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Archive for April, 2010

Posted on April 29, 2010 - by jono

Thank You Everyone For Ubuntu 10.04

Today we released Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx, available in Desktop, Server, and Netbook editions.

Lucid is a phenomenal release that has brought a new finesse and shine to what we as a community have worked together to achieve. I see this finesse executed in a fantastic array of features (which you can read about here), and underlined by an unwavering commitment to quality through the many disciplines involved in building Ubuntu. This work has not only been undertake by our development team at Canonical, but also by our passionate global Ubuntu community.

Today is a day in which everyone involved in the Ubuntu community should sit back for a moment and feel proud of our achievements. Whether you have worked on code, packaging, testing, bugs, documentation, translations, advocacy, or whatever else, your contributions have made Lucid and it’s supporting global network of community contributions what it is. Building an Operating System is a large and complex task which demands a wide variety of different skills and personalities to achieve, and I am so proud of everyone who has brought their gift to the Ubuntu table to help make Ubuntu better for everyone.

As one person riding this train, I just want to thank you to all of you for your hard work. Now it is time to celebrate!

Posted on April 29, 2010 - by jono

Community Leadership Summit 2010

Folks, I just wanted to remind you that the Community Leadership Summit 2010 is happening on the 17th and 18th July 2010 (the weekend before OSCON) in Portland, Oregon.

This is the second incarnation of the popular event designed to bring together community leaders and managers and the projects and organizations that are interested in growing and empowering a strong community. The event provides an unconference style schedule in which attendees can discuss, debate and explore topics. This is augmented with a range of scheduled talks, panel discussions, networking opportunities and more.

The event provides the first opportunity of its kind to bring together the leading minds in the field with new community builders to discuss topics 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 much more.

Make sure to add it to your diary go and register and join the Facebook event page.

Posted on April 28, 2010 - by jono

London And San Francisco Release Parties

Not long until the release now, and on Thursday there are two release parties I really want to be at, but I can only make one. So…I figured I would share them here so you folks can get along.

London Release Party – taking place at Davy’s at St James’ Winebar – More Information.
San Francisco Release Party – I will be at this one, taking place at the Thirsty Bear – More Information.

There are over 40 release parties scheduled, so go and find your nearest one.

Posted on April 28, 2010 - by jono

Let’s Make Ubuntu a Trending Topic

On Thursday we release Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx and I have one simple dream for that day:

I want to make Ubuntu a trending topic on Twitter.

…I know, I know, we should all use identica.ca, and indeed, I do. Twitter though represents a huge opportunity to socialize the new Ubuntu release with a huge demographic of new users. I don’t just want to see us becoming a trending topic, but I want to see Ubuntu mentioned everywhere. We can do this, but we will need to unite as a community to pull this off.

To do this we need to not only tweet about the new release ourselves but to also encourage all of our friends to do so too. This is all about encouraging as many people as possible to spread the word, encouraging people to re-tweet, and thus getting tweets in everyone’s timelines. All you need to know is #ubuntu: just make sure you add #ubuntu to your tweet to make the love happen.

We can do this, friends.

Rock and roll.

Posted on April 23, 2010 - by jono

Lucid Community Team Review

One thing I have been working hard to continue to grow and refine with each cycle is how I manage my team at Canonical, the projects that we are working on, and how we coordinate ours and other projects with the wider community. As I have focused on improving this project management approach, I have been working to help better structure and plan our projects.

While I started doing this with my team specifically, I was keen to see if I could improve this in the wider community too. As such, at the last Ubuntu Developer Summit I worked to better socialize the idea of teams developing a firm idea of what they want to achieve in a cycle, planning that work out, assigning the work across the wider team and making steady progress on those goals throughout the cycle.

To do this I encouraged teams to build roadmaps with a core set of goals, divide those goals into blueprints and to track actions inside those blueprints. Some teams embraced this more structured approach and were successful in achieving their goals.

As part of this work I approved a set of blueprints that I would manage as part of my team. This core set of blueprints, a mix of my team’s and other community goals, set the primary goals and workflow for my team throughout the cycle, and my role was to keep everything on track.

At the start of the Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx cycle I blogged about these plans for my team in Lucid. They included these blueprints:

Engage in outreach with targeted upstreams to build support for Application Indicators into their code
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-lucid-application-indicators-outreach

Help communicate needs of upstreams to Launchpad team
https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-lucid-launchpad-upstream-improvements

Continued documentation for Upstreams
https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-lucid-upstream-documentation

Upstream Contacts
https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-lucid-upstream-contacts

Adopt-an-Upstream initiative
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-lucid-adopt-an-upstream

Get Harvest more production ready
https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-lucid-harvest-next-steps

Improve Kernel community patch flow
https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/kernel-lucid-bugs-with-patches

Facilitate transition of Permissions Reorganisation
https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-lucid-permissions-reorg-process-changes

Help the IRC Council in being effective
https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/irc-council-lucid-plans

Improve translation status reporting
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-lucid-improving-translation-status-reporting

Increase community participation in coordinating translations
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-lucid-community-participation-in-coordinating-translations

Definition of translations best practices and policies
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-lucid-translations-best-practices-and-policies

Improve Quality Assurance on translations
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/lucid-qa-community-testing-translations

Increase community developer contributions in Launchpad Translations
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-lucid-increasing-lp-translations-dev-community-contributions

Raise awareness of LoCo team work
https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-lucid-loco-stories

Help the LoCo council to be successful
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/loco-council-lucid-plans

Make LoCo Directory usable for the LoCo Community
https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-lucid-loco-directory-development

LoCo Council
https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-lucid-loco-council-nominations

EMEA Membership Board
https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-lucid-emea-board-changes

Americas
https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-lucid-americas-board-changes

Asia/Oceania
https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-lucid-asia-board-changes

Kubuntu
https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-lucid-kubuntu-council-changes

Ubuntu Open Week
https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-lucid-ubuntu-open-week

Ubuntu Developer Week
https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-lucid-ubuntu-developer-week

Release Party Coordination
https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-lucid-release-party-coordination

Ubuntu Global Jam
https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-lucid-ubuntu-global-jam

Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase
https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-lucid-ubuntu-free-culture-showcase

Improve UDS Scheduling
https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-lucid-summit-improvements

Team Sprint Planning
LoCo Docs Day(s)
Release Name Announcement
Governance Assessments
LoCo Week
Debian Relationship
LoCo Stories
UDS Planning
DebConf
Desktop Events

The Fridge
https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/fridge/+spec/community-lucid-fridge-improvements

summit.ubuntu.com
https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-lucid-summit-improvements

LoCo Directory
https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/loco-directory/+spec/community-lucid-loco-directory-development and https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/loco-directory/+spec/loco-directory-event-registration

Harvest
https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/harvest/+spec/community-lucid-harvest-next-steps

So, we had a large set of blueprints with an even larger set of actions and I was keen to ensure I could provide as much support guidance across these different communities and blueprints.

I did by using the burndown chart approach that we in the Ubuntu platform management team have been experimenting with recently. I decided to trial this for the Lucid cycle to see if it would help me provide a sense of perspective and oversight over the team, and more importantly, help optimize my team and the community for success.

As we draw the Lucid cycle to a close, the burndown looks like this:

For those unfamiliar with a burndown chart, the Y axis is the number of committed actions in all of the projects I am managing, and the X axis is the time until the end of the cycle. Each bar on the chart indicates the number of items yet to do (red), the number of completed actions (green), and the number of postponed actions (orange). To use the chart effectively I need to keep the number of completed actions under the thick black line; this then provides a constant stream of progress across the collection of actions.

Doing this effectively is not as simple as saying “make sure you complete two actions every day until the end of the cycle”. Some actions take seconds to achieve, some actions take days to achieve. As such, while using the chart, I found myself developing a better awareness of the size and scope of tasks so I could better plan for the team. This was particularly important around vacations, holiday periods and other downtime.

I already have a pretty structured way of managing the team; we have weekly calls, I sent out call notes, create new actions, review outstanding actions etc, and the burndown just factored into our weekly workflow in a fairly non-invasive way.

While the burndown is primarily a useful tool for me, when I look at that chart I am hugely proud at how the team was responsive to keep the various projects on track. While this certainly applies to horsemen Castro, Holbach, and Planella, this also applies to the wider community. Take a look at the assignment summaries:

Let me explain what we have here. Across all of the blueprints that we committed to with their included actions, this is a list of who had actions assigned that affect the burndown. Naturally Jorge, Daniel, David and I have the largest assignments, but I am hugely proud to see that (a) we had lots of community participation and (b) those who did participate were hugely successful in completing their actions. Even there many folks only had a few actions to complete, this experiment demonstrated to me that the tool is useful for helping raise the opportunity for success.

As such, in the Maverick cycle I am going to use the same approach, but continue to encourage more community participation in these structured blueprints. I think that the burndown approach not only helps me guide all these projects and keep them on track with a regular flow of achievements, but it also helps raise my visibility on the different actions which helps me easily identify the next pieces of low-hanging fruit and coordinate with the community around completion of those tasks and unblocking any problems.

So, in a nutshell, I am proud of everyone’s achievements and I look forward to even more success in the Maverick cycle

Posted on April 22, 2010 - by jono

Change I Can Believe In

When I started out on my Open Source adventure, my desktop looked like this:

Today, it looks like this:

Wow.

That is all.

Posted on April 21, 2010 - by jono

Ubuntu Power Users Community

As Ubuntu continues to grow and refine, particularly in bringing excellence in design to the platform, there has been some concern in some parts of the community that it is less attuned to power users who want to tweak many aspects of the system than it once was. I agree. That in my mind is not a bad thing: Ubuntu is focusing on a simple, sleek and refined experience, and sometimes as Mark said recently, less is more.

Despite these subtle changes, this does not mean that we can’t accommodate power users and provide them with a fantastic experience. One of the most wonderful aspects of Ubuntu is that we have many derivatives and sub-communities that build on and change elements of the Ubuntu experience. This got me thinking: why don’t we create a power user community. Earlier I tweeted this, referring to it as Ubuntu Tweakers, but then nixternal informed me a ‘tweaker’ is a meth head. Best use another term then…

So this is my thinking. We should have a community that supports those users who like to take a stock Ubuntu system and hot rod it in every possible way. This community could do the following things (just off the to of my head):

produce a central hub of documentation for how to tweak, extend and customize your Ubuntu system. Imagine a fantastic library of wiki documentation for tweaking every possible aspect of your desktop…
provide communication channels and support resources.
build tools and facilities to provide post-installation facilities for configuring different elements of Ubuntu.

The benefit of this kind of community is that it would provide a home for those people who desire more configurability of Ubuntu beyond it’s default installation, and provide a fantastic way of supporting this community of users.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to build such a community, but I would love to help provide help and guidance to those who do. Anyone want to step up and lead the effort and we can maybe schedule and IRC meeting to move forward?

Posted on April 21, 2010 - by jono

Ubuntu/Launchpad Single Sign On Now Open Source

I just wanted to share some good news. Some time back we made Launchpad available as Open Source, and we have gone on to see a wonderful and thriving Launchpad development community flourish there.

One component in particular that was not made available as Open Source, was the Canonical Identity Provider which is used by the Launchpad Single Sign On and Ubuntu Single Sign on facilities. I am pleased to announce that we are now able to provide this code under an AGPL3 license. Thanks to Stuart Metcalfe who has been coordinating the technical and licensing work to be able to contribute this change.

You can grab the code from this Launchpad project page.