Updated travel plans
Added a bunch of speaking dates to my [Speaking](https://archivedblog.jonobacon.com/?page_id=703) page. I will be heading out to:
* LinuxTag, Berlin, Germany
* FooCamp, Sebastopol, California, USA
* LUGRadio Live, Wolverhampton, UK
* GUADEC, Birmingham, UK
* Ubuntu Live, Portland, Oregon, USA
* OSCON, Portland, Oregon, USA
There are also a bunch of other conferences in the pipeline. Stay tuned.
UDS Community Wotsits
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.
In full swing
Kick arse. *Kick arse*. Those are the only ways to describe the Ubuntu Developer Summit. Here we are in Seville having a blast and getting some really productive work done. I have actually been here since Wednesday for the Ubuntu Education Summit and the Ubucon, and everything has been running smoothly.
The Ubuntu Education Summit was a great success, filled with some great talks. Of particular interest was the training talk from Billy and Frank, the Intel talks and the mEDUxa talk. Lots of enthusiasm all round. Well done to Richard for his efforts with the UES.
The Ubucon went stunningly well. About 60 – 100 people showed up, and everything ran very smoothly. Thanks to Sladen, Melissa, the local team and the GuadaLinex people for all their hard work. Also, thanks to everyone who spoke at the event and otherwise participated. It was a great example of an Ubucon in action. I hope this becomes a regular event – if only to get me over to Seville again. 😛
The UDS has been going very well, lots of enthusiasm and vigour, and a stack of excellent, productive sessions. So, my little underlings, prepare for a bullet-point orgy to cover some of the community sessions:
* The slightly-controversial planet incident was discussed and the planet content removal policy and the complaints procedure was defined. The session was very productive and helped structure what happens in the future. It is a pretty damn rare risk however, and I doubt we will have a similar incident crop up anytime soon.
* Some discussion about how forums users can contribute to the development process has thrown up ideas and plans for encouraging forums users to get their ideas into a format and medium that is compatible with the Ubuntu development process. This is great work, and I am looking forward to working with the forums community to help them hook in with the development process better. 🙂
* We clarified some issues with LoCo resources and I am looking into the possibility of setting up a resources team to help deal with list requests, DNS changes and other issues. There is a bottleneck right now, and it needs fixing. I am sure we will have further discussions about this later in the week.
* The subject of mentoring has appeared this week, and I know LaserJock is keen to encourage mentoring in MOTU and I have been in discussions with Adam about creating a team-agnostic mentoring structure that can act as a baseline for all team-specific mentoring initiatives.
* Discussion of bartering techniques for encouraging further contributing – such as “if you want me to add this feature, go and triage 50 bugs”. I think done right, this could work, but it needs to be team-specific and be an optional process available. Henrik suggested this, and he has it laid out pretty well in his mind.
* Discussions at the UES about creating an education coalition. This will be a pilot scheme to bring together educational enthusiasts from inside the LoCo community and see how we can make some incredible things happen. If this works well, and I suspect it will, it could open up many doors for other coalitions of enthusiasts in our amazing LoCo community. Speaking of which, the LoCo community is *frikken incredible*. I am so proud of everyone who is part of it. I should get stickers made like when you have a tooth out at the dentist…they could say “I rock the LoCo world”.
OK, now I need to clarify a few things to set the rumour mill back to *Standby*:
* I am still not interested in ducks the way some people may suggest.
* No, the scar on my arm is not from some kind of suicide attempt, and yes, it is from trying to climb an orange tree while under the influence.
* Dennis Kaarsemaker is indeed the bastard child of Scott James Remnant and James Troup.
* I don’t have the plague that has affected the UDS. The source of the plague is Robert Collins – he has been taken to a hazmat containment chamber and hosed down.
* Corey Burger funded his trip here with the proceeds of his David Duchovny Lookalike Roadshow in Canada.
Seville is beautiful, and a great place to be. Everyone has been stunningly friendly, and our GuadaLinex friends have been incredibly accommodating. Thanks to everyone involved.
More as I get it. Well, more as I get a chance to grab five minutes and blog it… 🙂
Pam’s People
Sooz and her BBC cronies are doing a fun run for charity which was inspired by Pam Beckett, who was unfortunately taken from all of us a few months back in a road accident. Its a great cause and worth any spare money that you would ordinarily go and spend on beer or cigerettes.
[Go and donate](https://www.justgiving.com/pamspeople).
J.B. Loves Beard
Haha, it seems that someone has been kind enough to create fake LiveJournal accounts for [myself](https://ilovemybeard.livejournal.com/) and [Aq](https://gingalingling.livejournal.com/). No idea who is behind it, but should be fun. Never been the subject of satire before, well apart from appearing on Linus’s t-shirt in Everybody Loves Eric Raymond.
And no, I am *not* behind it, much to the disbelief of the #lugradio faithful. Heathens. 😛
LRL07 Buttons
Get all your LugRadio Live news and updates from the LugRadio Live Latest News Blog!
So, ou are coming to [LUGRadio Live 2007](https://www.lugradio.org/live/) as a vistor, speaker, exhibitor, crew member or otherwise *and* you have a website. Hmm, what an interesting combination…
Why not adorn your chunk of t’internet with a glorious little LUGRadio Live 2007 button. There are a number of buttons and sizes available:
* [100 x 42](https://farm1.static.flickr.com/208/480019343_8fe7562245_t.jpg)
* [240 x 100](https://farm1.static.flickr.com/208/480019343_8fe7562245_m.jpg)
* [Other Sizes](https://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=480019343&size=s&context=set-72157600164427159)
* [100 x 42](https://farm1.static.flickr.com/221/480019367_a85db98f88_t.jpg)
* [240 x 100](https://farm1.static.flickr.com/221/480019367_a85db98f88_m.jpg)
* [Other Sizes](https://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=480019367&size=s&context=set-72157600164427159)
* [100 x 42](https://farm1.static.flickr.com/208/480019361_f965d1faac_t.jpg)
* [240 x 100](https://farm1.static.flickr.com/208/480019361_f965d1faac_m.jpg)
* [Other Sizes](https://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=480019361&size=s&context=set-72157600164427159)
* [100 x 42](https://farm1.static.flickr.com/230/480023477_8a690b9c72_t.jpg)
* [240 x 100](https://farm1.static.flickr.com/230/480023477_8a690b9c72_m.jpg)
* [Other Sizes](https://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=480023477&size=s&context=set-72157600164427159)
* [100 x 42](https://farm1.static.flickr.com/185/480019353_f3032cef6c_t.jpg)
* [240 x 100](https://farm1.static.flickr.com/185/480019353_f3032cef6c_m.jpg)
* [Other Sizes](https://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=480019353&size=s&context=set-72157600164427159)
* [100 x 42](https://farm1.static.flickr.com/224/480003784_69927d0848_t.jpg)
* [240 x 100](https://farm1.static.flickr.com/224/480003784_69927d0848_m.jpg)
* [Other Sizes](https://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=480003784&size=s&context=set-72157600164427159)
* [100 x 42](https://farm1.static.flickr.com/171/480019347_3892087dce_t.jpg)
* [240 x 100](https://farm1.static.flickr.com/171/480019347_3892087dce_m.jpg)
* [Other Sizes](https://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=480019347&size=s&context=set-72157600164427159)
Coat each of your buttons with a link to https://www.lugradio.org/live/ and you are sorted. This is a great contribution to helping spread word about the event. 🙂
User Groups are cool, YA RLY
This is a photo of the excellent [ubuntu-br](https://www.ubuntu-br.org/) team and I. I found it while flicking through [their FISL 8.0 photo collection](https://fotos.ubuntu-br.org/v/fisl8/).
I think that this collection of photos and the apparent enthusiasm and commitment to Ubuntu just shows how cool it is to be a part of any user group, Ubuntu or otherwise. This is what its all about – community coming together as one. If you are an Ubuntu user, go and [join an Ubuntu LoCo team](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LoCoTeams).
That is all. 🙂
UES, Ubucon, UDS…FYI, OMG, O RLY, YA RLY
Well, I am off on my travels again. This time I am heading out to Seville in Spain for a number of Ubuntu events. These include:
* **Ubuntu Education Summit** – 3rd / 4th May – two days of discussion about furthering Ubuntu in Education. I will be hosting a session to discuss how we can get LoCo teams and other community groups together to focus on education. Much of this hails from discussions I have had with Richard Weiderman, the Canonical king of education. Should be an interesting session.
* **Ubucon Sevilla** – 5th May – a single day community event organised by the local community as well as Paul Sladen and Melissa Draper. If you are planning on going, [sign up here](https://beta.launchpad.net/sprints/ubucon-sevilla) so there is an idea of numbers. Should be an interesting day. I will be there rambling on about cat herding.
* **Ubuntu Developer Summit** – 6th – 11th May – a week in which the fate of gutsy is decided and discussed. What goes in it? Well, come and be a part of the week and help shape the next version of Ubuntu. More details [here](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UDS-Sevilla). I will be there, knee deep in community discussions, and I have a number of different issues I am keen to get on with. We have an incredible bunch of people coming, so it should be an excellent week.
As ever, I will be capturing each of the above on camera, and [my flickr account](https://www.flickr.com/photos/jonobacon/) will be royally battered with new photos as they arrive.
I am also looking forward to getting out in the evenings and partying with a bunch of the folks coming to the UDS. Last year was a blast, and I have no doubt that this UDS should be pretty cool too.
Jokosher update
Jokosher fans, time for an update. 🙂
The 0.9 release was delayed for quite some time due to a nasty bug in Gnonlin which has now been fixed, and we awaiting the legend Hervey to make his Gnonlin imminent release with the fix in before we make our release. This delay has in-turn caused a delay in Jokosher development, but I have good news to share.
Jokosher HEAD is now unfrozen. Laszlo branched 0.9 and hacking is now continuing for 1.0. The roadmap for 1.0 is not decided on yet – there will be an IRC meeting to discuss what is planned sometime soon, but the main plans are getting the current current code mature and well tested.
We are screaming out for more people testing Jokosher, particularly the editing tools. When Edward release Gnonlin we are hoping to get some updated Gnonlin packages built for Feisty and then Feisty is an ideal platform for testing Jokosher – it includes the required version of GStreamer. If you are a Fedora bod, fear not though, Snecklifter has been working on packages for you folks too. 🙂
If you are interested in helping the Jokosher community, head over to [our forums](https://www.jokosher.org/forums/) and get involved. 🙂
Ubuntu Open Week success
[Ubuntu Open Week](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuOpenWeek) is done and dusted. Thanks to everyone who participated in giving a session, and thanks to everyone who showed up to the sessions. Its safe to say it was another huge success, lots of people in the sessions, bags of enthusiasm, stacks of great questions for our fearless tutors and seemingly a bunch of new contributors to the Ubuntu community.
The logs for each of the sessions is available on the [main Ubuntu Open Week page](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuOpenWeek) – would be great to see the content there merged into FAQs for each of the different teams. 🙂
I am looking for success stories for the week – if you attended some sessions and are now becoming part of the Ubuntu community, or if you are an existing community member and the week helped you become more productive, do let me know. Send your success stories to me at jono AT ubuntu DOT com. 🙂