Archive for June 13th, 2009

Posted on June 13, 2009 - by jono

Community Leadership Summit Update

A while back I announced the Community Leadership Summit 2009 in San Jose on the 18th and 19th July 2009. Well, I think it is time for lil’ update on what is shaping up to be a rocking event.

The aim of the summit is get community managers, leaders and organizers together to discuss, debate and share ideas on building great community in a vendor-neutral environment. The event is entirely free (although I ask everyone to go and register and it takes place the weekend immediately before OSCON, in the same venue: the San Jose McEnery Convention Center. Details of how to get there are here.

Since I announced the event, the response has been stunning and over 150 people have registered with a fantastic and diverse range of contributors signed up to attend. You can see this awesome list of attendees here.

The the aim and purpose of the event to provide an open, transparent and vendor-neutral environment for discussion, and I have been really keen to make sure this is an unconference (an event in which an empty schedule is available at the start of the event, and attendees can go and add topics). The reason for this is to ensure the sessions are as diverse as possible and not merely what I think we should discuss. The openness of the scheduling means that anyone can add a session that they think would be of interest to the other attendees.

If you are coming along and interested in running a session, feel free to discuss it on this wiki page with the other attendees: you may find some other people who would like to help with the session. Speaking of the wiki, we also have rideshare, roomshare and other pages springing up to make attending the event as easy and enjoyable as possible.

I have another update on the event half-penned, but I will send that over in the coming week. Stay tuned, and go and register! I hope to see you there!

Posted on June 13, 2009 - by jono

The Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase Kicks Off

Folks, we are back with another Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase!

The Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase is an opportunity to bring the best of two great worlds together by showing off high quality Free Culture content in Ubuntu. At the heart of Ubuntu’s ethos is a belief in showcasing Free Software and Free Culture, and with each development cycle we present the opportunity for any Free Culture artist to put their work in front of millions of Ubuntu users around the world. Although the space restrictions are tight, and we are limited to how much content we can include, the Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase is an excellent opportunity for artists everywhere. I am always hugely inspired by the wonderful entries that we recieve in each competition and I am excited about the opportunities we have to ship awesome Free Culture content with Karmic!

The winning submissions will be made available on the shipped CDs and download images of the Ubuntu 9.04 release. Every user will be able to find the content in the Examples/ folder in a home directory.

With this competition we are accepting submissions for audio, video, and graphic/photo submissions. We have a winner to find for each category, and the competition closes on 16th July 2009. The time is short on this competition, so you better get cracking on some stunning entries!

Entering the showcase is simple:

• Your submission must be one of the following:
  • Audio Entries – no larger than 1MB in size – made available in Ogg Vorbis format.
  • Video Entries – no larger than 2.5MB in size – made available in Ogg Theora format.
  • Photo/Graphic Entries – no larger than 0.5MB in size – made available in PNG or JPG formats.
• All entries must be licensed and distributable under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike or Creative Commons Attribution license.
• Upload your submission somewhere online (there are lots of free hosting solutions available such as archive.org). Do not email any of the organisers or judges with your submissions.
• Add your entry to one of the submission tables at http://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuFreeCultureShowcase.
• When the deadline for submissions closes, our panel of judges will pick a shortlist, and the Community Council will then pick the final winners from the shortlist.

The deadline is 16th July 2009 and you can read more about it at http://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuFreeCultureShowcase.