Archive for April, 2009

Posted on April 22, 2009 - by jono

Ayatana

I just wanted to let you all know about an interesting project kicking off in the form of Ayatana.

Ayatana is the term that refers to the collection of user interface, design and interaction projects started by Canonical. Ayatana’s goal is to build a set of well researched and defined projects to help extend, improve and refine the Open Source desktop. More specifically, the focus of Ayatana is to improve the perception and presentation of information in the desktop, hence the name of the project; the Buddhist term for a “sense base” or “sense sphere.

I am really excited about this. When I first read The Design Of Everyday Things by Don Norman, he makes it clear in example after example that perception is a key consideration in great design. One of his examples is the thermostat. How many have you have walked into a cold house and turned the thermostat straight up to 10? Of course, cranking it up doesn’t do a jot to heat the house any quicker, but the perception of the interface and the expectations around similar devices suggests it will. There are countless examples of this kind of perception in devices, interfaces and across the desktop. I am excited that the project is starting out with this approach.

What I find exciting about Ayatana is that it is really putting design at a top level. Over the years we have seen collaboration in our community really evolve: at one time it was heavily programming led, but now we see contributions across a wealth of diverse skill types: translations, documentation, advocacy etc. Ayatana is going to be an interesting vessel in which design plays a real role accompanying these other skill sets.

The Ayatana community are keen to encourage contributors to get involved in the design, hacking, translations, documentation, and other areas. Canonical has also invested a team of developers who are actively contributing to the project. This team includes rock stars such as Mirco Muller, Ted Gould, Cody Russell, Bo Thorsen, Aurelien Gateau and Neil Patel. In addition to this a team of designers will be contributing to the project including some familiar faces such as Matthew Paul Thomas, Martin Albisetti, Ken Wimer and David Siegel as well as some new faces such as Ivanka Majic and Mat Tomaszewski.

Currently Ayatana comprises of the following Open Source projects:

• notify-osd – a set of guidelines for organising user interactions with notifications and dialog windows
• indicator-applet – an improved message indicator and its underlying indicators framework

The first point of contact for getting involved is the Ayatana mailing list here and the archives are available here. To kick things off the team have organised their very first Ayatana IRC meeting on the 5th May at 17.00 UTC. The meeting takes place in #ayatana on irc.freenode.net. The agenda for the meeting will be fleshed out in more detail on the mailing list.

Posted on April 20, 2009 - by jono

Jaunty Release Parties

Ladies and gents, this week is a big week for Ubuntu. As we build toward the release of Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope on Thursday April 23rd 2009, final preparations are being put in place.

While there is much going on right now I just wanted to focus your attention in this particular post on Release Parties. At the time of writing we have 92 release parties happening all over the world! Thanks to everyone who is participating in organising and joining these parties: we have already broken our record for the number of parties organised for a release. At the start of this cycle my goal was for us to break the **100* party milestone and we are so close to this record we can taste it! So, if there is no party in your area on this page, go and organise one and add it. We can do this, friends.

Also, I would love to see just how many group photos we can get for these parties. To do this just get as many people as you can to stand against a wall, get someone to take a photo and put it online on Flickr / Picasa etc and tag it with ubuntu, release, party, 2009, 9.04 and jaunty. I am also planning to build a montage of these group photos, so would appreciate if you folks could email at jono AT ubuntu DOT com with a link to your group photo and the name of the LoCo team and location of the party. Thanks, folks!

Posted on April 19, 2009 - by jono

Interviewed on FLOSSWeekly

A few weeks back I had the pleasure of doing an interview on the rather excellent FLOSSWeekly podcast with Leo Laporte and Randal Schwartz. On it I talk Community, Ubuntu, Art Of Community, Canonical, Severed Fifth and more. Check it out here.

Posted on April 14, 2009 - by jono

First Videocast Tomorrow

Quick note: tomorrow (Wed 15th April) at 11am Pacific I will be doing my first real live video cast here discussing various topics including Ubuntu, the Jaunty release, Art Of Community and the Community Leadership Summit.

I will also be fielding your community questions in the video cast: you can ask them in the chat channel that is on that page. Hope to see you there!

Posted on April 12, 2009 - by jono

Community Leadership Summit 2009

Just a quick message to let you all know that today I announced the Community Leadership Summit 2009 on the 18th and 19th July 2009 in San Jose, California. The event takes place the weekend before OSCON in the same venue: the San Jose McEnery Convention Center.

The goal is simple: if those passionate about building great communities can get together to compare notes and discuss and debate these topics, we will all benefit from better communities.

The summit gathers together community managers, leaders and organizers as well as the projects, organizations, commercial vendors, ISVs and others who have an interest in building a strong and enabled community. The purpose of the event is to get everyone together to talk about the many nuances of building strong and effective community, such as governance, creating collaborative environments, conflict resolution, transparency, open infrastructure, social networking, commercial investment in community, engineering vs. marketing approaches to community leadership and more.

The event is very much a summit: it’s primary focus is around discussion. It will be run in the style of an unconference; a clear and open schedule in which attendees can volunteer sessions and engage with other attendees. This will ensure the summit packs in a healthy chunk of diversity, covering a wide range of topics and perspectives. In addition to the discussions the summit will feature some scheduled presentations, panel discussions and social events.

The event is entirely free, but you need to pre-register here. You can read more about the event at www.communityleadershipsummit.com.

In its first day day many community managers have signed up to attend such as Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier (OpenSuSE Community Manager – Novell), Dave Neary (GNOME Foundation Board Member – Neary Consulting), Brian Proffitt (Community Manager – Linux Foundation), David “Lefty” Schlesinger (Linux Foundation Mobile Advisory Board, GNOME Foundation), Karsten Wade – (Fedora Community Leader – Red Hat) and John Mark Walker (Community Manager – Collab.net). Rock and roll.