticket for a day on Sunday because my family had planned on going to Epcot on the Saturday following UDS, but their plans didn’t end up syncing well with mine. I planned on going to Epcot anyway but then realized I really wanted to go to the rest of the attractions with MJ, so instead I decided to spend that extra day on my ticket on Saturday by going to Animal Kingdom again by myself where I picked up where I left off attraction-wise. Got to the park at opening (9AM!), went on the safari again, took the first ride of the day on the Wildlife Express Train to Rafiki’s Planet Watch. I got my picture taken with Lilo and Stitch:

Then had lunch at the Rainforest Cafe and then headed over to DinoLand U.S.A. for their DINOSAUR ride. I will say, having a the friendly Disney staff makes all the difference when going to a park alone, it didn’t feel nearly as lonely as other touristing adventures I’ve been on alone were. After DinoLand it was time for me to catch a shuttle back to the hotel.

More photos from our trip are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157627953468729/

I picked up my bags at the hotel and caught a shuttle to the airport for my evening flight. Between all the Disney, family visiting and UDS fun, it was a wonderful trip! We’re thinking of doing another Disney trip in the future and are thinking we’ll actually stay at The Contemporary, the Disney resort next to Magic Kingdom that actually has the monorail run through it.

UDS-P Orlando: Day 5

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!


Elizabeth Krumbach, Laura Czajkowski, David Wonderly

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!

UDS-P in Orlando: Day 4

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.

UDS-P in Orlando: Day 3

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!

UDS-P in Orlando: Day 2

The second day of UDS!

– Community Roundtable –

We spent this roundtable reviewing the results of the Ubuntu Community Survey (see: here). The discussion primarily centered around exploring what type of “bickering” in the community that people were experiencing and if we could address it. From there we began discussing responses to the leadership questions where we touched upon not only individuals feeling empowered to join the leadership teams within the community, but those leaders themselves feeling as though they could make tough decisions as needed.

Meet with the Ubuntu Desktop Designers

This session began with several of the Canonical Desktop Designers offering introductions. From there they discussed some of the tools they’re making public via their site and blog at design.ubuntu.com, including the toolkit page which has links to branding guidelines and logo files, Unity details, and more. The topic of design tools was also raised because of concerns over design teams not using Linux-based tools for their development work, and Scott Richie asked if all wine bugs were fixed – could they use Ubuntu for design development? It was out of this session that I learned about the Pencil Project for prototyping. From there the discussion also covered the low number of configuration options in Unity and Gnome3 itself which the design team is working to resolve.

Development documentation improvements

The session reviewed the points from the Getting involved with Ubuntu development survey (see: here). There was a lot of interesting feedback in the survey which can help improve the documentation, including what resources individuals who took part in the survey learned Ubuntu development from and precise examples of how they believe the documentation can be improved like by providing more packaging examples. They also are working to get more new packagers to review the Ubuntu Packaging Guide, and to report bugs as they find them. I also found the survey interesting because they covered where folks get Ubuntu development news, and as part of the Ubuntu News team this was really valuable to me.

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

App developer site resources section update

This session was focusing on improvements to developer.ubuntu.com/resources/ to make the page easier to navigate and scalable as the documentation, links to API specs, tutorials and other “resources” grow. The team was interested in reviewing how other successful application developer portals get better ideas about how to structure their own, but were also mindful that not all developer portals have the same goals. There was also a very interesting proposal of making the platform diagram more interactive so with something like a mouseover an individual could perhaps see a path they could use from kernel to application.

I’ve uploaded full notes from the session here: community-p-app-developer-site-resources-section-u

Leadership Mini-Summit

The afternoon was spent with the Leadership Mini-Summit (see: here). I could probably spend a whole post talking about just the topics covered in these three hours but I’ll keep it short for now.

We decided to focus on a few key sections of the outline on the wiki including:

  • Limiting Council membership as far as terms or number of councils an individual can be on at once to encourage participation from a broader group
  • Best Practices for individuals participating on councils, boards and general leadership positions
  • Canonical-Community Interaction

Several action items came out of this session but it was mostly a lot of discussion to define what the challenges are within our growing community and brainstorming some ideas for how to address them in ways which would work now and could scale in the future.

I think my favorite proposal was to adjust Community Council meetings to add a portion of every meeting where we do a public check in with another council, board or team within the project to see if there is anything we can help with or they wish to discuss. There was also talk of ways which we can better advertise the Leadership Code of Conduct so that contributors in leadership positions have a better idea of what is expected on them within their role.

Charles Profitt took a great photo of the session here:

http://ftbeowulf.wordpress.com/2011/11/01/uds-leadership-summit/

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

Tonight we had the Ubuntu Women dinner! Seven of us from the summit piled into a van and headed out to meet up with Michelle Hall of Qimo for Kids fame. She welcomed us into her home where we enjoyed a great dinner that included salad with lots of toppings, and home made garlic bread and an amazing chocolate bread.

We wrapped up the evening at her place by spending an hour outside in the back yard with a fire and some s’mores. Thanks again to Michelle for such a great welcome (and it was so nice to finally meet her!), Amber Graner for driving us all out there and to Michelle’s husband Michael for helping with planning (and offering to drive until capacity required the van!) and doing the graham cracker run required for the full s’more experience.

UDS-P in Orlando: Day 1

I actually arrived in Orlando several days ago with MJ so we could go to some Disney parks (which I’ll blog about later!) before he flew home and I went into Ubuntu Developer Summit mode. Sunday evening after visiting Disney’s Animal Kingdom my uncle dropped me off at the UDS hotel and I quickly met up with some fellow community members to spend the evening with some food, drinks and good conversation.

This morning began with the keynote section of UDS where Jono Bacon did his traditional introduction to UDS, Mark Shuttleworth did a keynote presentation on the Past, Present and Future of Ubuntu and George Grey, CEO of Linaro, discussed some of their progress and plans.

You can view Mark’s full keynote here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bOwyGYTMv8

From there it was off to a day full of sessions!

– Community Roundtable –

This roundtable centered around brainstorming general community discussion points we wished to cover throughout the week. These include:

  • Review the Ubuntu Community Survey results (see: here)
  • Plans for work on Building Community wiki page
  • Community scaling to accommodate a growing community
  • Community growth without bureaucracy

We also discussed Mark’s keynote address from the community standpoint. We were largely glad he didn’t unveil any real surprises and there was a lot of support for the multi-device plans, there are many people who wish there was an Ubuntu option for devices they use rather than only really having Android as the open source option.

Better Recognizing Community Contributions

One of the results from the Ubuntu Community Survey was that some community members aren’t feeling appreciated and it’s causing motivation problems. In this session we focused on ways in which we can extend the “thank you” culture of the community. Jorge Castro created a bug report to add a clause about being appreciative to Our Philosophy and over a dozen people and a couple of teams volunteered to write posts of their own on various social media outlets thanking their fellow contributors.

I’ve uploaded full notes from the session here: community-p-better-recognizing-community-contribut

Designing and Creating Ubuntu Experiences

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this session because I’m not involved with the Canonical design team or familiar with much of the work they do but their proposal was a very interesting one. Shifting the focus from the typical developer stack that people think of when working on an OS (kernel, middlewhere, shell) they are seeking to empower the community to create “Experience” teams which will focus on a particular experience for the user which transcends these standard labels and delivers a specific “experience” like streaming media from your Ubuntu system to your TV. The idea is to use the tools already in place and make the improvements needed to deliver solid experiences to the user and they’re planning to do a trial this cycle and then review how it went to expand it further. I think the most important thing I got from this session was a very good push from the Canonical Design team to empower the community to make decisions about the Ubuntu experience, something that some members of the community haven’t been feeling lately.

I’ve uploaded full notes from the session here: community-p-designing-and-creating-ubuntu-experien

After lunch were the first plenaries of the summit. The Cloud Foundry talks didn’t interest me all that much (the technology is cool, but I’m a sysadmin rather than a dev). However, in the middle of these two they gave Stefano Zacchiroli, the current Debian Project Lead, an opportunity to give a talk on “Collaboration Between Debian and Ubuntu: An update” and I’ll let my tweets do the talking here:

Great history of Ubuntu-Debian relationship being presented by Stefano Zacchiroli (current Debian Project Leader) #uds

Work Debian has done to foster collaboration: Derivatives Front Desk, Debian dErivatives eXchange (DEX), Derivatives Census

Ubuntu-Debian Relationship has shown “Good progress” hooray! :)

Challenges and opportunities: Difficult to get Canonical software in Debian, collaborative mentoring, role of ISVs #uds

“all contributions propagate, everybody wins” #uds

Increase in patches from Ubuntu to Debian, more Ubuntu people getting involved directly with Debian (as DMs and DDs) #uds

Ubuntu Women UDS-P Goals

I ran this session and started off by talking about some of our accomplishments from this past cycle including setting up all our social media outlets, the Month of Making competition and work we’ve completed on the new theme for our wiki. From there we touched upon key points we wish to accomplish in this cycle, including:

  • Continuing with development of our mentoring program
  • Testing and installation of our new wiki theme
  • Improvements to our main website text (wall of text is no fun!)
  • Improvements to our Best Practices document for teams looking to attract more women (less confrontational)
  • Identify and flesh out target groups of women we’re looking to bring into the Ubuntu community and work out strategies for reaching them

One of the things I really love about having an Ubuntu Women session at UDS is the new blood that it brings in. We had a couple new contributors come by with really fresh ideas and even someone who ended up taking on a couple blueprint items!

I still need to update the formal blueprint, but I’ve uploaded full notes from the session here: community-p-ubuntu-women-project-goals

Ubuntu LoCo Council Items for the Precise cycle

The LoCo Council has made some really amazing progress over these past couple years. They now work on reapprovals of teams in addition to the standard initial approvals, they worked with Canonical to get conference packs improved, frequently work with Canonical IS to get technical blockers removed for teams and even launched a blog this past cycle to help communicate with the wider community. They will have a session or two later this week but this session they wanted to focus on ways they can take time this cycle to find further ways to encourage teams. One proposal was to pair up representatives from a successful, approved LoCo with similarly composed (language, size, etc) newer teams to offer guidance and support. There was also a great deal of time spent discussing size and organization of teams into smaller, regional chapters within the LoCos. The general consensus was that there are some countries which can benefit from formally splitting into geographical regions but for the majority of teams internally organized regional chapters work the best and offer the fairest distribution of resources. There was also discussion about customization of the LoCo Team Portal display name on the teams list page to make teams easier to find – they will not be changing the way that teams are named in Launchpad.

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

Debian Health Check

I wrapped up my session day by going to the Debian Health Check session. I’ve gone to these since my first UDS in Dallas in 2009 and it’s been inspiring to watch the progression. It’s not uncommon to see Ubuntu developers who are also Debian Developers now and today much of this session is compromised of really solid discussion about bug report integration options and how the new Application Review Board (ARB) process in Ubuntu and new developer.ubuntu.com portal will impact Debian (will fewer packages get to Debian? Hopefully not, part of the ARB charter puts emphasis on directing contributors to Debian if their package is appropriate there).

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

This evening was the Meet and Greet with a buffet of sandwiches and cupcakes with do-it-yourself sprinkles!

Great day, looking forward to another tomorrow!

“I’m going to Disney World!”

I am a Disney animated features fangirl. My bedroom growing up was full of Disney toys (ok, Star Wars too), every Christmas my parents would get me the latest Disney VHS and accompanying lithograph and watch from the Disney Store. In those days before the web, I once sent a letter to Disney asking for a full list of all their full-length animated features to make sure I’d seen them all and they were happy to oblige! My best friend and I would save up to go to opening showings of the latest animate feature in the theater. I did a book report on An American Original : Walt Disney. I used to draw a lot and many were Disney characters. Even in High School my binders and folders were covered with Disney characters and stickers, like this (actual folder I still have!). It’s amazing that I survived High School being such a massive dork, in retrospect it’s pretty obvious why I wasn’t popular :)

This is the background for understanding exactly what it means when I say this:

17 years ago, when I was in 8th grade, I went to Disney World for the first and only time. It should have been a dream come true, but instead I got horribly sick due to the heat.

I went to one attraction, Walt Disney’s Carousel of Progress. I spent the rest of the day getting intimately familiar with the toilets of the Disney World First Aid office and trying to figure out what “MK” meant on all the pillows (yeah, Magic Kingdom, some days I’m smarter than others). We ended up having to spend the night in a cheap motel in Orlando because I was too sick to risk the ride back to my Aunt’s place in Clearwater. The next day we went to Epcot, where Spaceship Earth (the big ball thing) and the 3D theater were both closed for repairs during the off-season. I was still a bit queasy and hot, so the day wasn’t all that enjoyable.

It was probably the most expensive family vacation we ever took and by far the most disappointing for me. I’ve been upset about it ever since, the question of “Have you been to Disney World?” is met with this story.

But this week…

“I’m going to Disney World!”

It probably goes without saying that I’m massively excited.

Cinderella's Castle - Walt Disney World

We’re taking a redeye on Wednesday night to put us on the ground in Orlando shortly after 9AM on Thursday after a connection in Charlotte. The plan is to spend about 4 days between Magical Kingdom, Epcot and Animal Kingdom. On Sunday MJ is flying home and I’m staying in Orlando for the Ubuntu Developer Summit (the actual reason for this Orlando trip). I’m coming back home late on November 5th.

Now let’s hope I don’t get sick! :)

Northern California Ubuntu Hours and SF Release Dinner!

I was in Philadelphia for the actual release day of Ubuntu 11.10 so I went to the Pennsylvania team’s release party (congrats again on your reapproval!).

In San Francisco I ended up postponing the regular monthly Ubuntu Hour a week and we held an Ubuntu Hour and then an 11.10 release dinner on Wednesday the 19th. Fortunately that was also the day that we received our CDs so we had CDs for our release party.

I arrived at 6PM and met up with Michelle Mastin who had brought along an ExoPC running Ubuntu 11.10, which Oneiric the Ocelot got to play with:

We were soon joined by Laura, who had been invited out by a friend at NoiseBridge, our friendly neighborhood hackerspace. Then Greg Grossmeier showed up, a recent transplant to San Francisco from Michigan. I’ve worked with Greg on several things over the years, including the Americas Ubuntu membership Board so it was a pleasure to finally meet in person.

We wrapped up at the coffee shop and met up with other Noisebridgers on the short walk over to Thirsty Bear Brewing Company for our 11.10 Release Dinner.

Much fun was had and the ocelot made some new friends.

We ended up with a total of 10 people coming out for the dinner and left shortly after 9PM.

Thursday night was the Ubuntu Hour in Mountain View. I took the 6:14 Caltrain down so I arrived shortly after 7 to an already lively group.

By the end of the night we had 12 people enjoying warm drinks and discussions about Ubuntu. When someone asked about new features in 11.10 I did a mini-presentation based on the one I did in Philadelphia last week.

The night turned from great to exceptional with the arrival of Reynaldo and Linda Gil and Belinda Lopez. Reynaldo first contacted me about two weeks ago about what the Ubuntu California team could offer in terms of networking and support for some work with Edubuntu he was starting in San Jose with a focus on the Latino community. I quickly informed him about the in-school efforts of Partimus in San Francisco and we arranged to meet at the Ubuntu Hour. It was great to meet up and the Hour was a really great opportunity to introduce him to several players in the Ubuntu community near San Jose. Belinda has a background in education and happened to in town for the FLOSS Documentation Summit at Google this week so I invited her out to the Hour and to meet with us about educational opportunities. After the Hour, Reynaldo, Linda, Belinda and myself had dinner and a lot of really inspiring conversation at a nearby Italian place, a perfect way to wrap up the evening.

More photos from both events are available here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157627938849996/

Thanks to everyone who helped make it happen!

Visit to Philadelphia

I took a sleepless redeye on Friday the 7th to get into Philadelphia at 6:30AM on Saturday the 8th. I had quite the public transit adventure as I took a shuttle bus from the airport, since the airport line train was unavailable due to work being done. From there I took a train two stops to our hotel where I dropped off my bag, picked up a quick breakfast and hopped on another regional train to meet MJ. We spent the evening with more of the family, breaking their Yom Kippur fast with bagels, lox and other delicious foods. From there it was back down to Philly to check into our hotel for the week.

Sunday was the first day of MJ’s conference so I met up with Nita for a couple hours and had lunch in Olde City (cheesesteak, yummy!) and on her way out of the city she was able to drop me off at the Philadelphia Zoo where I met up with Jon, Crissi and the boys. As always the zoo trip was a fun one, and I was delighted to learn that they had their Xtinkshun experience still going on, so we were treated to Muppets throughout the zoo! We also got to see their new jaguar cub (which I learned about on ZooBorns).

Sunday night I met up with MJ and we went to a conference social on the 43rd floor of the Comcast building in Philadelphia, where I enjoyed a Comcastini, a mashed potato bar and stunning views of the city.


View from Comcast building, PSFS is our hotel

This was a working trip for me too, so I was working 9-5 each day of the week from the hotel. Unfortunately the hotel internet speeds left much to be desired on the weekend and evenings, but I was able to get work done during the day. It was probably my most productive work trip yet, we really planned my workload well to compensate for hotel internet and I was able to knock out some important asynchronous project work.

Monday evening MJ took me out with some fellow conference-goers. As mentioned in my last post Tuesday and Thursday were Ubuntu nights. Wednesday was a conference dinner event at the Franklin Institute which was a beautiful night. Not only did they have a great catered dinner with an open bar, they opened the institute exhibits to the attendees (including the special Mummies exhibit, which we saw in July), offered several Planetarium shows and even gave free rides on the Sky Bike.

Thursday during the day I was able to meet up with my boss and some co-workers for a company meeting and Friday MJ wrapped up the conference and I finished up my work week. We ended up without plans for the first time since arriving in Philly and took the opportunity to head over to dinner together at The Continental near the entrance to Penn’s Landing.

Saturday we spent with Nita, we were able to grab lunch MJ’s favorite pizzeria and headed back down to the city for a haunted house and then dinner at a “typical south Philly diner” that offered all the diner stuff I miss now that I’m living in dinerless San Francisco. Sunday we met up with some of MJ’s old friends and grabbed some lunch at Revolution House before walking down to South Street for some Rita’s for dessert. I ate far too much during this trip, I managed to get to the hotel gym once (was too busy otherwise!) but was looking forward to being home and getting back on my typical diet that consists of fewer bagels, cheesesteaks and cannolis – as delicious as they are I always overdo it when I come to Philly.

Lots more photos from the trip are up on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157627865240312/

We had a 6PM flight out of Philly which actually put us on the ground in San Francisco at a reasonable time.