jonobacon@home

Today I just wanted to share a few thoughts on a much under-used and sometimes overlooked component in growing great communities: validation. Every community is an organically grouped bundle of people, many of which spend their free time choosing to be part of that community. With the majority of communities being associative volunteer-based groups, our [...]

Recently I have been talking to Prentice Hall, the rather spanky-awesome publishers of The Official Ubuntu Book by Mako, Matthew Helmke and Corey Burger, and the brand new Official Ubuntu Server Book by our friend and yours, Kyle Rankin and Mako. These books were commissioned by Debra Williams-Cauley who has been awesome getting them on [...]

Tonight I spent some time fiddling with the rather awesome VirtualBox to get a Karmic instance up and a Kubuntu machine up and running. I managed to get a rather nice set up going and I just wanted to quickly share my experience. This is a little rough and ready and I would appreciate if [...]

Recently I have delivering a presentation about the 12-stages of burnout at a few conferences and it seems to have been really useful to people. The presentation talks through the progressively worse stages and how to identify the symptoms and protect against them spiralling out of control. A bunch of folks have asked for the [...]

Folks, go and take a look at Linux Against Poverty. Ken Starks recently got in touch with my colleague Robbie Wlliamson, who then passed this on to me and I wanted to raise some awareness. If you are anywhere near Austin, go and check it out. If you are not near Austin, find someone who [...]

This blog entry is a little delayed after a crazy week of the Community Leadership Summit, then OSCON, then a weekend away for some much needed decompressing. Last weekend the very first Community Leadership Summit happened in San Jose and what a weekend it turned out to be. The idea for the event was inspired [...]

I just want to offer my congratulations to the Launchpad team for their excellent efforts in Open Sourcing the whole project. I would also encourage everyone to pass on their thanks to Mark Shuttleworth for this incredible gift to the Open Source community. Ultimately he made the final decision on this move and I personally [...]

One of the attributes in the Free Software, Open Source and Free Culture world that I am most proud of is the seeming openness and accessibility in the patch-work of communities that form this inspiring landscape. Every day we hear wonderful stories of people joining these communities, furnished with the opportunity to collaborate and having [...]

Quick update on my icon hacking. I have now figured out a way to get most of my notification icons to have broadly the right color. It used to look like this: Now it looks like this: To do this I first copied my Human icon, edited theme.index to change the name of the theme [...]

For some time now there has been a general move over to darker themes in GNOME-land. I have tried a bunch of themes here and there but I have always moved back to the default Ubuntu theme: I always found the dark theme less usable and harder to look at in my day to day [...]