Author Archive

Posted on September 1, 2010 - by jono

Rest Well, My Friend

It was with great sadness that I read earlier that my friend and colleague Ian Clatworthy passed away after his fight with cancer. Although I never knew Ian that well, whenever I did work and spend time with him I always found him to be a fun, light-hearted, and always pleasant person to be around.

Words escape me.

You will be missed, my friend. Rest, well.

Posted on August 30, 2010 - by jono

Incredible Stories Of Free Software and Open Source

A little while back I blogged about wanting to reconnect with our ethos. In a continuation of that theme I am keen to talk about stories.

I have talked about stories quite a bit in my writings on community management (particularly so in my book The Art of Community). Stories are important entities in communities – they are vessels in which we share ideas, lessons we have learned, our experience and more. Many stories come laced with these underlining nuggets of wisdom that we then take aware and help us to refine and improve how we interface with the world and the people around us.

Stories though encompass another significant benefit: they allow us to inspire and encourage others via real-world practical examples of our ethos being put into practice.

A story I share at every Ubuntu Developer Summit is that when I started working as the Ubuntu Community Manager I got a lovely email from a kid in Africa who would walk two hours to his local town where he would spend his own money to buy Internet time in an Internet cafe to contribute to Ubuntu and then walk two hours back home. This story was powerful to me. It told me that my job is to help that guy get the most out of his hour, to justify his investment of energy and expense to just get involved in the first place. His story was inspiring, encouraging, and an impressive example of commitment. I always share this story at UDS as an inspiration for us to get the most out of each one-hour session.

These stories benefit us all, and in the continued theme of reconnecting with our ethos, I wanted to ask you folks what are the most inspiring and encouraging stories of Free Software and community that you have heard? Which story have made those little hairs on the back of your neck stand on end?

Posted on August 28, 2010 - by jono

On Zareason

These views are my own, and not necessarily those of Canonical.

Some time back the always awesome Earl and Cathy from Zareason loaned me one of their Strata laptops to play with. I met them at an event some time before, and while I had heard of Zareason, I really knew nothing about them. Since then I have learned about their work and played with the Strata. I just wanted to share some thoughts.

Zareason are a company that I think really gets Open Source. They are a small organization and incredibly supportive of Open Source in the local area and wider USA. They pre-install Ubuntu on their machines, focus on open hardware, and one really nice touch is that they include a small screwdriver with each machine because they believe that everyone has the right to be able to open up their machines and peek inside. In this age of screwless, inaccessible boxes and restrictive end-user license agreements, this is a refreshing change. Like most, I would never actually use said little screwdriver…but it is a strong statement of Zareason and their culture. Kudos!

So, as for the machine, it is a zippy little monster and works great. The pre-installed Ubuntu worked great out of the box, with pretty much everything running as expected. One thing that really struck me, is regarding build quality. I consider build quality an essential ingredient in a laptop. Laptops move around a lot, they get thrown into bags, and they get picked up, dragged around and balanced in precarious ways. The Zareason Strata I tried felt incredibly durable…as in…Thinkpad durable. I absolutely adore Thinkpads for this very reason, so again, Kudos Zareason.

Finally, a big decider for me in a laptop is the keyboard. There are many great laptops with horrible plasticky keyboards. The Zareason Strata has a really comfortable, useful, and durable keyboard. It feels strong but not difficult to use. Again, kudos Zareason.

So, Zareason produce great, solid, hardware pre-installed with Ubuntu, they are actively supportive of the Open Source community, and they affirm openness in both the software and hardware. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

Posted on August 26, 2010 - by jono

This Friday: Rockridge Ubuntu Global Jam In Berkeley

Just a quick reminder: as part of our awesome Ubuntu Global Jam I am organizing the Ubuntu California Rockridge Jam at A’cuppa Tea, College Ave, Berkeley. The jam is from 10am – 6pm – I hope to see you there!

Don’t live near me? Go and find your nearest jam or organize your own!

Posted on August 25, 2010 - by jono

Rocking The Application Indicators

Some time back the Ayatana project introduced the Application Indicator Framework, based upon technology created by the KDE project. We have been shipping this technology in Ubuntu for a few releases now and it makes the top-right part of the desktop a smooth, efficient, and pleasant experience, getting over the inconsistent and limiting notification area we had before.

To help build integration in the GNOME panel for this indicator work we had Ted Gould, Cody Somerville, and Jason Smith produce an implementation complete with C, Python and C# bindings, had Aurélien Gâteau continue to perform his excellent work with KDE, and Jorge Castro to help spread awareness of this work. In addition to this we contracted some developers to port apps with notification indicators that we ship in Ubuntu to the new framework, and this included apps such as Brasero, GNOME Bluetooth, GNOME Power Manager, Gnome Settings Daemon, XChat-GNOME, iBus, Nautilus, Policykit GNOME, Empathy, Gwibber and more. All of these patches are publicly available if other distros would like to use them.

The community has really got involved with the technology too, with community patches for Lernid, Banshee, LottaNZB, and DejaDup, and System Monitor, Weather, Screenshotting, Workspaces, Device Mounting indicators, support for the indicator framework built into AWN and Lubuntu, and more. I am absolutely delighted to see so much interest from application developers in the technology.

Posted on August 24, 2010 - by jono

Articulating IRC Contributions Concisely

Today I had a call with Jussi from the Ubuntu IRC Council. We spent some time discussing a range of different topics, but then Jussi raised an important question which I think could benefit from some community discussion.

Today we have many methods of providing free support for our users – the Ubuntu Forums, Launchpad Answers, Ubuntu StackExchange and of course IRC. With each of the web resources there is a method of identifying those who are providing a significant and sustained contribution when providing support by checking their account profiles.

Unfortunately we don’t have this today for IRC. The simple reality is that there are many community members who use IRC every day and provide fantastically valuable support for our community, but there is no way of sufficiently articulating their contributions in a way that could, for example, be assessed for Ubuntu Membership.

The outcome I would like to achieve here is that someone in the IRC community who provides support could apply for Ubuntu Membership and the Ubuntu Membership Board could take a look at a profile that accurately and concisely summarizes their contributions, thus identifying that such contributions are significant and sustained, and therefore suitable for membership.

One option I was thinking could be something that I am thinking of as a ‘thankbot’. Imagine this context

<jono> hey, how do I do X, Y, and Z on Ubuntu?
<erica> hi jono, all you do is click on the frizometer and select babang.
<jono> ahh, that is it, thanks so much!
<erica> jono, it would be
<jono> thankbot erica
<thankbot> erica got thanked by jono - erica has been thanked: 28 times

We could then provide a means for others to check how many times a given person has been thanked, and it could be even cooler to have IRC client plug-ins that shows the number of thanks next to the persons nick.

Of course, the bot would want to be armed with the ability to not be gamed (such as limiting the number of thanks from the same person, to avoid spamming the bot), but these would all be details.

Could this work, and if not, is there a better idea out there to solve the problem of providing better visibility on our contributors who provide great support?

Posted on August 24, 2010 - by jono

Revisiting Ethos

When I first heard about Free Software in 1998 I was mesmerized by it’s potential. Sure, back then the software was complex and some would argue ugly, but underneath the rough edges was a thing of beauty — the opportunity for people to come together to make new things, and anyone with the inclination and energy could take part. Back then our community was small and intimate. Most people seemed to know each other, and there was a tremendous sense of family within Free Software.

Things are quite different today: while the ethos has remained unchanged, Free Software and Open Source are popular concepts and terms, we have many comprehensive Free Software platforms, and our small community has now become a huge, sprawling, global community that has diversified; inspiring everyone to bring their gifts and their talents to the community.

So, why am I talking about this? I think these days it is easy for us to purely focus on the ones and zeros, the bugs and patches, the squabbles, the emails, and the challenges that face Free Software. While these things are part and parcel of our community, I worry sometimes that we forget the very human reasons why many of us got involved.

I was reminded of this last week. I was having a pretty shitty day, I had spent most of the day on the phone, I had oodles of email and TODO items to get though, and I was just feeling a bit tired and worn out. As my day came to end I saw a tweet show up on my desktop from someone who had just used Linux for the first time and was expressing how excited they were at exploring their new system. When I read it it took me right back to 1998 when I felt exactly the same way.

My take away from that day was that I think it is healthy for us to remind each other why we got involved in Free Software and Open Source, and I wanted to ask you all what attracted you, and what still attracts you to our community. To be frank — I don’t care which community you are in, whether it is Ubuntu, Red Hat, Solaris, GNOME, KDE, X, OpenStreetMap, whatever — I am more interested in the ethos which transcends the borders if these different communities.

So, why are you passionate about Free Software and Open Source?

Posted on August 23, 2010 - by jono

Getting More Developers Interested In Participating In Ubuntu

I am just beginning to get into the planning stages for the next cycle for my team, and as part of this cycle we would like to really focus on attracting more developers to participate in Ubuntu. We would like to see more people interested in getting involved in packaging, fixing bugs, and joining our community. Daniel Holbach on my team will be leading much of this work.

Right now the 11.04 planning slate is clean, and we are looking for what you all feel are the areas in which Daniel’s time and effort would be best spent in the interests of having more people participate.

Where do you think we should focus our efforts?

Posted on August 23, 2010 - by jono

11.04 Ubuntu Developer Summit Announced

Hot on the heels of the announcement of the Natty Narwhal, I am tickled pink to announce the details of the next Ubuntu Developer Summit taking place in Orlando, USA from 25th – 29th October 2010. We also have a brand new Ubuntu Developer Summit website which provides all the details about how to get there and why UDS is interesting if you are in our community, if you are an upstream, and if you are a vendor.

The Ubuntu Developer Summit one of the most important events in the Ubuntu calendar and at it we discuss, debate and design the next version of Ubuntu. We bring together the entire Canonical development team and sponsor a large number of community members across the wide range of areas in which people contribute to Ubuntu. This includes packaging, translations, documentation, testing, LoCo teams and more. UDS is an incredible experience, filled with smart and enthusiastic people, fast paced and exhausting, but incredibly gratifying to be part of the process that builds the next Ubuntu.

For every UDS, Canonical sponsors a number of community members to attend the event. We are looking for those who want to bring some real insight and expertise in their area of Ubuntu, be it development or community governance. If you feel you could offer this but can’t afford to cover your expenses of attending, you should apply for sponsorship. The deadline for sponsorship is 8th September 2010.

Posted on August 23, 2010 - by jono

Help Colin Get His Kids Back

I don’t tend to blog about appeals, but I came across this terribly sad story and I really want to encourage you all too also pledge and support him. Here is what happened, written by a friend of Colin:

Colin & I have been close friends for 13 years when we started our MBA program together. We then both lived in London and our children played together. Colin moved back to his home town of Boston before I returned to the US and unfortunately he got divorced from his wife, an Egyptian national, in 2008. He was granted full legal custody by the US courts of his two young boys (US citizens). His wife created forged passports in a fake name and kidnapped his two children by illegally flying back to Cairo on Egypt Air. He hasn’t seen them in more than a year and she is in hiding.

Mirvat el Nady now has an arrest warrant in the US and is wanted by Interpol (see here). Colin is being supported by his Senator John Kerry and has received help from Vice President Biden and Attorney General, Eric Holder. The problem is that Egypt doesn’t support the Hague Convention and doesn’t have an extradition policy with the United States so they don’t recognize any of the international legal rulings in Colin’s favor. Colin has now won visitation rights in an Egyptian court, but Mirvat didn’t show up at the legally required meeting day / time in Egypt.

You can see an interview with Colin here about his ordeal.

I am not a father yet, but it doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to understand how painful and heartbreaking it must be to have your kids taken away from you and to have no idea where they are…and no way of getting in touch with them.

I wanted to encourage you all to show your support for Colin, and contribute to his legal defense fund. You can also show your support by joining this Facebook page; I am sure kind words of support on that page will be welcomed.

We pledged today, and with him aiming to raise $25,000 for the legal defence fund, if we all contribute a little this could really help this family. Thanks, folks.