Archive for November, 2009

Posted on November 30, 2009 - by jono

More On Lernid

Time for a quick update on Lernid, a little program I have been writing to make it as easy as possible to get involved in online Ubuntu events such as Ubuntu Open Week and Ubuntu Developer Week. This is how it looks right now:

Here is a summary of the recent changes:

• Better Classroom – the main classroom view now ditches the embedded web IRC and instead uses Telepathy. It has better scrolling and layout and importantly, is read-only, reducing the chatter, joins/parts and other fluff that clutters a session in the main classroom channel.
• Translated – Lernid is now available in Arabic, Asturian, Catalan, Czech, English (Australia, Canada, and United Kingdom), Esperanto, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Malay, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish. If you want to help translate Lernid, click here!
• Improved Layout – I cleaned up the interface a little and tidied up some dialog boxes.
• Fixed Bugs – a bunch of different bugs have been fixed and it is feeling much more solid now.

My plan is to fix a bunch of remaining bugs and then upload Lernid 0.2 to a PPA so you can all try it. I am keen to get a simple yet stable verion ready for Ubuntu Developer Week.

You can find out more about Lernid on it’s Launchpad page.

Posted on November 28, 2009 - by jono

The Shot Of Jaq Train Begins

Yesterday we kicked out our first proper episode of Shot Of Jaq and I am chuffed to bits with the response. Right now it stands at 42 comments, and I am sure this will continue to grow.

The whole idea behind Shot Of Jaq is that our 10 minute shot acts as the start of a conversation, and then the conversation continues on shotofjaq.org. With Shot Of Jaq being something of an experiment, I am tickled pink that our first shot has generated so much interesting discussion. I am also excited that we are seeing the beginnings of the Shot Of Jaq community forming, and we have some awesome community members already knee deep in the Shot Of Jaq spirit. Thanks so much to you all for throwing both feet in and getting involved. If you have not yet joined the conversation, go here and join us!

In the interests of making sure the Shot Of Jaq (and Severed Fifth) sound quality is top notch, yesterday we got up at 4am and went shopping on Black Friday. There I bought a new studio computer (Quad Core Athlon 2, 8GB RAM, 640GB disk, 20″ screen), new control surface (Tascam FW-1082), bought Aq a Shure X2U XLR to USB for his side of the recording (I will give him one of our Sennheiser mics) and I have some other bits on my list to upgrade.

The next episode of Shot Of Jaq will be out on Tuesday. Looking forward to it!

Posted on November 25, 2009 - by jono

Introducing Lernid

Last week, while at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Dallas I mentioned in one of the roundtables about how wicked-cool it would be to have a desktop client for Ubuntu Open Week, Ubuntu Developer Week and other online tuition events that we run.

One of the challenges we face every time we run these events is helping new community members figure out how IRC works. Ideally this should be as simple as running a program, selecting an event and connecting.

On the flight home I hacked up a little quickly app to get started on this. It is called Lernid.

This is how it works:

When you fire up Lernid it will ask you to select an event from a combo box and enter a nickname. The list of events in the combo box is actually held on the server side, which means we add new events and all Lernid clients will see them. This also means that other projects can use Lernid for their online events too. When the user hits OK it then loads up the main interface:

In the upper pane the schedule is displayed for the currently selected event, the bottom left pane shows the classroom channel and the bottom right pane shows the chat channel. The user is now all set to take part in the session.

Right now I have focused on getting a basic Lernid together, and I have created a Lernid Launchpad project and published Lernid 0.1 to my PPA.

I think there is bags of room for additional features. Some ideas include:

• Filtering IRC channels – filter out the ‘QUESTION’ lines, hide join/part traffic etc.
• Scheduling – include a feature to schedule a given event on the system calendar.
• Notifications – pop up a box to indicate that an event is about to begin.
• Session leader tools – it could also be useful to include a feature for a session leader to scribe down notes, share links or twitter right from Lernid.

Hopefully Lernid can act as a starting point for the community to add new features.

Posted on November 10, 2009 - by jono

Creating a roadmap for more successful teams

One of the challenges that every community faces, particularly teams inside a larger community, is the ability to coordinate what goals and ambitions the team is going to work on. Traditionally this has always been somewhat ad-hoc: people join a team and work on whatever they feel like. Ideas are ten-a-penny though. For most teams that work on larger projects (such as events, software, products and more) to actually be productive, coordinating this work can be complex: some projects require coordination across many people with different skill-sets, time-availability and resources.

Something I would like us to work towards in the Ubuntu community is encouraging a culture of best-practise in how we plan our work and coordinate our awesome teams to work together on projects. I believe this kind of coordination can help our teams increase the opportunity for success in their work, feel more empowered and productive and provide greater insight to people outside those teams on what the team is doing.

An effective way of doing this is to build a Roadmap for each cycle. This provides an opportunity to capture a set of goals the team will work together to achieve in each six-month period. This article outlines how to build such a Roadmap.

Creating Your Roadmap

While at first a roadmap can feel a little like a nod to the gods of bureaucracy, they actually possess many benefits:

• Direction – one of the biggest complaints teams often report is a lack of direction. If a team gets into the habit of creating a roadmap at the beginning of a cycle, it gives the team a sense of focus and direction for the coming cycle.
• Documented commitments are more effective – a common rule in Project Management training is that actions assigned to people in a shared document are more effective than ad-hoc or private commitments. By documenting who will work on what in a cycle and putting their name next to an action can help seal a sense of accountability for their contributions to the project.
• Feeling of success – regularly revisiting a roadmap and checking off items that have been completed can develop a strong feeling of progress and success. It makes a team feel productive.

I spent some time recently putting together a little bit of infrastructure to help making roadmaps as simple as possible. This is how it works.

Step 1: Decide what your team wants to do

The first step is to open up a discussion with your team to talk about things that the team would like to do. As an example, a LoCo Team may want to organize a booth at a given conference or work together on marketing materials, a documentation team may want to work together on a book or guide, a software team may want to work together towards a first release, and a translations team may want to work together on documentation to help translate a particular language and organize translations events and sprints.

The most effective of way of having this conversation is to produce a wiki page in which people can jot down their ideas and this can form the basis of converting key popular ideas in the team into roadmap items. Keep the discussion focused on the next cycle (which lasts six months). You should make sure you have these discussions out in the open in your team communication channels, be it mailing lists, IRC channels or otherwise.

It is important to note that not every contribution has to be on the roadmap. Roadmaps are great for larger projects and goals.

Step 2: Create your roadmap document

To make things as simple as possible, I have created a roadmap template and place to store roadmaps. This is how it works:

1. Go to http://wiki.ubuntu.com/Roadmaps/Lucid and create a page in that namespace that reflects your team (e.g. http://wiki.ubuntu.com/Roadmaps/Lucid/ExampleTeam). Be sure to add a link to your new page on https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Roadmaps/Lucid by using this markup: [[https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Roadmaps/Lucid/ExampleTeam|Example Team]].
2. Open up a new browser tab and go and view the roadmap template. Click on Edit and copy the content from the template into your new team page that you created in the previous step.

You are now ready to start building the roadmap.

Step 3: Capturing projects in your roadmap

The roadmap is broken into a set of sections, each of which points to a particular goal you want to achieve. Each goal then has an Objective block which provides a task that needs to be completed to achieve part of the goal. Each goal can have many objectives.

The Objective block is structured like this:

• OBJECTIVE: An Objective is a goal that you want to achieve. Summarize your objective here in one sentence (e.g. ‘Exhibit Ubuntu at OSCON‘ and ‘Create Lucid Marketing Materials‘).
• SUCCESS CRITERIA: This is a statement that can be clearly read to determine success on the above Objective. This needs to be as clear as possible and not vague: it will indicate if you achieved the Objective (e.g. ‘A successful exhibition at OSCON‘ and ‘Lucid website buttons, banner ads and wallpaper provided for LoCo Teams‘).
• ACTIONS: This is a set of steps that need to be executed to achieve the Objective. It is recommended that if someone volunteers to commit to delivering on an action, you put it in brackets (e.g. Print out LoCo logo on a banner (Jono Bacon)). There can be multiple actions for each Objective.
• BLUEPRINT: If a Launchpad Blueprint applies to this Objective, link it here (optional).
• DRIVER: If someone is coordinating this objective and helping those involved to deliver on their actions, list that person here (optional).

The aim here is to try and capture what your team wants to do and who will be contributing to the goal. Let’s look at an example of organizing an event:

• OBJECTIVE: Exhibit Ubuntu at LugRadio Live 2009
• SUCCESS CRITERIA: A successful Ubuntu exhibition complete with demonstrations and materials.
• ACTIONS:
  • Confirm booth space with LugRadio Live organizers (Steve Harris)
  • File a request for CDs from ShipIt (Bruce Dickinson)
  • Develop artwork for main banner sign, staff badges, flyers (Janick Gers)
  • Provide demonstration laptops (2 x laptops) (Dave Murray and Adrian Smith)
  • Prepare demonstration speaking script (Nicko McBrain)
  • Promote our presence on LugRadio forums, Planet Ubuntu and Full Circle Magazine (Steve Harris)
• BLUEPRINT: N/A
• DRIVER: Steve Harris

The goal of a roadmap is to capture as many of these projects and apply the same structure that no only communicates what needs to be done, but also who has volunteered to work on which actions.

At the Ubuntu Developer Summit next week I will be working with many teams to talk more about this approach to roadmaps and encouraging our various teams, LoCo teams and councils to start experimenting with a roadmap to see how well it can help the team be successful.

Posted on November 9, 2009 - by jono

Canonical and Creative Commons Meet Donations Target

Melissa from the Creative Commons pointed me to the rather good news that Canonical’s offer to match Creative Commons donations up to $3000 has already been matched:

Just five days ago we announced that Canonical would be generously matching every donation dollar for dollar for the next week – up to $3,000. Well, we met that goal in record time! Thanks to everyone who donated in the past five days and had your donation doubled – for a total of $6,000 going toward our annual campaign to sustain CC!

Many thanks to Canonical for their ongoing support of free culture and Creative Commons.

We still have a long way to go to reach our $500,000 goal for this year’s campaign, so please donate today and show your support for a culture of sharing!

Thanks to everyone who donated, and if you haven’t donated yet, go and contribute!

Posted on November 9, 2009 - by jono

One Year Anniversary

One year ago today, I married the love of my life, Erica. From the minute we went on our first date, I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. We instantly developed a close connection; a bond that spans beliefs, interests, ambitions and tastes. Since that day we have not only carved out a life with each other, but grown a partnership that is strong and connected, underlined with a lust for life, experienced and shared together.

When it comes to relationships, I have always been inspired by my parents. They have been together for thirty years and they still hold hands, tell each other every day that they love each other, and put each other at the center of their lives. Erica and I found that connection in each other, and I look forward to spending the rest of my life with her. Bacon is happy.

Posted on November 6, 2009 - by jono

The Intersection Of Quality And Expectations

There has been a little bit o’chatter on the tubes recently regarding quality and our recent release, Ubuntu 9.10. There we were on Thursday, champagne in hand, kicking a new release out the door and while I have seen countless reports of happy users with effortless upgrades and hardware and software working better than ever before, there are of course some reports of things going less-well, some broken upgrades and unexpected quirks.

Those of us involved in the Ubuntu project, like anyone involved in any kind of endeavour, are emotionally invested in our work. When we hear of problems, it hurts us, and it is tempting to get a little defensive and find fault in those who criticise. Well, I don’t want to denigrate the experiences of our users who face problems: if something goes wrong, that user’s experience is genuinely marred. Irrespective of whether the fault was in our package, with hardware, with networking, in the upstream version of the software or elsewhere, that user had a bad experience, and we need to come together as a project to help prevent these problems from occurring again.

What I am conscious to do though is to put things in a little bit of perspective. It is tempting to believe that the sky is falling when we see patterns of negative outcomes: that is the way human beings are wired up. This concern can be further confounded when journalists write articles that look at a portion of the picture; a news-wire always makes things look more worrying than they really are. Then again, that’s what journos do: they look for patterns and they report on them. Hell, I used to be a journo, and that is what I was expected to do with the publications that I wrote for.

In the interests of keeping things in perspective, I just wanted to remind us all of some of the things going on in the background that I think are worth remembering. Take these for what they are, but I think they go a long way in helping to understand the picture before us.

Firstly, criticism is a sign of success. Ubuntu is arguably the most popular Linux distribution in the world, and has been growing every year since it started. This release of Ubuntu outdid each previous version in terms of how much data we shifted on release day. “With enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow” is one of the foundational attributes of Open Source and therefore it is not entirely surprising that when we kicked out a new release of the world’s most popular desktop Linux distribution, there were more eyeballs, more hardware, more networks, more devices, more configurations, more expectations and therefore more opportunities for things to go awry inside these attributes. If we then combine this with the natural inclination for human beings to communicate complaints as opposed to share praise, it is also not entirely surprising that we see these patterns before us, and that journalists report on said patterns.

Around the time we set the Karmic Koala loose, many comparisons were made to Windows 7. Of course, Windows 7 has generated an incredible amount of press, and the mere fact that we are being compared to the most dominant Operating System in the world is something that I consider an achievement. 11 years ago when I joined the Linux journey, it took 2 weeks to get the bloody thing installed, there was barely any device support, you needed a degree in rocket science and integration was something that happened to other people. Microsoft never stood still and we needed to catch up, but today we are direct competitors. This is a tremendous testament to the upstream community and the Ubuntu community for building an integrated system.

There is one key difference between our quality story and Microsoft’s though: we are transparent. You can download all of the source code that comprises Ubuntu, you can see all of our bugs, you can see all our patches, and because the software is free, you can download it freely and try it out, if only for shits and giggles. With a transparent development and quality assurance process, a culture of openness and transparency develops and we are all frank and honest about defects. Speaking as one dot on the Internet, I work for Canonical, a company directly invested in Ubuntu, and I feel comfortable reporting public bugs and defects in Ubuntu and I feel comfortable talking about what rocks it and what ails it: it is part of the Open Source culture in which we all exist. I love this attribute of free software: we are not afraid to talk about problems, and due to the open nature of our environment, the opportunity exists for success.

Fundamentally, if someone experiences problems with software, we need to resolve those problems. The global Ubuntu family is proud of all that we have achieved so far on this journey and we are firmly committed to the road ahead. Karmic was a ballsy release: we shipped some adventurous new technology and in the short six-month cycle that we are committed to, we tried to ship the most exciting, feature-full and compelling release that we could. It is this exact reason that attracted me to Ubuntu back in 2004: it was a project that was unafraid of pushing the envelope. The difference is that now we have millions of people who are judging our work, many of which have stories that we will never hear.

We have a tremendous opportunity to embrace these challenges. With our Ubuntu Developer Summit coming up in a few weeks, and with us focusing on a Long Term Support (LTS) release that is underlined by stability and enterprise-grade maintenance and support, we have an opportunity to really indulge in stability, QA and testing. As ever, this is a story in which we can all play a part and I welcome you all to join us.

Posted on November 5, 2009 - by jono

Not Tolerating The Intolerant

Thanks to my friends over at ZDNet for allowing me to post another guest article on their Between The Lines column. This time I have written an article discussing the importance of a productive, pleasant and pleasurable community that rewards great work and celebrates the exchange of both agreeable and challenging opinions, ideas and views, and how intolerance can risk and undermine that community.

Go and read Not Tolerating The Intolerant.

Posted on November 5, 2009 - by jono

The Art of Community #1 Culture Book on Amazon.com

It may have changed by the time you read this, but The Art of Community has now hit the #1 slot for the Business and Culture category Amazon.com:

You can see it on this page and you can check out the Art of Community Amazon page here. Go and buy a copy and support the project, folks!

Today I also did a webinar about the book and you see it here. Thanks to Intro Networks for the opportunity!

Posted on November 5, 2009 - by jono

Art of Community Webinar Soon

Just a quick note: I am doing a webinar on my book The Art of Community at 9am Pacific today.

You can join us here.