The UDS mob. [Original photo](https://www.flickr.com/photos/kwwii/496835232/) by Ken.

Well, its over. A trip to beautiful Seville which encompassed the Ubuntu Education Summit, the Ubucon Seville and the Ubuntu Developer Summit. It was an intense week and a half, and I am utterly shattered. It was well worth it though, *well* worth it.

Lots got done at the UDS in a number of different areas, and I want to list some of the bits and pieces achieved on the community side. I will try to note everything, but I am bound to have missed some bits and pieces out – there were so many conversations and discussions not only in the sessions but dotted around the corridors and bars. So, prepare for an orgasmic bullet-point explosion:

* The IRC council was ratified, governance infrastructure constructured (based on the Forums Council governance) and initial jury and council members discussed. I expect this to go to the Community Council fairly soon.
* The new Community Council members were elected. Congratulations to everyone who is now on the CC. I think we have an excellent range of personalities, all with a firm grounding in community.
* Editorial policy for Ubuntu Planet was discussed and debated and some solid policy put in place for removing offensive and/or potential law-suit inducing content. We struck an excellent balance between editorial confidence, community resources and the business world.
* The marketing team submissions process was better defined. I had a meeting with Corey and Melissa to improve how the marketing team gets information and how it pushes it out. This has resulted in a submissions list and some work on a web front end, with processes to help keep a steady flow of content. With this structure in place the next step is to hook other Ubuntu teams up to it to regularly feed the team with information – the LoCo teams seem a natural source of information here.
* Forums ambassadors process discussed and refined. Some discussion about improving how ideas and concepts from the forums community can be better communicated to developers. This will involve the forums community educating itself to develop specs and better structure ideas in a form that developers can use. This should greatly improve the ability to get their ideas in front of developers. 🙂
* Better managing LoCo resources. Recently there has been some delays on mailing lists and DNS. Mailing list requests are now coming to me via RT which should help reduce one step in the process, and DNS is being transferred from smurf to someone else too. There was also discussion about a LoCo community team looking over resource requests, which I think could be useful. More discussion on this to come.
* Discussion about getting more people involved in MOTU and making use of the Debian front-desk method of mentoring MOTUs. Some productive discussion, but I had to dip out before the session finished – hopefully there are some solid points to follow up on here.
* Discussion about some forums related issues.
* Discussion of an education coalition formed from the LoCo community. Some discussion with Alan Pope about creating a screencast video to introduce the concept. I hope to get to this over the next couple of weeks.
* Further discussion of community bartering (such as saying “I will triage this many bugs if you do this for me”). It is a good concept in theory, but would need a pilot to test effectively. I hope to look into this in more detail over the coming weeks.
* Improving the scope of Software Freedom Day within the Ubuntu community. Chatted with a few people about ways of doing this and also how to spread the word on LUGRadio.
* How the Canonical support department could theoretically work better with the answers tracker and the forums. Speaking of the answer track in Launchpad, it seems it is kicking arse and taking names, and we had more discussion about interfacing different communications resources together to unify knowledge.
* Unifying mentoring schemes across the Ubuntu project – here I am thinking of a base-level mentoring team and then additional team-level teams to drill in the specifics.

All in all a productive UDS, and lots got done. Let us also not forget the hugely important social side. It is important to get everyone together to renew their personal friendships and connect on a social level. It was particularly good to see Ken, Sladen, Melissa, Corey, Sulamita, Dennis, Mark S and Mark V d B, Soren, Marcel, Daniel, Ben, Robert, Colin, Scott, Richard, Alan and a bunch of others.