Thursday was the busiest day of the summit for me. It started with the Community Roundtable where we discussed some of the webapp development community members are doing for Ubuntu resources and how Canonical can make it easier for them (setting up staging sites, expanding access without compromising security). There was also some talk of an Ubuntu Jobs board – both for companies to post paid jobs (this is being worked on) and looking into something that can be used for volunteer positions within the community (maybe OpenHatch is the solution here?). Finally it was brought up that the method of using blueprints to set up sessions can be confusing to new UDS attendees.

– Community section Ubuntu.com –

The current Community section of Ubuntu.com was simply pulled over from older revisions when the theme and other content on the site was updated recently, so this session was to talk about what we wanted to see on the page. Jono started the conversation by mentioning different audiences for “community” – ones who want to “read” (consume documentation, attend, meet) and those who want to “write” (contributors) and that it should be addressed some how. The design team also learned from testing of the site that people expected the Community tab to be something about what Ubuntu did for communities, rather than a community itself. There was also talk of making the pages more impressive to attract more contributors (there are $x people helping do translations now!) and somehow integrating the LoCo teams into it so people can meet other Ubuntu people who are nearby. The Canonical web team is going to put together some ideas based on this session. Session notes available here.

– Ubuntu Membership behavior and Code of Conduct outside Ubuntu.com community –

Should your conduct outside the official Ubuntu resources have consequences with regard to your involvement in Ubuntu? I don’t think I have to tell anyone that this is a subject of some debate. It was discussed that individuality is a highly regarded and respected within the community, however you are representing the Ubuntu community when you talk to reporters, present at LUGs or conferences, etc so it’s important to represent in way which maintains the values of the community so people get the right impression. More difficult are cases where you may not be directly representing the project at the time (personal Facebook, Twitter) but people know you from the project and may expect that you behave in a certain way. The result of the session? Behavior outside the official project resources matter to some degree, but needs to be weighed and handled on a case by case basis taking into consideration how much you are “representing Ubuntu” in your communications. The body to weigh this is the Community Council and it was stressed that every attempt should be made to resolve things in a way that gives people chances and makes clear why certain behavior is a problem and may harm the project. Session notes available here.

– Ubuntu Women UDS-O Goals –

I thought this was an excellent session (if I do say so myself!). We had much of the plans outlined already and just needed to formalize some action items regarding the website, the structured mentoring program and leadership elections. The rest of the session we took advantage of the feedback of the amazing people in the room who have seen success in bringing more women in their team (yay Vancouver!) or who have women in their teams who are collaborating with others in the FOSS community to do outreach (yay Italy!). It didn’t make it into an action item, but I’d really like to see us put together a document that links to existing resources and adds our own tips for making your LoCo team more welcoming to women. Session notes available here.

– Config files management for Ubuntu Server –

I have attended a lot of configuration management talks these past couple years. Agreeing upon a policy for configuration management that doesn’t break Debian policy is very difficult and I didn’t see a clear path forward. A few weeks back Dustin Kirkland wrote a blog post with his proposal for .d directories for policy-compliant config management and sent it to the dpkg-devel list so packages won’t have to touch config files of other packages. Session notes available here.

– IRC Council plans – O cycle –

This session began with some really great action items for the team. First it was encouraging folks to apply for Ubuntu Membership through the IRC Council for heavy IRC contributions (in all of IRC, not just core channels, see here). From there we talked about improving tools for operators, the team really needs more folks who know Python to help work on the bots (start here and drop by #ubuntu-bots-devel if you’re interested). There was also discussion about making sure channels have the appropriate resources to make sure they run smoothly. Session notes available here.

– Open Week, developerweek, and stuff –

Last session of the day! This was proposed when there was questions about the value of all the Weeks we host in Ubuntu Classroom. Fortunately by the time this session happened many of those fears about value had been reversed – people at UDS said they enjoy these weeks and they should continue! So the session was primarily about making sure the audiences are clearly defined and giving action items to people moving forward for the plans for the next cycle. Session notes available here.

After sessions we grabbed a quick dinner and then met up with the Ubuntu Hungary Team for an evening of night tourism. A group of about 40 people gathered in the lobby for a long walking tour with them. The team did an awesome job and even had the forethought to all dress in their bright orange Ubuntu.hu t-shirts – it made finding our travel guides pretty easy!

The walking tour started on the Pest side of the river.

We then walked over the Széchenyi Chain Bridge to get to the Buda side. Once there I was super excited to learn that we’d be taking the Budapest Castle Hill Funicular (Budavári Sikló) up the hill! I saw one on Rick Steves’ Budapest: The Best of Hungary which I watched before coming here (thanks again Cheri for the recommendation!) and really wanted to go one one but figured I wouldn’t get around to it. I was happy to be proven wrong.

After wandering around the area for a while we hopped on one of the yellow trams and took it back to Pest where we enjoyed a few beers at a nearby ruin pub. On our way back I got dorky tourist pictures with one of the many statues standing (er, and sitting) around the city. We thankfully got back to the hotel shortly before midnight and I actually got a decent night sleep for once.

A huge thanks again has to go to the Hungarian team. From the moment I contacted Hajni a couple months ago to see if we could arrange some outings she’s been so accommodating and the team did a wonderful job showing us around their beautiful city. Thank you! Thank you!

I woke up at 5:30AM on Wednesday morning and couldn’t fall back to sleep, once again not enough sleep! After breakfast it was off to the Community Roundtable where we talked about what the 200 million users goal means for the community, nurturing leaders and talked a bit about UDS Sponsorship criteria.

– LoCo and Laptop Testing Review –

I remember when I saw Paolo’s first talk on ISO testing with his LoCo team back in Brussels and I was really excited about it – and promptly failed to ever actually get beyond signing up for the tracker because I did it at the beginning of the cycle before there were any ISOs to test. I revisted the tracker in the Natty cycle while preparing documents for the Global Jam but decided to hold off on jumping in with both feet and using it for the Jam itself. The session was a good one and in addition to covering ISO testing he also presented on the Laptop Testing Tracker. It’s all a really great program and I’m hoping I can work with the California team and reach out to other teams to help them too. Session notes available here.

– Discuss doc team goals for the 11.10 release –

The Ubuntu Docs team truly has a massive scope, handling everything from the official docs, to the plans for help.ubuntu.com, to helping teams improve their pages on wiki.ubuntu.com. Their todo list is very long and I’m happy to see they are moving toward creating a Strategy Document to get some concrete goals. There were also suggestions of small tasks that newcomers can do, which I hope is something that’s pushed to being a vital part of their strategy, like many teams they have a lot of work and volunteers exist but the path to involvement isn’t always clear. Session notes available here.

– Improve monitoring for the Server –

I was hoping the objective of this session would be to review some of the tools being taken into consideration as a follow up to this Nagios thread but it ended up ending after just a few minutes as key people needed to be elsewhere and the direction of conversation was led to “we may change at some point, but Nagios is the standard and we’re going with it.” We use Nagios at work (and I have an install at home monitoring my personal servers) so I wasn’t unhappy with this conclusion, no need to go back to my boss and tell him that we need to change everything for this amazing. awesome new thing.

– Accessibility review of Ubiquity –

Ubiquity is the Ubuntu installer and while mostly accessible there are currently there are a few accessibility problems which this session did a review of and was able to define action items for. These included having the installer make a sound when it starts up, looking into language selection, and making improvements to the slide show so that it’s actually useful for blind users. Session notes available here.

– IPv6 Health Check –

IPv6 has been on my radar for quite some time thanks to discussions I’ve had with MJ these past few months so it was interesting to attend a session where that was the focus. Installations can be a problem where IPv6 is the only connectivity, with the Debian Installer itself still requiring IPv4 (a proposed fix that is being reviewed). There are also considerations around DHCP6 and NFS which they’ll be following up with in QA. It’s great to see all this effort being put in to polish off the IPv6 support. Session notes available here.

– Ask Mark (Q+A with sabdfl) –

For this session Mark brought together several leaders from the community, including Amber Graner, Scott Richie, Jussi of the IRC Council and those of us on the Community Council and invited governance questions from the audience. Decisions about Unity, the retrospectively poor handling of the Banshee situation and other topics were brought up. We have a more formal governance roundtable session on Friday.

From that session it was down to the lobby to meet up with everyone to prepare for the Invisible Exhibition. We had a few cancellations and a few extra people show up but everything worked out well and by shortly after 6:30 we were able to head out. Getting 30 people to the exhibition using public transit was quite the adventure, but members of the Hungarian LoCo Hajnalka Horváth, László Torma and Gabor Kelemen who were guiding us along the way handled it with skill and we made it to the exhbition on time without losing anyone! Hajni had arranged our arrival with the venue so they had English-speaking guides for us and they were able to stay open late to accommodate our whole group.

I took a picture of the exhibition:

Just kidding. But that is what it looked like. The guide took us around a series of rooms where they would ask us to touch things and identify them and throughout asking us questions about how we were feeling, what our impressions are an whether our expectations were different from reality. The tour finished up with us buying drinks in the dark, complete with having to figure out which Hungarian Forint coins we had to pay with (fortunately they warned us beforehand so we could quickly review our coins in the light before going in!).

From there several folks went back to the hotel and the remaining 20 or so of us headed to an Italian restaurant to have some pizzas.

It was after midnight by the time we got back to the hotel and I spent some time talking to people in the casual part of the lobby where I got to play with Emmet Hickory’s tiny Sharp device running Ubuntu which makes my netbook look big!

Of course, it was another late night. On to day 4!

I woke up far too early again on Tuesday morning, jet lag fun! The first session I attended was the Community Roundtable again where Jono talked about some of the plans for the emerging QA infrastructure, and we discussed the need for quickstart getting involved pages and general wiki pruning for a lot of teams, and then plans for the revitalization of the Ubuntu Weekly News in a way that doesn’t overwhelm contributors (it was taking over 30 man hours to prepare it in the past, something I learned when Nathan Handler and I released an issue in January).

– Forums Health Check –

Apparently I am a pretty typical UDS attendee in that I don’t use or care for web forums all that much for personal use (I prefer IRC and mailing lists), but I admire and appreciate the tremendous value they bring to the support community. A major project that forums council member Mike Basinger has been tackling is the upgrade of this forum and this session he presented the fruits of some of this labor, most visibly the new theme but also a lot of underlying technical issues related to the upgrade including security and spam handling options for the newer version. Ivanka Majic from the Canonical Design Team was also attending and offering comments about the overall new design. Session notes available here.

– Edubuntu plans for Oneiric –

While Partimus.org doesn’t strictly use Edubuntu itself, we certainly use a number of metapackages from the project and it’s always nice to be able to give direct feedback to the project admins regarding our real world deployments. The session began with some follow-up from some known issues including translations in several areas and some small technical cleanup tasks. The discussion then moved to what attendees at the session and others had been requesting as far as features. Major pain points for school deployments appear to be some of the large, popular web applications that are commonly used for schools but which are either old in the Debian/Ubuntu archives (such as Moodle, discussion around this has been happening since my first UDS) or don’t exist at all (in the case of Koha). A suggestion was made to link to installation and maintenance documentation to the Edubuntu site itself so people have good resources at their fingertips even if it’s not as simple as an apt-get install. There was also some discussion about educational Windows apps that work in wine and how to get potential administrators of Edubuntu to be made aware of use the existing database at appdb.winehq.org. Session notes available here.

– Debian Health Check for O –

I have been attending this session since my first UDS in Dallas a couple years ago and each time I attend it feels like the social delta between the projects has been cut down so now these sessions are very calm and focusing on some key points of issue. Now with the recent launch of DEX the Debian team is also making a more public and direct effort to communicate with downstream projects that are based on it. I’d say it’s a pretty exciting time to be involved with collaboration between projects. Session notes available here.

It was then off to lunch, after which I had a great hallway discussion with Jim Campbell about documentation of all kinds.

– Integrate Lubuntu into Ubuntu ecosystem –

As far as flavors go I’m actually involved with the Xubuntu project rather than Lubuntu, but I’ve been greatly interested the work that Julien Lavergne and his team have been doing the past year in really getting Lubuntu cleaned up to be a flavor of Ubuntu. Becoming a flavor means that a project gains all the benefits of iso hosting, daily builds, release announcements (the other flavors are: Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Mythbuntu, Ubuntu Studio). I can’t count the number of times I’ve been asked how a version of Ubuntu becomes one of these flavors and I haven’t had a good answer, but with this move for Lubuntu to join the ranks they are working to smooth out the process. Mark attended this session and I joined him and Julien to take notes. The project now has the blessing to become included and right now there are really only some technical barriers to making this happen. Based on the feedback from this session it really looks like Lubuntu will be among the other flavors for 11.10. How exciting! Session notes available here.

– How to run usability sessions –

With the defaulting of Unity and all the changes that come with Gnome3 and the shell interface usability has really come to the forefront of testing in the Linux world. From my perspective the sharp rise in popularity of smartphones and slate/tablet systems has also increased my interest in how people use devices and methods of testing. This session was really great for all that, gave piles of very direct, practical tips for running even a small coffee shop usability study (ask 5-6 strangers in a coffee shop to try your new thing). Session notes available here, and are very detailed with everything that was discussed.

– Discussion of the goals of the accessibility team in the Oneiric cycle –

As a blessedly able person, accessibility really just started to show up on my radar last year because I never had a compelling need to seek it out. As I’ve watched the team over these past several months I’ve really come to learn that the team is so much beyond just making Ubuntu more accessible for people with disabilities, it’s about making Ubuntu really great for human beings and taking advantage of the amazing opportunity that a solid open source operating system community has to deliver a highly superior product when it comes to accessibility. While there are still many uncertainties, one of the things I was happy to hear from this session is that they want to do Classroom sessions to give some introductions to contributing to the team and some general Q&A sessions so the community has an even better opportunity to approach the team with questions. Session notes available here.

After the session I was able to get an email out about the Invisible Exhibition outing tonight with more details about costs and logistics (read here if you’re interested). I’m pretty excited about attending it tonight.

The evening was spent by first meeting up with some folks down in the ballroom for buffet-style dinner and checking out some of the cool hardware that Linaro had to show off. I then met up with Cherí Francis and around 9:30 we met up with several others for a ride down to the river to do some exploring. The river is beautiful and while we were there we ran into several other UDSers and mixed up our party a bit to explore in separate directions.

We did a bunch of walking, caught public transit for the first time and I ended up getting back to the hotel around midnight.

Now off to day 3!

My weekend began with a quick ride down to the San Francisco airport for a noon flight to Los Angeles. I dashed across LAX only to arrive at my gate to a flight that was delayed by over an hour. At the gate I met Clint Byrum who was on the same fight. The long flight over the Atlantic was uneventful, but unfortunately the delay in LAX caused us to miss the connection in Frankfurt. Lufthansa rebooked us on a flight 5 hours later so we spent the afternoon paying too much for wifi in the airport, chatting and eating frankfurter sausages.

It was almost 8:30PM on Sunday evening by the time I was checked in to Corinthia Hotel Budapest. The hotel was stunning, but I was too tired to enjoy it and headed straight up to my room to meet my roommate and get some rest!

Monday morning the day started with a gathering of UDS crew for the week, we picked up our t-shirts and helped set up the registration table. It was then off for a great breakfast (all the food here has been very good) and then the opening and keynote by Mark Shuttleworth.

You can view Mark’s keynote on youtube here: Ubuntu UDS O Mark Shuttleworth Keynote

I left the opening early for crew duty, and then it was off to the first session, a short Community Roundtable.

– Remote Desktop Improvements –

I don’t do a lot of Remote Desktop work and do all of my own systems administration via ssh but I was interested in this session to get a view of the changes in the remote technology over the past several years and to see what the goals were in Ubuntu. The session discussed two very different needs for remote access, one being a way for systems administrators who prefer the GUI to remote in to a server, and the other being a demo instance of Ubuntu for people who want to try it. I had never heard of x2go or noVNC prior to this session, both of which I’ll have to give a try. They also discussed several other options including ones based on familiar VNC and NX technologies. Session notes available here.

– UDS-O LoCo Team Directory –

This was a great session where we discussed the future plans for the LoCo Directory. One of them was to include more documentation in the LoCo Directory itself rather than having it on a separate wiki page that people may not be able to find. There were also a number of ideas thrown out to make it more people-oriented, like adding rotating photos of people at LoCo events as a banner across the top, create a planet-like feed for just LoCo feeds from appropriate categories on personal and LoCo team blogs. Session notes available here.

After lunch I attended the planeries before running off for crew.

– Beginners Team Roadmap for Ubuntu-O Cycle –

This session was booked at the same time as the NGO Team Oneiric Plans which I somehow forgot to subscribe to so I went to this one and chose to catch up on the NGO session after. I ended up leading this session with komputes as we spoke with members of the community about their perception of the team and what we could do to improve the mentoring program. The resounding response was that at last UDS the team didn’t have enough quality control of mentors, and at this UDS there was too much structure in place so potential mentors were put off by the “hoops they had to jump through” to volunteer to be a mentor. It certainly is a delicate balance and I look forward to the Beginners team tackling this issue. This was probably the session with the most participation from IRC of all the sessions I’ve been to so far, a number of the representatives from the Beginners Team who couldn’t attend were active remotely. The session inspired remote attendee David Wonderly to write this blog post about the team. Session notes available here.

I then met up with Chris Crisafulli so we could finish our crew duty for the day and then catch up on the missed NGO session, notes are available here. Sessions were beginning to wrap up and so we went out with Paolo Sammicheli and Chris on my first geocache! And second!

Plus it was a nice walk around our area of the city.

We got back around 7:30 and headed to the UDS Meet & Greet where I met up with Scott Sweeny who I knew from the Pennsylvania LoCo but hadn’t seen since before I moved to California. We ended up going for drinks with a couple of others and had a very enjoyable, (and very late!) night.

Perfect first day.