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Archive for the ‘Advocacy’ Category


Posted on August 17, 2010 - by jono

Thankyou, Debian

Debian is awesome. You know that, I know that, we all know that, and 17 years ago Debian entered into our lives. Before I joined the Ubuntu project I was an avid Debian user, and still am. Ubuntu owes a huge amount of thanks to Debian and it’s global family of contributors for all of their incredible work.

If you would like to find out more about Debian, here are some links:

You can download the latest Debian release from here, and be sure to go and thank Debian here.

Thankyou, Debian, and long may you prosper! :-)


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 April 19, 2009 - by jono

Interviewed on FLOSSWeekly

A few weeks back I had the pleasure of doing an interview on the rather excellent FLOSSWeekly podcast with Leo Laporte and Randal Schwartz. On it I talk Community, Ubuntu, Art Of Community, Canonical, Severed Fifth and more. Check it out here.


Posted on April 14, 2009 - by jono

First Videocast Tomorrow

Quick note: tomorrow (Wed 15th April) at 11am Pacific I will be doing my first real live video cast here discussing various topics including Ubuntu, the Jaunty release, Art Of Community and the Community Leadership Summit.

I will also be fielding your community questions in the video cast: you can ask them in the chat channel that is on that page. Hope to see you there!


Posted on January 6, 2009 - by jono

Open Source and Open Learning

Years ago when I was at OpenAdvantage, I worked closely with a group called Access To Recycled Technology. Formed by two salt-of-the-earth students called Steve and Vinnie, they secured what they referred to as “access space” in Birmingham. It was basically a decent sized room that they used to fill with old, discarded computers. They would then install Linux on these computers and use them to train people and upskill them in Open Source software and general computing skills. Linux was the perfect choice: it ran well on older hardware, and software such as XFCE managed to squeeze more juice out of those machines.

For many of the people who came to access space, Steve and Vinnie would furnish them with a computer that they could take home to continue to learn and refine their skills. The guys had struck a deal with Birmingham City Council to take a warehouse full of old computers that were destined for the dump. This gave them a stock of computers to give out to the local community, complete with Linux and application software pre-installed. It was perfect for all involved: for the council to dispose of the computers in landfill was expensive, so when Steve and Vinnie came knocking, it was ideal.

I loved the concept of the scheme. It fits the opportunity of Open Source perfectly: old computers re-energised with free software to give away to people who need them. It helps put computers in the hands of people who could not ordinarily afford them, helps encourage learning, and contributes to closing the digital divide. It is also an ideal green-friendly way to deal with the mounds and mounds of computers that are simply not cut-out for Vista.

The opportunity for Open Source in this area is stunning. While at OpenAdvantage I worked with Birmingham City Council to fill a Community Center in Aston (a deprived part of Birmingham) with machines that ran Ubuntu to help train the local community. Courses were given in using the desktop, office productivity, graphics with the GIMP and Blender, web development in HTML and PHP, learning and sharing knowledge with Wikipedia, desktop publishing with Scribus and more. We also worked with the center to run courses designed to excite local young people. Courses were run on podcasting, recording music, editing video and more. The courses helped to get kids off the street and in a computer room, being creative and enjoying the technology. It was great to see their faces when they realised they could take the software home and use it there too, and that they could share it as much as they liked.

Open Source really paves the way to learning. I have met so many people who have had a hugely positive impact on their lives by enabling their creativity with Open Source.

An example of this was a kid known as WeirdHat. Years ago he used Blender to composite him fighting an animated character in lightsaber battle (unfortunately I can’t find the original video to share with you all). He then entered Theforce.net’s fanfilm forum with this video of him having a lightsaber battle with himself. It is stunning. Not only that, but he then went on to animate Colbert with a lightsaber and got featured on the show. He used Blender for it all.

WeirdHat is obviously a talented guy. The free availability of Blender and a stunning community of Blender users helped unlock his creativity. There are thousands of similar stories happening right now: Open Source opening up doors to creativity which are not only rewarding, but career building. Do you folks have any other success stories to share?

But lets get back to the concept of using Linux to recycle computers. While there are many of these schemes around the world, it seems that they are largely uncoordinated. It strikes me that there is oodles of potential in getting these different projects together to share knowledge, best practice and advice. There is also huge potential in working with other user groups such as Ubuntu LoCo Teams and Linux User Groups to help staff the projects, deliver training and install the software on computers.

Speaking personally, I would love to see our worldwide collection of Ubuntu LoCo Teams help to deliver Ubuntu or its derivatives to people on these computers. Are any LoCo teams doing this? If we have a small number of teams doing this, lets get them talking together and see what opportunities flow from it.


Posted on March 31, 2008 - by jono

Rambling Brit in TV Shocker!

A few months back I did an interview with the Sun Developer Channel and it was released today. The interview covers Ubuntu, MOTU, community building, developer communities, extremists, LugRadio, LugRadio Live USA 2008 and more:

Can’t see it? Click here!

You know what, I have done interviews before, but in this one I found it pretty nerve wracking. Something about a video camera poked in your direction in nerve wracking enough, let alone a full-on studio, like the one buried away at Sun’s Silicon Valley campus. Thanks to Barton for the interview. :)


Posted on October 15, 2007 - by jono

History Lesson

A few days ago I got an interesting email from a young chap:

hi jono,

my name is David and I am a fan of your website and your work in ubuntu and lugradio (my chin!!!!). i know you are a well known open source guy and community hero, and one day I want to do the same. i am 14 and want to leave school and do the same thing. i just wanted to ask how you got into free software and how you got to where you are today.

i know are a busy guy so don’t worry if you are too busy to reply to me. thanks a lot.

davis

It is an interesting question, and something I often wonder about people who I follow too; possibly explaining why I like reading biographies. Well, I figured I would provide a quick history, and I would like to encourage other bloggers to do the same. Erk, it seems I might be starting one of those rather annoying Internet memes. At least it is not a What are your top 5 science fiction films involving tentacles? meme. :P

I will warn you now though, this is a long post, and one I started writing on a train and then finished off on the train back. If it bores you, please move along. :)

In the beginning, there was hair

OK, I am going to spin back to when I was about 17 years old. I was young, had long straggly hair, and was doing my A-Levels at school. I had worked hard in my GCSE exams and done pretty well, but in-between my GCSEs and A-Levels, I joined my first band, Conspiracy, and was launched into an exciting world of band practises and gigging. Conspiracy were a band with an already established reputation in my area and much older members than me, so to get the job in the band felt like a huge opportunity. Consequently, despite my best efforts, more guitar playing than revision happened, and I completely screwed up my A-Levels and failed to get enough requisite points for my chosen university. Despite the dismal situation, the university (of Wolverhampton) offered me a place anyway (they cited an impressive interview as the reason for letting me in; I suspect they were just lowering the bar for numpties like me, mind). Despite my acceptance, I was not quite ready to give up my cushdie home-life and deferred University for a year, planning a year of working in the day and playing music in the evenings.

Being the supportive types my parents are, they rather bizarrely asked if I would like to run my own business in my year out, and offered to help fund it; it would be a means of me learning business skills, and doing my own thing. They are odd like that, they think of particular opportunities and dangle them in the face of their youngest born, when back then there was a likelyhood of it being wasted. It reminds me of when I was in hospital once having my wisdom teeth removed and they visited me, informing me that an insurance policy that they took out when I was born had matured, and I was the proud owner of £1050. As soon as I got out of hospital, I immediately ran out and bought a full Laney stack (a massive guitar amp) – it had 12 speakers, was bloody loud, and towered above me. I remember cranking that baby up, positioning it to my window and going outside in the back garden with my wireless system and the amp switched up to 8 – it was so loud everything would fall off my shelves in my room (we had very patient neighbours, as you can probably imagine). My parents should have known better. Anyway, I digress. I started my little business doing technical support (called The Mouse Man, my mums idea), and it lasted about three months. A combination of me being rubbish at technical support and not really business minded blew it, so I offered myself up for full-time work in the bookshop I worked at in Milton Keynes.

Around this time, my eldest brother, Simon, returned from the US and came to stay with us. Simon and I had a love/hate relationship back then – I hated him and he loved to taunt me. Despite our differences, we had some fun, and one day, while I was bemoaning Windows again, he mentioned something called ‘Linux’ to me, referring to Windows as a ‘Mickey Mouse Operating System’. He filled me in on how Linux was free, and you could get a free copy of it on the back of a book. Using my mighty staff discount, I nipped over to the bookshop I worked at in my rusty old Fiat Uno van and picked up Slackware Unleashed, complete with my 30% discount. We rushed back, and Simon began to install the included copy of Slackware 96 on my computer. It took him literally a week to set it up, and he was there with the case open, bits strewn everywhere, using pliers to poke around with the hard disk – I was not entirely enthused by such a sight, and slightly scared at this big ‘ol chunk of hardcore that he was installing. The only amusement I took was watching him get more and more infuriated. That made me happy.

Eventually, the “piece of hippy s**t” (his words) was installed and ready for me. Pretty much the day he finished the installation, he moved out, and I was left with a huge hardback book and this on my screen:

darkstar login: _

I sat down, stuck a Testament album on and started reading Chapter 1 of the mighty tome, and read about the community, and how every day people around the world worked together to make Linux better, using the Internet to share their work. I was utterly, utterly captivated, and the sheer potential of it all inspired me. Without actually using Linux, I read up on it, joined IRC channels, read newsgroups and mailing lists and got to know some of its rather fanatical users. Despite such excitement, the damn thing was inanely complicated, and after three weeks or so, I gave up. I was excited and enthused, but I just could not hack the pace, and I had grown bored of configuration files, compilers, and grep. I was out.

Well, it didn’t last long. Despite my best efforts, I was still captivated at the sheer prospect of this worldwide group of people making this Linux thing better every day. Surely, it was just heinously complicated right now, and it would get better? Also, despite its complexity, I had met some interesting Linux people in the dark annals of the Internet, and I found them strangely intriguing – just regular people who contributed to a system that hundreds and hundreds of people were using. These people inspired me, and I wanted to have the same kind of impact, despite having the technical ability of a rubber hammer.

One of the benefits of the bookshop that I worked in was that it had been bought by Waterstones (a large book retailer in the UK), and we basically sold off all the old stock from our other branches for £1 and £2 per book before we were re-branded as Waterstones. As such, once a month when we got a delivery, there was a mad rush as customers snapped up the new stock, and the rest of the month was pretty quiet. To fill the time I would read the computer books that came into the shop that were relevant to Linux, and when I had finished them, I would print out HOWTOs from the Linux Documentation Project and read them. The bookshop was scattered with random bits of paper with various Linux bits and pieces scrawled on them, as I scrambled to figure the Linux beast out. In addition to this, I also started writing my own little guides on the shop computer. For some time I had written a number of guitar lessons for my website, and I enjoyed writing, so I turned my sights to helping with documentation where I could.

Almost immediately I became indoctrinated with free software, and the ethos behind it. I have always been the kind of person that will try to sell a concept of something I like to others (as my friends will painfully testify about metal), and I wanted to tell the world about Linux. I realised I had a captive audience every day at work, so I found some Linux logos on the Internet, printed them out and ironed them onto some t-shirts. When someone would come in and ask about the t-shirt, they would get a pitch from me about Linux. It was amazing just how many people would ask about the t-shirt.

Linux UK

Around the time I realised just how few resources there were in the UK for Linux, but I saw various names from the UK on comp.os.linux.announce newsgroup and was aware of a limited handful of Linux User Groups across the country, the nearest to me being in Northampton (I was living in Bedfordshire at the time). Back then I had built my own website and an advocacy site called The Triaxis Zone about the Mesa/Boogie Triaxis guitar amp (which I didn’t actually own at the time, but hankered after…odd, I know). I built these sites using Microsoft Frontpage which my dad had bought for me, so I fired it up and produced a new site called Linux UK. Yep, Linux UK started out life being created in Microsoft Frontpage.

The page went online on some free Xoom hosting, and people started using it. It had news, opinion, links, tuition guides and other bits of interest for UK Linux users. One such section was a listing of Linux users in the UK, and as the site grew, I would get between 5 and 10 emails a day from people with their details, and I would manually update the website. Yep, it got boring quickly, very, very, boring, but I kept it up, and the site continued to grow.

A few months in, I received an email from John Dorman, a random guy who offered to purchase a linuxuk.co.uk domain name for me. He did so and the site started to feel a little more real. John worked for an ISP and had recently become a Red Hat reseller. In those days, some members of the Linux community were getting a little frustrated that Linux box sets (which had a CD, instruction book and notes) were selling for quite a lot of money and it was blocking people getting into Linux, and with such a small community back then, every user was critical to get on board. John and I devised a devious scheme to buy Red Hat sets in and sell them at virtually no profit, undercutting anyone who sold the sets – we were not in it for profit-making purposes, we just wanted to get the sets out to the users and to allow more people to get started with Linux. He dealt with the sets, and I promoted and publicised it on Linux UK. Consequently, a fair few sets were shifted.

After a little while of running Linux UK, I got an email from a chap called Rafiu Fakunle from XInit Systems. He liked the site and was keen to support it. He offered me a web server, laptop, printed t-shirts and any other support I needed. To an 18 year old kid, this was a big deal – my website was receiving some commercial attention. Rafiu drove up from London to Luton and we had a meeting. I will never forget driving over there, psyched about this important meeting I had, flying down the M1 listening to Powerslave by Iron Maiden in my rubbish van. It felt good. It felt like there was potential. Despite my inexperience making me feeling worried and anxious that this random business dude was going to screw me in some way (which incidentally, he never did) I accepted his offer of help. Linux UK started to grow bigger than ever.

September was approaching, and I left for University, with Linux UK in full flow, and in my first few weeks there I met a chap called Steve ’sparkes’ Parkes (LugRadio fans will know him from Season 1). I showed Steve Linux UK, who was far more technical than me, and he was stunned that I had maintained the site for so long manually. He started work on a full dynamic website written in PHP with some other people in the community (one of which being my brother, Simon). With Wolverhampton as my new home, and having been to two Northampton LUG meetings, I decided to set up Wolverhampton LUG, and started encouraging more of a Linux community in the city. This is where I eventually met Matt Revell (popped along to see what a LUG was like), Aq (moved to the Midlands, wanted to join a new LUG), Adam Sweet (had never owned a PC, got Linux on cover-disc and came to the LUG), Ade Bradshaw (came over from South Birmingham LUG), Chris Proctor (also from South Birmingham LUG), the Spline (came to Wolves LUG to demo his 3D scanner), Barbie (came over for our first Xmas party) and other people who LugRadio fans might know.

When I started the LUG, I was very keen for it to be different; I wanted it to be a really social group, with lots of eating, drinking, and being merry, just with a lot of talk about Linux – I was really eager for it to not be the socially awkward, forced, monotonal, formal culture of many LUGs and technical groups. Luckily the group developed its own identity and a reputation among other groups for its more irreverent nature, and we had a great time (I passed the reigns to the current LUGMaster, Dave Moreley in late 2006 – who continues to run the group). LugRadio was in-fact conceived in the corner of The Moon Under Water pub in Wolverhampton as an idea to take our spirit in the LUG and put it in an audio show.

KDE

Despite the excellent work going into the new, dynamic Linux UK, I was growing bored of it, and wanted a new challenge. Around the time I was fascinated with the KDE desktop, and was regularly compiling the latest CVS copy of KDE and poking around with it, reporting bugs when I found them. Slowly KDE was taking over Linux UK in my life. I remember sitting in the back row of the IT lab in lectures, doing my work while compiling KDE 2 on my laptop and reading kde-devel to see what was going on. Back then there were no planets or blogs, so mailing lists is where you got your information.

At university, most of my lectures were at Wolverhampton Science Park; a rather nice business park on the outskirts of the town, which was considerably more pleasant than the cold, grey, formal computing center in the middle of town. I did have a few lectures in the computing center, and while there I met a particular professor who saw me using Debian on my laptop at the time. He came over and said “are you a Linux user?”, I said “yep, I use Debian”, and he said “have I got something to show you, come with me”. At this point I should have worried, but alas he took me to a quiet part of the computing center and showed me a locked room full of Linux computers. He offered me as much computing power as I wanted, as much disk space as I needed and anything I wanted installing, he would provide. I filled-in sparkes about this new discovery and we spent hours in that room, working there, getting pizza delivered and learning more about Linux.

At that time I kept a pretty interesting schedule, and sleep was rare. I would wake up 10am, go to the science park for 11am, have lunch in the rather nice cafeteria there at 1pm, finish Uni at 6pm, come home, go out at 7pm with friends to pubs/clubs/gigs, in at 1am, work on KDE until 4am and then go to sleep. Back then, I would go to sleep when Paramount Comedy finished at 4am – I was quite the night-owl, and in the meantime developed a real love for comedy with three hours of nightly comedy augmenting my KDE work.

With all this KDE excitement, I formally announced I was leaving Linux UK (which later changed name and then later shut down) and spent my time on KDE. Around the time I was getting interested in usability, and started the KDE Usability Study. I also started developing a few other sites such as enterprise.kde.org (a site to list businesses and case studies using KDE) and attempted to write some KDE applications (KWebStat, DevCenter, maintained Kafka for a while and wrote a few patches here and there). My attempt at learning KDE development, rather predictably, fell flat on its face – I suck at programming, so I decided to stick to what I seemingly did best, talk to people about Linux and free software.

The Linux Format Break

Around the time I had heard about a conference in London called The Linux Expo. While at university one day, I ducked out of a rather dull lecture to call the organisers to try and bag a space for KDE at the expo. Rather surprisingly, I got a free space, and work started to prepare for the show. Rafiu rather generously paid for me to stay in a hotel room with my friend and co-hort, Lee Jordan. We produced fliers, name-tags, sourced box sets, organised talks at the booth and more. Looking back, I think it was a pretty good show, and I am still proud of what we managed to achieve at that first show, considering we had no money and no experience.

At the time, Linux Format magazine had just been launched in UK, and I heard about a party going on in a pub near Olympia in London. I popped along with Lee, managed to blag our way in, and started schmoozing with the attendees, much of which involved a certain amount of ribbing of the Debian crew who didn’t look particularly amused, sipping on their half-pints of coke. That night I got fairly drunk and gathered the courage to wander over and have a chat with Nick Veitch (editor) and Richard Drummond (senior staff writer) to ask if I could write an article for them. To my surprise they said “yes, but if it is rubbish, we won’t print it“. Fair enough, I thought, and got home, agreed on a topic, and amazingly, they published it. It was one heck of a buzz to see my name in a magazine, I was hooked.

So, I wrote more. In fact, I wrote regularly for Linux Format, and as new magazines came out, I approached them too. I ended up writing for the three main magazines at the time, and all of this produced a nice addition to my student loan, which I promptly squandered on CDs, pizza, guitars and drink. Consequently, my CD collection grew larger by the day, which made me happy. University continued, I did my placement year in the third year, spending a year as a web developer, and then finished my final year. Throughout this time I had written around a hundred articles for magazines and had gained a book agent, and was looking into writing my first book.

It was a tough time finishing university, and many of my close friends were leaving and going back to their native countries or back home, and everyone was scrabbling around for work. I was deeply, deeply uninterested in finding work, so I figured why not just be a lazy sod and write more articles?. So I did. I tidied my little home studio to make an office, fixed up my website, informed the magazines that I wrote for that I was turning full-time and started writing more and more. Before long I was writing for 12 publications and was working on a few books (which is a whole story in itself, that was a wacky time). In addition to this I also developed some training courses, and started learning how to do public speaking.

LugRadio

Around the time, I was regularly going down to LUG meetings, every two weeks. This would basically involve us meeting in a pub, having a good time, talking about the latest goings-on and politics in the Linux world, and getting drunk. Wolves LUG meetings were great fun, and particularly entertaining, with a central hardcore of attendees who were fun, engaging and amusing. For a while I had been thinking about how it would be interesting to take some people from the group and produce an audio show. Interestingly, at the time, Matt Revell, a newcomer to the LUG, was also thinking how the central hard-core of the group could take well to an audio show. One night we discovered we had had the same idea independently and started making plans to take the pair of us, Aq and Steve ’sparkes’ Parkes and produce a show. As usual, time passed and lethargy set-in, but around Christmas time while I was in Bedford with family, I started the ball rolling and invited everyone to a recording in my little home studio in February to recorded episode 1 of what we were nicknaming ‘lugradio’.

We recorded the first show, and we were very keen for it to retain the atmosphere and irreverence of the LUG. The only thing I did at the time when mixing the show was to cover up the swearing with animal noises, which was amusing in itself for a while (we eventually dropped the censoring later in the first season). We would record the show on a Wednesday evening (every other Wednesday when the LUG was not on), and would finish the recording at about midnight, and then I would spend three hours mixing the show and we would release it the following day. This pretty intense evening of mixing didn’t last long, as I started working more daytime hours due to increasing business relationships with my work. As such, we started to release the show the Monday following a recording.

Retrospectively, the first show was a bit rubbish, but at the time it was new and different, and went down fairly well. We worked to grow a community by producing a mirror network in which our listeners helped chip-in and host the shows, and developing forums, a planet and other community features. Although the show was doing well, it also garnered some controversy, with some people not overly amused at the swearing, anarchic recipe and grilling we gave some interviewees. But, we plodded on, confident in our formula; I am so proud we are still kicking, five seasons in, and hugely proud of the incredible LugRadio community.

OpenAdvantage

After a year and a half or so of working as a journalist, I heard about a new place called OpenAdvantage opening in near-by Birmingham. It was a vendor-neutral, government funded organisation to spread Open Source to hundreds of businesses and individuals in the West Midlands (the region of the UK that I live in). I found this fascinating, so I called them up and asked if they would be interested in an interview. I was invited to their open day, and I shopped the article to Linux User & Developer. I went over and realised that one of the founders, Paul Cooper, was someone who had previously heckled me at a KDE talk that I delivered at South Birmingham LUG, but despite this appalling indiscretion on the part of my future boss-to-be, they were doing a good job. I wrote my article and got it published.

A little while later I got a call inviting me to interview as a consultant for OpenAdvantage. With journalism giving me lots of good times, I was initially not that interested, but the job did intrigue me, so I went along to interview, and got offered it. After some consideration of the offer, I decided it was the right step forward for my career, so I took it. My job there was tasked with helping organisations to move to Open Source – full-time Open Source advocacy, which was a blast. In my two years there I dealt with an incredible array of different businesses and individuals, explored many different subjects, and got to travel all over the world to talk about OpenAdvantage and Open Source. OpenAdvantage, and everyone involved really did make an impact on the West Midlands.

Ubuntu and Canonical

A few years into OpenAdvantage, I knew the project was coming to an end; as a funded project, it had a limited running time, and although there would be an effort to find further funding, I wanted to make sure I was prepared for the worst. Around the time, I read a blog entry on Mark Shuttleworth’s website saying that Canonical were looking for people, and despite being six months away from OpenAdvantage ending, I knew that one of the few companies I would want to work at was Canonical.

One of the problems with being an advocate, is that you can only really work at places that produce software or systems that you truly believe in; it is not like marketing in which the core art of marketing is being able to understand a diverse audience and sell it – advocacy is largely based on people having faith in your belief and the merit of your belief. This limits the field of potential, and the number one company I was going to target when OpenAdvantage came to an end was Canonical. So, I mailed Mark to let him know that I was available, and he mentioned a new role that was coming up called Ubuntu Community Manager. I waited for the job description to go online, and due to an insanely busy schedule, I actually wrote my CV while being driven home after work one day as we had a LugRadio recording that night and I was busy through the week. I then went through four interviews. No-one knew anything about my interviews; I am a little superstitious about jobs, so I kept it all to myself. In fact, at the second LugRadio Live in 2006, I had my final interview scheduled the Monday immediately following. I was utterly shattered after LugRadio Live, having had around 5 hours sleep all weekend, and went down to interview with Matt Zimmerman and Mark Shuttleworth. A few weeks later I got an email offering me the job.

When I received the email I calmly left my desk at OpenAdvantage, walked into the empty meeting room and (very silently) started jumping around with joy. I was a happy bunny, and have been since, and love working at Canonical and with all my friends in the incredible Ubuntu community.

…and…

…thats the story so far. So there you have it, Davis, that is a brief (well, rather long, it turns out, despite leaving out big chunks) history of how I got started. I feel incredibly lucky to have been surrounded by such an eclectic and supportive bunch of people, and there is plenty of story to be written yet. I would love to hear how other people got started too, so get writing folks. :)


Posted on February 28, 2007 - by jono

Update-tastic

OK, I have a few things to cover in this blog post, so hang tight.

  • Dammit, that sucks – Unfortunately I have had to cancel my appearance at the Free Software and Open Source Days 2007 event in Turkey. I wish I could attend the event but alas, circumstances mean that I can’t. Apologies to anyone this may have affected.
  • But, wow, this doesn’t – Wow, the Big Red Recording has already raised a whopping £776.00 in just two, yep, that’s two days. Only another couple of hundred quid and we will hit the £1000 mark. Thanks to everyone who has donated, I am so grateful to everyone for chipping in. And for you ‘orrible lot who haven’t yet donated, DONATE RIGHT NOW and lets just see how much money we can raise for such a good cause. :)
  • I am an artist don’t you know… – I have started writing music for The Big Red Recording, and I have four songs on the go at the moment. My mission statement for this album is to “tap into the full range of human emotions” – expect happy, sad, aggressive, sensitive and other emotions thundering through with the songs. I am really excited about the material that is coming together. As ever, this will be blogged about over at Recreant View,so keep your eyeballs over there for updates.
  • The single greatest event ever to happen – We have had some incredible LUGRadio Live 2007 paper submissions, and this years event is shaping up to be pretty incredible. We are still very keen for more paper submissions though, so see this page and get them in! We want a diverse and interesting range of talks, so everyone should submit something. Try and get your submissions in over the next few weeks. :)

Right, thats it. :)


Posted on February 7, 2007 - by jono

Nice one Steve

Credit where credit is due to Steve Jobs for his recent Open Letter. This is exactly the kind of discussion people in his position should be having to promote an open marketplace and freedom. His letter quite clearly states that “if the Big 4 music companies provide DRM-free songs, this will be a good thing” – I am impressed that he is taking this stance, particularly with their dominant market position and pre-existing relationships with the Big 4.

It also makes me chuckle. There seems to be a bit of this going on:

Five Years Ago…

Steve: Hi Big 4, we are creating this online music store and trendy little device to play the music on. We are a cool company, and admired by a generation of people with disposable income, would you like to be a part of it?

Big 4: Hmmm, sounds a bit dangerous…

6 months later…

Big 4: OK, we will be part of it, but we need you to make something called a DRM that will protect our precious music.

Steve: Of course, protecting music is essential…utterly essential. You wish is my iCommand.

5 years and 2 billion songs later…

Steve: Haha suckers! You should be using DRM free systems and we own the music player market!

Interesting about-turn. Kudos Steve. Want to come and speak at LUGRadio Live 2007? We will you a pint. :)


Posted on December 31, 2006 - by jono

2006 Retrospective

This time one year ago, I was peering into 2006 wondering what the year would bring. Back then I worked at OpenAdvantage as an Open Source Advocate. I knew 2006 would be a challenging year, and back then I was gritted and determined to help push free software and myself as best as I could. In the tradition of others providing a retrospective, I figured I will follow the flock like the sheep I am and weigh in on my own 2006. What a year it has been…

  • Work – As I just said, back at the start of 2006 I was working at OpenAdvantage. I knew back then that the project was going to finish in March 2007, and I knew that I would likely need to consider a new job by the end of the year. One of the problems with my line of work is that there are very few people paid to be Open Source advocates. As such, the scope of companies was and is fairly restrictive. That was not the real sucker-punch though, oh no. The real kick in the goolies was that being a good advocate means you have to advocate things that you truly believe in. As such, this mean’t I could only reasonably work for companies that make the software and subscribe the ethics and direction that I believe in. From a distribution stand-point this locked out Novell, Yellow Dog, Mandriva, Red Hat and more – they all do great work, but I was and am an Ubuntu guy. As such, Canonical were always my #1 choice for my next step. Back in May when I started talking to Mark about the job, I never anticipated looking for work until later in the year, but this blog entry started the discussion. After a lengthy interview process (apparently the job was very heavily applied for) I got the good news and Mark announced it and so did I. OpenAdvantage was a truly awesome place to work at and I miss them all hugely. Working there was a fulfilling, inspiring experience and I hope to work with my friends there again. Now I am at Canonical and working longer days, getting more email and looking after an incredible worldwide community of Ubuntu contributors. Moving to Canonical was daunting, but has been a great experience and I am loving every moment of it.
  • Family – 2006 was a great but challenging year for family. Just prior to new year 2006 my nanna sadly died and I attended and spoke at her funeral in the tiny village of Kirby Hill in North Yorkshire. In other bad news Banger died rather surprisingly and I felt a level of grief and sadness I had never experienced, not even with my nan’s death. It was a dark, intense time, but Sooz, Frankie and I managed to get through it. Despite the sadness, the awesome bundle of joy that is Pepper entered our lives. In non-dog-family related news the Bacon and Curtis clans remained safe, healthy and together for another year.
  • Jokosher – This time last year Jokosher never existed, which is nuts. I am hugely proud of the achievements made in the Jokosher team in the last ten months, and I am proud that our little project has gone on to not only achieve success but to also be revered by many as an important project for the Linux desktop. Its been a tough ride, and we have all worked long hours and spent lots of time thinking and working on hard problems, but our efforts have been made easier by the awesome development team that has formed. Laszlo blogged about his views, and I am similarly enamoured to have worked with such incredible people. 2007 is the year when we really kick some ass. No kidding. It is the year when we not only match our competitors, but really stick the boot in and take some names. Keep your eyes peeled folks.
  • LUGRadio – After three years of LUGRadio, we always expected the interest to die down a little and the show to hit hard times, but the LUGRadio rollercoaster keeps on rolling. This year has seen yet more growth in the show, and the year saw LUGRadio Live 2006 happen, which was a great success. Our community has grown, we have seen a fan podcast appear in the form of hashlugradio and I feel that artistically the show has remained true to the original recipe. We have had on some excellent guests, covered some important, inspiring and ridiculous subjects and we have always involved our insanely cool community at every step. This year we also became the Award Winning LUGRadio and got written up in a bunch of magazines and websites. I love the LUGRadio community, and again, I am proud to know so many of them. Thanks guys!
  • Music – 2006 was a turbulent year for my musical interests. On the Seraphidian side we started out well, doing lots of gigs and finished writing our second album with the working title of Death Blow. We were scheduled to hit the studio to record Death Blow in September when we heard that our drummer Jon needed to take some time away from the band. Since then we have been writing and recording and looking for a new drummer – more on that in 2007. On my solo music side, Recreant View has been getting more and more attention, and my last.fm page has been getting hot too – just need a MySpace page now. :P In 2006 I wrote and recorded seven songs, and I am tickled pink with them all. I also grew the studio in 2006 and at some point I plan on building a dedicated studio and recording bands and artists.
  • Speaking – 2006 has been a good year for refining my public speaking. At the start of the year I set myself the goal of “getting good at public speaking” and throughout the year I did 18 speaking gigs. Included here were my first gigs in the USA and Spain and a UK LUG Tour with my pal and yours Ted Haeger. I am pleased with the progress I have made, and 2007 is shaping up to be a good year for speaking, with four countries and five dates already booked for the first three months. I hope to be in your part of the world next year.
  • Writing – 2006 saw a change in my writing. As the year has progressed I have done less and less magazine writing due to time constraints, but pushed out two books – The Official Ubuntu Book and Practical PHP and MySQL. I have written many of my articles and thoughts on my blog as opposed to in article form or on my O’Reilly Blog, as my blog is now far better syndicated and read than it used to be. As such, my views and thoughts and occasional tutorials will now appear here on jonobacon.org. I really wish I had the time to do more magazine work, and I would love to continue writing for Linux Format and Linux User & Developer, but alas, there are only some hours in the day. Not sure what 2007 will see in terms of writing – although I would like to write another book, but on community/advocacy. Who knows?
  • Community – This year has been a great year for community. I love the free software community, and it has been great to get to know more and more people. This year I have got to know more and more GNOME, GStreamer, Ubuntu, KDE, LUGRadio and FSF people, and got to meet lots of old and new friends alike. Many people get a kick out of meeting so-called celebrities in the Open Source world, and I have been fortunate in that I have got to know a bunch of these celebrities through work and travelling, but for me, I find the most fun and inspirational people are the guys and girls on the ground. As an example, meeting people like Melissa, Joey, Mark, Jorge, Brandon, Jenda, Scott and Matt from the Ubuntu community, or Edward, Jan, Thomas, Christian, Wim and Tim from the GStreamer community is truly inspiring. The celebrities will always get the attention, and the celebrities will always get the focus, but it is these people on the ground that I love to get to know, drink beer with, exchange stories with and work with in our incredible free software community. We need to never lose sight of this.

So, enough babble from me. 2006 has been one hell of a year, and I know 2007 is going to be even more insane than this year was. Lets all head into 2007 together and really start the free software smackdown. :)