Archive for February, 2009

Posted on February 25, 2009 - by jono

Party Time: Jaunty Style

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, it is that time of the year again – it is time to start organising your Ubuntu Release Party! This time for our friend, Ubuntu 9.04, the Jaunty Jackalope.

Every time we kick out a new version of Ubuntu we like to get together, celebrate the release and have a great time. And you know what, I think we all deserve it. After six months of hard work building our lovable Operating System in the many different ways in which we all contribute, we are all about ready to let our hair down, get together and toast to Ubuntu and Free Software in general. If you have not contributed to the community you are not only welcome but encouraged to come and party with us – release parties are a fantastic opportunity to get to know our friendly and bustling community! Good times!

So, with this blog post I want to kick off the call for parties. The last two releases have generated a great selection of parties from all around the world, but for Jaunty I want us to get out there and smash it: lets make this the release with more parties than ever before! When Jaunty is released everyone should be close to a fun, welcoming release party. We can do it, folks.

Making It Happen

Alrighty, so how do we make this happen? Simple, follow these simple steps:

• First you need to pick a date. Jaunty is released Thursday 23rd April 2009. Some people party on the same day, some on the Friday and some on the Saturday. Pick a date that works for your group party people. Sometimes you may get different opinions on when to hold the party: don’t let this get the better of you, so make sure you don’t spend too long debating the best date.
• Find a venue to have the party in. This can be as simple as just nominating a bar or restaurant. More details on how to organise a party are available here. If you have any questions, check out the ubuntu-event-planners and loco-contacts mailing lists. Also, check out the #ubuntu-locoteams IRC channel on Freenode.
• Add your party to this page. Make sure you add the name and preferably the email address of the main organiser(s) of the party. This is the page we use to tell people where all the parties are.
• Spread the word! Blog about it, twitter/identi.ca it, put up posters, tell your local computer groups and anything else you can do to make sure that everyone knows about your party! The more people who know the more people may come!

OK, so there we have it. Lets get this show on the road. I myself will be at the release party in London, but I can’t wait to hear which parties you are all organising! Oh, and one quick tip: don’t put it off. I have heard many stories in which someone decides they want to organise a party but they don’t have enough time. The reason I wanted to announce now is that it gives us all plenty of time to get together a rocking set of parties. Wicked.

Posted on February 24, 2009 - by jono

Ubuntu Global Bug Jam Success!

Wow, what an incredible Ubuntu Global Bug Jam we had this weekend! Thanks to everyone who got involved. Safe to say, we not only beat the number of bugs touched last year, but we smashed it!

Reports from the different events are still coming, but y’know, a picture shows a thousand words:

Ubuntu Chicago – read more…and more

Ubuntu Berlin – read more

Ubuntu Michigan – read more…and more

Ubuntu UK – London – read more

Ubuntu UK – Birmingham

Ubuntu Philadelphia – read more

Ubuntu South Africa – read more

Ubuntu Florida – read more

Ubuntu Denmark – read more

Ubuntu Ireland – read more

Amazing! Its events like this that really help us spread the Ubuntu Ethos. Thanks to everyone who got involved and helped make Ubuntu that bit better this weekend!

One final note. Nathan wrote a wonderful blog entry about his experience of joining a bug jam, and I wanted to reproduce it for you all:

“After introductions were out of the way, it was bug squashing time. This is where the community feeling started to sink in for me. In one corner of the room, we had one person teaching another person how to program in C. In another corner, we had people working on a new logo for the ubuntu-chicago Launchpad page. And all over the place, we had people triaging and fixing bugs. Whenever somebody had a question, there was usually someone in the room who had the answer. However, even with all of the knowledgeable people that were present at the event, a question regarding 5-a-day came up that nobody knew the answer to. As I was preparing to ask the question on IRC, Richard Johnson pulled out his cell phone and first called Daniel Holbach, who was sleeping, and then called Jorge Castro who was able to answer the question. All over the internet, people refer to the Ubuntu Community. This bug jam really made it clear to me that we are not just a community, we are a giant family. Not only do we work together to make Ubuntu a great opperating system, but we also care and look out for each other”.

Stunning.

Posted on February 20, 2009 - by jono

Ubuntu Developer Summit Sponsorship

Hi everyone. Due to some wordpress quirks, I have announced the sponsorship process for the next UDS, but it has appeared in a post that was published yesterday. Don’t ask! For the benefit of planet readers so it doesn’t get buried in your feed, that post is here.

Posted on February 20, 2009 - by jono

Ubuntu Global Bug Jam: Here It Comes, Lets Make It Rock Hard

Alighty folks! The Ubuntu Global Bug Jam is almost upon us! From the 20th – 22nd February Ubuntu LoCo Teams from around the world get together to hammer the living daylights out of unsuspecting bugs in Ubuntu. This is not only (a) oodles of fun, but (b) really helps Ubuntu be a better system for everyone.

One thing that I am keen that everyone remembers: you don’t have to be an official developer, packager or programmer to take part in the Ubuntu Global Bug Jam. A fantastic contribution is going through the list of bugs and testing and trying to reproduce bugs and adding notes and comments to bug reports. Also, lets not forget that Ubuntu Global Bug Jam events are a fantastic place to learn and improve your skills: you can sit next to someone who can show you how to do something or explain something in more detail.

In this post I want to cover three things that everyone should know about the Ubuntu Global Bug Jam. Pay particularly close attention to (3), which could be a lot of fun for everyone!

1. Finding An Event

So, first things first, we need to hook you up with a Global Bug Jam event:

• Go to this page and see if there is an event near you. If so, go along and have a great time meeting other Ubuntu fans and helping squash some bugs! You don’t have to register or let anyone know in advance that you are attending. Just show up and have a blast!
• If there no event on there, you are welcome to join people bug jamming in #ubuntu-bugs!

2. How To Participate

We want to count every bug that is worked on in the Ubuntu Global Bug Jam so we can get an idea of how many people participated. Doing this is simple:

• Go and join the 5-A-Day Participants Team.
• Go and edit this page and ensure that your event is listed and that every person who is attending adds their name to the Participants list.

Thats it! No longer do you need to log or register bugs, and you don’t need to download a special client to do this. Just do your bug work and we can figure the statistics out without without you needing to be bothered.

3. Make Some Noise

While the Ubuntu Global Bug Jam is happening, lets make as much noise about what we are doing as possible. This is a great opportunity to show the rest of the Ubuntu community and the wider Open Source community how much fun our bug jams are. We are really, really keen to see lots of content coming out of bug jam events across the world. Apart from anything, this helps grow the concept of the Ubuntu Global Bug Jam for when we do it in the next cycle. So, here are some great ways in which you can make some noise:

• Post Photos – as the event happens, take photos of what people are doing and put them online. Tag them with ubuntu-global-bugjam-february-09 on Flickr and other photo sharing websites so we can find them.
• Blog – blog what is happening at the event as it happens! This is a great way for people across the Internet to see what you are working on. If some of your participants are on Planet Ubuntu this is particularly important: lots of people can check in on the action! If you do blog, post some photos too if you can: we love to see what is happening at events!
• Microblog with Twitter / identi.ca / Etc – As your event runs, why not microblog what you are doing. Let us know when you have added a comment, fixed or bug or made a new discovery. On identi.ca there some groups you can post to: [!ubuntu]http://identi.ca/group/ubuntu) !ubuntudevelopers !ubuntulocoteams !kubuntu !xubuntu
• Chat With Us – if you are on IRC, log into #ubuntu-bugs to participate in the discussion. Another great channel to be a part of is #ubuntu-locoteams. Both channels are on the Freenode IRC network. Details of how to connect are here.

Alrighty! All set? Lets go!

Posted on February 19, 2009 - by jono

Stick To ‘Em

This weekend I am heading over to Los Angeles for SCALE. In addition to speaking, attending the Ubuntu Global Bug Jam and generally catching up with people, I plan on hunting out some stickers to cover this bad boy with:

Some of you will be familiar with how utterly plastered my previous laptop was. Now that the poor blighter has been decommissioned, I need to claw back some laptop credibility and get this fella up to par. If any of you are going to SCALE and have some cool stickers you want to lob in my general direction, that would be wonderful!

Posted on February 19, 2009 - by jono

Announcing the Karmic Koala Ubuntu Developer Summit

Hot on the heels of the announcement of the Karmic Koala, I am tickled pink to announce the details of the next Ubuntu Developer Summit taking place at Palau de Congressos de Catalunya in Barcelona in Spain from Mon 25th May – Fri 29th May.

The Ubuntu Developer Summit one of the most important events in the Ubuntu calendar and at it we discuss, debate and design the next version of Ubuntu. We bring together the entire Canonical development team and sponsor a large number of community members across the wide range of areas in which people contribute to Ubuntu. This includes packaging, translations, documentation, testing, LoCo teams and more. UDS is an incredible experience, filled with smart and enthusiastic people, fast paced and exhausting, but incredibly gratifying to be part of the process that builds the next Ubuntu.

For every UDS, Canonical sponsors a number of community members to attend the event. We are looking for those who want to bring some real insight and expertise in their area of Ubuntu, be it development or community governance. If you feel you could offer this but can’t afford to cover your expenses of attending, you should apply for sponsorship.

How To Request Sponsorship

Luckily, requesting your sponsorship is pretty simple, and we a simple system to handle sponsorship requests. To apply for sponsorship, just follow these simple steps:

• Go to summit.ubuntu.com and log in with OpenID. When you have logged in, click the Request Sponsorship link.
• On the first page, add your location and use the About yourself box to tell us why you should be sponsored and tell us about your work on Ubuntu – here you should tell us your vital stats – tell us your 5-A-Day numbers, your work on the sponsorship queue, what you have uploaded, which teams you are in, your LoCo involvement, documentation you have written, any translation work and other work that you have been involved in. When you have done this, click the Next button.
• On the final page, answer the questions and then click Finish to finish your sponsorship request.

All done.

Everyone should get their sponsorship requests in by Wed 4th March 2009 to be considered. Good luck!

Posted on February 17, 2009 - by jono

On Governance

While writing a chapter on governance for the Art Of Community, I kick off the chapter with the wonderful story of how Mike Basinger, a volunteer who has never worked for Canonical Ltd, has been able to serve on two of the most significant governance bodies in the Ubuntu community. I think the story itself speaks well for the Ubuntu governance infrastructure; an infrastructure that other Open Source projects have also been building on for their own communities too.

I asked Mike what excited him about the Ubuntu community and he described it eloquently:

“What excites me about the community governance is the sense that Ubuntu is a community of thousands of people from every country, race, sex, and religion who have got together and said ‘we want computing to be this way’. Linux and Open Source has enabled this as opposed to what Microsoft or Apple tell you. It is the sense that our community’s governance is open and anyone who wants to contribute can and has a say in the direction of Ubuntu. It is that the community’s main focus is to help each other, be that is write code, create documentation, or answer questions from our users.”

That made the hairs on the back of my neck stick up.

Posted on February 17, 2009 - by jono

Keeping Things In Perspective

Am I the only one who is getting a little tired of all the bickering over version control in the GNOME community? I was under the impression that GNOME is people, not GNOME is people (who argue over which way you skin a cat).

Version control is important, and it is important for us to have the debate, but it worries me when some of the commentary gets overly sarcastic, personal and flamey. Lets not let the debate compromise our relationships.

Posted on February 16, 2009 - by jono

Week Off

Just a quick note to everyone, I am taking the following week off as holiday to write the Art Of Community. This is the second and last week I am taking off to work before I hit the writing deadline. I will be responding to email, but a little slower than usual.

Posted on February 14, 2009 - by jono

Ready To Jam?

Next weekend is the Ubuntu Global Bug Jam!

This is the regular event in each release cycle in which LoCo teams from around the world get together to work on Ubuntu bugs: reporting, triaging, fixing and otherwise rocking Ubuntu. So far we really have an excellent global representation, with teams from all of the USA, South Africa, Japan, Denmark, UK, France, Germany and Ireland taking part. Right now we have 25 teams, but I would love to increase this to a big round 30. To do this, only you folks can help us achieve this.

Ubuntu California global bug jamming

If you are part of an Ubuntu LoCo Team, Linux User Group or other type of group, this is a great chance to get together with your members, help improve Ubuntu and have a big ‘ol pile of fun.

Getting involved is simple. Simply read this guide to running an Ubuntu Global Bug Jam event and ensure you add your event to the big list of participating teams. Don’t worry too much about organizing a huge and overly complex or refined event: a collection of Ubuntu-loving friends armed with laptops in a pub, restaurant, university room or someone’s house is all that is needed.

Ubuntu California jamming after the jam.

I will be blogging more about the Ubuntu Global Bug Jam later in the week. I really hope to see some more of our friends in the Ubuntu community coming together to organise events. I myself will be over in Los Angeles at SCALE and taking part in the Ubuntu Global Bug Jam event there. Rock and roll.