Congratulations to Microsoft Open Technologies
Recently [Microsoft Open Technologies](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/openness/default.aspx#home) celebrated their one year anniversary. I just wanted to offer my congratulations on this important milestone.
Now, it could be tempting for some of you to become a little snitty about Microsoft wanting to engage more openly with people, but I believe that this project (as well as the [OuterCurve Foundation](https://www.outercurve.org/); a different but similarly themed entity) should be celebrated. These are important steps in Microsoft evolving into a more open future, and folks such as *Gianugo Rabellino* from Microsoft Open Technologies and *Paula Hunter* and *Stephen Walli* from the OuterCurve Foundation are doing wonderful work in treading these careful steps forward. All three of these folks have been tremendously supportive of Open Source, community (including sponsoring the [Community Leadership Summit](https://www.communityleadershipsummit.com/) multiple times), and demonstrate a real commitment to delivering those values in a historically proprietary culture. I can imagine that this is not particularly easy work, and I commend them for their commitment, and Microsoft for their evolution as a company.
Open Source has had a profound impact on the world, and for a company with such a philosophically different history to commit staff and resources to exploring a more open future, well, I think this is a fantastic step forward for Microsoft, Open Source, and wider interoperability.
The Microsoft Open Technologies team will be celebrating on Thursday in Silicon Valley with their [anniversary party](https://blogs.msdn.com/b/interoperability/archive/2013/04/16/you-re-invited-to-help-us-celebrate-an-unlikely-pairing-in-open-source.aspx). Be sure to head over there; unfortunately I am unable to join due to another commitment.
Congratulations, Microsoft Open Technologies!
Valuable Lessons
Henry Ford, a great inspirational figure in the history of technological development once said that “when everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it”. Ford faced great technological challenges in building the Model T; a car that he wanted the average citizen to be able to afford back in the early 1900s. He committed his life to challenging the norm and bringing technology that touched the lives of real people.
While challenged with the status quo and at times by ignorance and entitlement, he merely saw “obstacles as those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal”. Ford’s commitment to making technology available to all resulted in more than 15 million Model Ts being sold between 1908 and 1927.
Valuable lessons.
Community Leadership Summit, Training, and Talks
I just wanted to talk about a busy week of community management and leadership related content I will be involved in in July 2013 in Portland, Oregon.
## Community Leadership Summit 2013
The [Community Leadership Summit](https://www.communityleadershipsummit.com/) is the primary annual event that brings together community leaders, organizers and managers and the projects and organizations that are interested in growing and empowering a strong community. The event pulls together the leading minds in community management, relations and online collaboration to discuss, debate and continue to refine the art of building an effective and capable community.
The **Community Leadership Summit 2013** takes place at the **Oregon Convention Center** in **Portland, Oregon** on **20th – 21st July 2013**, which is rather conveniently the weekend before [OSCON](https://www.oscon.com/oscon2013).
At the heart of Community Leadership Summit 2013 is an open unconference-style event in which everyone who attends is welcome to lead and contribute sessions on any topic that is relevant. These sessions are very much discussion sessions: the participants can interact directly, offer thoughts and experience, and share ideas and questions. These unconference sessions are also augmented with a series of presentations from leaders in the field, panel debates and networking opportunities.
I can’t quite believe that this is the **fifth anniversary** of the Community Leadership Summit, and I am determined to make this the very best year yet! We already have an [awesome list of pre-registered attendees](https://communityleadershipsummit.com/attendees), and this is shaping up to be yet another fantastic example of the primary place for community managers and leaders to get together to discuss, share, and learn best practice.
The event is completely free to attend, you just need to [register first](https://www.communityleadershipsummit.com/register/). I hope to see you there!
## Community Management Training at OSCON
Speaking of [OSCON](https://www.oscon.com/oscon2013), which takes place the week after the **Community Leadership Summit 2013**, I am also delighted to announce that I will be running my very first community management training class.
As some of you will know, I wrote [The Art of Community](https://artofcommunityonline.org/) published by [O’Reilly](https://oreilly.com/) (now in its second edition), which has rather fortunately become the best-selling book on community management and leadership.
For some time now I have wanted to deliver a training class that takes many of the concepts of the book, but extends them with detailed problem solving discussions, workshops, Q+A sessions, and more to provide an intense, detail-rich class about how to manage and lead communities, be them small and local or large and global.
On **Monday 22nd July 2013**, the day after the **Community Management Summit 2013**, I will be delivering this [one day community management training class](https://www.oscon.com/oscon2013/public/schedule/detail/29589).
Topics in the class will include:
* **Welcome and Introductions**
* Discussing how the class will work, student introductions, and facilities information.
* **The Core Mechanics Of Community**
* Read/write communities.
* Understanding the social dynamics.
* Building retention and generational growth.
* **Planning Your Community**
* Understanding where to focus community management.
* Gathering stakeholder and community requirements.
* **Building a Strategic Plan**
* The importance of a crisply defined strategic plan.
* Structuring and documenting goals and objectives.
* Delving down to the work item level.
* **Building Collaborative Workflow**
* Understanding the collaborative needs of your community.
* Building effective communication channels.
* Determining infrastructure and tooling needs and how to resource them.
* **Defining Community Governance**
* The role of governance.
* Governance styles: dictatorship, delegated leadership, and enlightened dictatorship.
* Assessing the governance needs for your community.
* Building, codifying and documenting your governance structure.
* Growing effective leadership in your community.
* **Marketing, Advocacy, Promotion, and Social Media**
* Assessing marketing, advocacy and promotional needs.
* Building a buzz cycle.
* Using social media effectively.
* Tracking publicity work and re-aligning for efficiency.
* **Measuring Your Community**
* Knowing what to measure.
* Defining useful growth and health metrics.
* Understanding to how to read and react to metrics to provide more focused strategy.
* **Tracking and Measuring Community Management**
* The importance of building credibility from good work.
* Planning for different visibility needs: stakeholders, the community, and your team.
* Tracking projects, using burndown charts, and reacting to project changes.
* Tracking growth and decline.
* Tracking community health and building a network
Find out more about and book your seat in the class by [clicking here](https://www.oscon.com/oscon2013/public/schedule/detail/29589). Space is limited, so be sure to reserve your seat as soon as possible!
## Burnout and Bickering: a Community Manager’s Guide to Conflict
I am also pleased to announce that I will be presenting a brand new presentation at OSCON on **Wednesday 24th July 2013** at **2.30pm** in **D137**.
The talk is entitled *Burnout and Bickering: a Community Manager’s Guide to Conflict*, and here is the description from the [talk page](https://www.oscon.com/oscon2013/public/schedule/detail/29163)
> One of the most challenging aspects of growing community is managing conflict and burnout. While we often see the effects of conflict, getting to the heart of the issue is often more challenging.
> In this new presentation from Jono Bacon, the Ubuntu Community Manager and author of The Art of Community, he presents a comprehensive guide to conflict and its many different causes.
> The presentation explores how to identify these different causes (such as stress, personality differences, language/age/cultural barriers, and more), how to identify when problems are happening in a scalable manner, and how to resolve conflict in a progressive and repeatable way.
> Bacon will also cover preventative measures to reduce the potential for both conflict, stress, and burnout, and wrap the content in a set of practical tools you can use in your own community.
> All of this will be delivered in Bacon’s amusing anecdote and story filled style, delivering practical recommendations and techniques in a fun and contextual presentation.
I am excited about this presentation. As some of you will know, I have talked before about burnout and managing stress and conflict in communities, and this presentation provides extensive coverage of the topic. I am looking forward to presenting this at OSCON.
See more about the talk by [clicking here](https://www.oscon.com/oscon2013/public/schedule/detail/29163).
As you can see, quite a week for community management and leadership! I hope to see you there!
On Vacation
Just a quick note: I will be on vacation this week in Australia. I will be checking in with work and email, but this will be more limited throughout the week.
Look forward to seeing everyone in a week! Lots of exciting things to focus on when I get back. 🙂
Smart Scopes Not Landing In 13.04, Will Land in 13.10
As some of you may know the dash team has been working to get the new [smart scopes functionality](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SmartScopes1304Spec) in the dash ready for 13.04; this functionality delivers a far more comprehensive dash experience, performing searches over 50 or more different data sources. This feature makes the dash dramatically more useful by searching a far wider range of data sources and returning more relevant results.
The team has been working in a PPA to get the feature ready, and as we are past feature freeze, had [filed a Feature Freeze Exception (FFe) to get this into 13.04](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/1154229). After an extensive amount of work to get the feature ready, unfortunately [the dash team doesn’t consider it mature enough for 13.04](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/1154229/comments/36) — it is nearly there, but doesn’t meet the quality needs for Ubuntu. As such the team has decided not to pursue landing in in 13.04 and to instead move it to the Ubuntu 13.10 cycle where it will be developed as soon as the archive opens. As I mentioned earlier, this feature has been developed in a PPA and has not landed in 13.04 yet, so there are no actual changes to the archive.
Some of you may have some questions about this so we have prepared a short FAQ below. I have also notified our governance boards to ensure they are aware of the change. Feel free to ask any questions in the comments!
The FFE (1154229) got a sabdfl override and is now being rejected, how come?
A sabdfl override always has high requirements regarding code quality and User Experience. After looking at the current status of the smart scopes project we decided that the User Experience simply needs more work and it does not meet the quality requirements for Ubuntu. We would prefer to delay the feature until the next release cycle to ensure that it is rock solid.
Why was this feature being pushed at the last minute?
We believe the feature does provide additional benefit to Ubuntu Users by improving the search experience in the Dash, which is Unity’s weak spot. Landing the feature in 13.04 would have given us 1 additional cycle on the way to 14.04 to train and improve the suggestions provided by the server and further refine the overall Dash experience.
When, if at all, will the feature make its way into Ubuntu?
We are planning to provide the feature in a PPA for Ubuntu Raring which will be always rebased on Unity shipped on Raring. It will land it as soon as we are confident enough on the feature quality in Ubuntu S.
What about the in-dash purchases feature? Will that be landing?
There were some final outstanding issues with in-dash purchases and we are striving to have a conclusion to this ready for early next week (week beginning 1st April).
What about the privacy enhancements that were part of the smart scopes project?
It is unfortunately not possible to get the privacy enhancements from the smart scopes projects without the larger project itself. Smart Scopes would have allowed to disable individual scopes and limit network access for searches at all. In Ubuntu 13.04 you will still be able to disable all server communications through the settings apps. You can also remove the scopes and lenses you are not interested in using them by directly uninstalling the corresponding packages.
Introducing BBQpad
Recently I have been working on a project with my best buddy [Stuart ‘Aq’ Langridge](https://www.kryogenix.org), called [BBQpad](https://www.bbqpad.com).
I haven’t really talked much about it on my blog as we have been fixing up the rough edges, but I wanted to share a little about it now.
As some of you will know, I have been [increasingly getting](https://archivedblog.jonobacon.com/2012/08/13/my-barbecue-adventure/) [into BBQ](https://archivedblog.jonobacon.com/2013/01/24/the-barbecue-journey-continues/) as a hobby. I love being outside and cooking, I love cooking over fire, and the art and science of BBQ *facinates me*. Don’t think there is a science? Well check out [amazingribs.com](https://www.amazingribs.com) and see just how much detail, science, and engineering can be involved in creating awesome BBQ.
One of the tips people give you when you start learning grilling and smoking is to maintain a notebook where you track the details of your cooks. You can then refer to what you did, learn from what works and what doesn’t, and improve your ‘cue.
Being of the nerdy persuasion, I was not going to use no stinking paper and pen, so I wrote a web app to track my cooks.
Originally I wrote this as something just for me, and then it struck me that this could be of general interest. I was chatting to Aq one day and he loved the idea so we decided to build what you now see at [www.bbqpad.com](https://www.bbqpad.com/). The sites works on your computer, mobile, and tablet.
## How BBQpad Works
So what does BBQpad let you do?
Well, with it you can create any number of cooks; each cook is a place you track the details of each cook session, such a meal for your family, practicing to improve your cooking, a party for your friends, a BBQ competition, or anything else. Go and see an [example cook](https://www.bbqpad.com/4).
Within a cook you can add as many cookers and foods as you need (we maintain a database of cookers and foods to make this easy).
When you start cooking you can then [track lots of different things](https://www.bbqpad.com/about/track):
* The different woods and fuels you use (we maintain a database of woods and different fuel products).
* When your food is added and removed from the cookers, and we automatically calculate cook time to make it easier to see how longs things take to cook. You can also track rest time for the different foods (if applicable).
* All your food prep elements such as rubs, sauces, brines, marinades, and more. You can also add general notes about your food items such as the weight, quantity, where you bought it, the level of marbling, whether it is organic (good for veggies) etc.
* The temperature of your cookers and any food items you are tracking internal temperature for. We use this to plot graphs of your cookers and foods; this makes it easier to track your temperature control and improve things where there are problems.
* General updates to the cook. As an example, if you spritz your food with apple juice to keep it moist, you can track this and the time when it happened.
We also allow you to add photos for the final food products as well as photos through the cook to show how your food is evolving. Photos can be added from your desktop, or mobile devices such as your phone or tablet.
When you have finished cooking an item you can then rate it for *taste, tenderness*, and *appearance*; these are the same ways people rate food in a BBQ competition setting.
Continuing the competition theme, we then provide a cook score based upon the certified [KCBS](https://www.kcbs.us/) competition scoring format for each of your food items as well as an overall score for the cook. This provides a neat way of seeing which cooks or items were better than others.
An example cook.
## Getting All Social
One of the goals of BBQpad is not just to provide a place to store cooks, but to also make BBQpad as social as the cooking itself. BBQ is all about cracking open a few beers, cooking some food over fire, enjoying the spoils with friends, and having a great time.
The social aspect of BBQpad is built right into the cooks.
On every cook page there is integrated discussion where people can leave comments and offer tips, advice, and other comments while you are cooking. We also have integrated social media to post your cooks to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Reddit.
One area where BBQpad is really handy is pointing people to the details of a cook. As an example, you may join one of the many BBQ forums/communities online and ask a question about an aspect of your cooking and you can easily point people to the cook page on BBQpad where people can get a good idea of the context of the cook. We have also seen many users tweet about their cooks so folks can follow along as they are happening, often leaving feedback and comments on the cook page.
Another neat part of BBQ is the [community](https://www.bbqpad.com/community/). Here you can see the latest photos from cooks, most active pitmasters, new users, active cooks happening right now, recently completed cooks, and more.
The community brings BBQpad pitmasters together.
Another feature is the [most popular](https://www.bbqpad.com/popular/) page which shows you the most popular cookers, woods, and fuels that the community uses in their cooking. We plan on expanding this page with other *most popular* items soon.
See what our pitmasters prefer.
Clicking on one of these products will also take you to a product page which shows you information about the cooker, the prices on various sites (right now Amazon, but we will add other vendors soon), and a place to have discussion about that product.
Product information for the Weber Performer grill.
## Cooking Together
Another cool feature that we added recently is the ability to do online cook offs.
The idea is simple: there will be a number of cook off events on BBQpad in which everyone is welcome to join and participate in. The cook off will happen on a specific date period and cover a specific food, and pitmasters from around the world will all cook together, tracking their cooks on BBQpad.
To take part you simply go to the event page on the date(s) of the event, create a new cook as part of the event, and track your cook in BBQpad. As you and others cook you can see the latest cook updates from these different cooks all in one place, as well as discussion from those watching the cook off. We also encourage those of you who tweet to tweet about your cooks with the `#bbqpad` hashtag, and those tweets appear on the cook off page too. This provides a great way of cooking together and having fun with the cook off.
Congrats to Jason Perlow for winning our first cook off!
We did our first cook off recently and it was a lot of fun; go and see the [The Ultimate Rib Cook Off](https://www.bbqpad.com/events/ribcookoff/). We plan on doing another cook off soon (most likely *chicken*). 🙂
## Upgrades
BBQpad is completely free to use, and we want it to be a fantastic community resource for the wider BBQ community. Naturally we have some running costs, so we have added some discrete ads to the cook pages to help cover these costs. We also gather a small amount of affiliate revenue when someone buys one of the products linked on Amazon. As such, if you want to buy a cooker or charcoal, go and buy it from BBQpad. 🙂
We also have a few cheap upgrades people can buy. Our view is simple: all cooks by default are publicly available and thus shared with the wider community, and when people provide these cooks we feel they have earned the right to use BBQpad for free. Some folks (such as competition cooks, restaurateurs, or just private people) may prefer to have private cooks so they don’t share their techniques and recipes.
We offer private cooks as part of [BBQpad Pro](https://www.bbqpad.com/about/pros) (which includes blocking ads) for $24/year, which is only $2/month. You can also just block the ads for $10/year.
The private cooks feature is pretty cool: you can choose whether cooks are private or not on a per-cook basis, so if you want to use the community features on the site (such as cook offs) you can make those cooks public, but if you want to practice for a competition and keep those cooks private, you can do so with the click off a button.
## The Technology
Now, many of you in the technology world who follow me will be curious about the site and how it was built. In a nutshell, we are using the awesome [Django](https://www.djangoproject.com/) platform (and the always lovable *Python*) as well as [Twitter Bootstrap](https://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/) as our CSS library. We are managing the source code with [Bazaar](https://bazaar.canonical.com/en/) and hack on it on [Ubuntu Desktop](https://www.ubuntu.com/ubuntu) using [Geany](https://www.geany.org/). All imagery was created using [Inkscape](https://inkscape.org/) and the [GIMP](https://www.gimp.org/). We test across a number of different browsers, and primarily use [Firefox](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/) for debugging. The site is deployed and running on [Ubuntu Server](https://www.ubuntu.com/business/server).
In terms of development methodologies Aq and I both hack on the site and we manage our work using [Trello](https://trello.com/) and drafted and reviewed UI designs using [Balsamiq](https://balsamiq.com/). We have also deployed *staging* and *live* servers and we each code review each fix before it lands.
The site is currently in *beta* and has evolved significantly since we first launched it. This has included two rounds of user testing that have proved to be tremendously valuable in refining the user journey on BBQpad.
I know some of you will want to know if this is Open Source or not. Right now BBQpad is not Open Source but is a free web service that everyone is welcome to use. We may consider Open Sourcing it in the future, but right now it is not a priority; we would rather focus on adding extra features and refining the site.
BBQ is a lot of fun and our hope is that BBQpad makes it even more fun and social. Come and join in the fun!
**Go and see [www.bbqpad.com](https://www.bbqpad.com/) and follow us on our Facebook page, on Twitter, and in our Google+ community.**.
More Regular, Open, and Transparent Planning
Continuing with the work to refine and improve how we build Ubuntu in an open, transparent, and collaborative way, I want to take a few minutes to discuss some work going on to improve the regularity of our planning and the benefits this brings.
Traditionally planning for Ubuntu has worked like this.
* We ship a release.
* Shortly before a release we rapidly prepare blueprints for the next Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS). Everyone is welcome to participate.
* We discuss topics at the UDS and jot down work items into blueprints.
* We then execute on those work items over the course of the six month period.
* We track this work on [status.ubuntu.com](https://status.ubuntu.com) and use burndown charts to visualize this progress.
While this has served us well, there are a few problems with this approach. The most notable issue is that we work in software, and a lot changes in software in a six month period. This means we define a set of work items, prepare the burndown, and then if requirements or direction changes it can be difficult to reflect those changes across our community and we have to go and postpone a bunch of work items and re-build our burndowns. This means that even though the changes are made to open blueprints, it can cause folks across our community to be out of sync. It also presents the misconception that everything at UDS is locked in for the duration of the six month cycle. If something changes in our strategy or a new opportunity opens up, it can be difficult to change course with everyone on the same page.
Solving this is part of our theme of making Ubuntu engineering as transparent and agile as possible.
One approach we are experimenting with in the Ubuntu Engineering Management team at Canonical is to increase the regularity and transparency of how we plan. Instead of locking in every six months we will do it like this:
* We host the virtual UDS (vUDS) every three months and use the event as a means to plan out the next three months of work. All discussions are open, everyone is welcome to participate.
* Blueprints will be used to track that work and work items will be divided up into monthly milestones.
* On the last week of every month we will review the work performed in the last month to see how well it was completed and then plan the forthcoming month’s work. This provides an open opportunity to identify blockers, define new goals, and change coarse if needed.
* A new burndown chart will be generated on [status.ubuntu.com](https://status.ubuntu.com) and we will host a Google+ Hangout presenting the goals for the next month to ensure that everyone is fully up to speed on what is going on.
Now, to set expectations clearly: this is just an idea for how to improve this workflow, and we are doing it for the first time this week, but the idea is that it will dramatically increase the transparency of which teams are working on what, making it easier for others to (a) know what is going on and (b), participate in areas of interest.
My team is currently preparing the work items for April and you will be able to see the final burndown [here](https://status.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-raring/canonical-community-ubuntu-13.04-month-6.html) when it is complete. From there you will be able to see all the blueprints.
I will provide plenty of feedback on what is working well and less well, and your feedback is welcomed, as ever, in the comments.
## Building Re-usable Processes
As I mentioned in [my previous blog entry](https://archivedblog.jonobacon.com/2013/03/18/recent-ubuntu-community-refinements/), we want to make virtual UDS an event that is repeatable and useful for not just UDS but also for domain-specific events too (such as a LoCo themed UDS). The goal is that this event format is repeatable for our wider community.
Likewise, the monthly planning process is also designed to be repeatable for our wider community too, making it simple to get everyone on the same page for planning and executing on awesome projects.
As ever, feedback is always welcome, but I think this combo of a wider planning event every three months combined with monthly work item sync-ups and planning will result in a pretty effective formula for helping Ubuntu to be as effective, transparent, and collaborative as possible.
Recent Ubuntu Community Refinements
Our community is at the heart of how we build Ubuntu. Recently there were some concerns expressed about some aspects of our community and I have been working with various community members and internally at Canonical to resolve some of these issues to make things smoother.
I just wanted to summarize some updates:
* **Regular, transparent planning** – we want to improve how we plan the delivery of work items, and make that planning more nimble. While the major decisions are reserved for primary discussion at UDS, we want to regularly and transparently checkpoint progress on those projects, and ensure things are moving along. To do this the engineering managers at Canonical will perform this planning on a monthly basis with our community. An an example, with my team, we will decide at UDS what major projects we will work on and document the work items in those blueprints, and every month I will ask the team to commit to delivering an agreed set of work items that month and update the blueprints accordingly. This will make it easier to understand who is working on what, what needs to be done, and areas in which people can participate. This entire process will be completely open and transparent and I would like to encourage our wider community to use the same approach. As an example, this could be a useful technique for our LoCo community to use for planning their work too around advocacy campaigns. All of this work will continue to be tracked openly in [status.ubuntu.com](https://status.ubuntu.com).
* **Training our engineers** – our engineers at Canonical are expected to openly and transparently perform all work that is not considered customer/company confidential. While this expectation is clear, there are sometimes cases when this doesn’t happen (e.g. if someone joins Canonical without the experience of working in an open environment and isn’t really sure how to do this). I have prepared an internal slide deck with these expectations and workflows clearly laid out; my team will be working to ensure everyone gets the deck, reads it, and gets an answer to any of their questions.
* **Regular leadership problem solving meetings** – one problem we have today is that we don’t have a regular problem solving meeting in our community in which our governing leaders are present at. Instead our different leadership boards (e.g. Community Council, Forums Council) tend to resolve issues pertinent to that specific board. We think it could be useful to have a meeting every two weeks that has representatives from our different governance boards and our community can join and raise topics for discussion. We are going to run the first one of these sessions tomorrow (**Tue 19th March 2013**) on [Ubuntu On Air](https://ubuntuonair.com/) at **8pm UTC**. We invite you to bring your topics there on IRC for discussion.
* **Online UDS refinements** – as I [blogged about last week](https://archivedblog.jonobacon.com/2013/03/14/refining-and-improving-virtual-uds/) we have released a survey to gather feedback about how to refine and improve UDS. We have already made some plans for some improvements but I plan on organizing a community meeting to discuss this more next week (I can’t later this week as I am at an event). I think there is an opportunity to refine the format of UDS into a form that becomes a useful and repeatable way of coordinating meetings in a community.
* **Weekly Updates** – I have reached out to the engineering managers on some of the core projects at Canonical and asked them to provide weekly updates of work going on. We have already seen the first updates for [Ubuntu Touch](https://lists.launchpad.net/ubuntu-phone/msg01129.html) and [Mir](https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/mir-devel/2013-March/000005.html).
* **Prepping announcements better** – while the major announcements are now out, one piece of feedback I received is that our community felt ill-prepared around things such as the Ubuntu Touch announcement, and people such as our IRC/Forums/Community councils were inundated with questions and didn’t have good answers to those questions. If we need to make future announcements in the same way again, I am going to ensure our core governance boards are clued up first and we provide a FAQ for our community to refer to when getting these kinds of questions. This should relieve this concern.
* **Improving our community on-ramp** – one area where I want to drive some improvements is making it easier for people to join the community. We started some work a while back to improve the community landing page on ubuntu.com and I have asked *Daniel Holbach* to drive that work to completion. I am also working with the Ubuntu Touch and Mir teams to ensure that they have awesome documentation and guidance for how people can participate. A good example of the progress being made here is the [Mir documentation](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Mir/). If you would like to help improve these docs, then feel free to dig in and help, or share your ideas on the mailing lists.
I want to get as much feedback on these steps moving forward as well as other ideas and areas in which we can focus. You can always grab me on IRC on freenode (my nick is `jono`) and I hang out in `#ubuntu-community-team`. Also feel free to drop me an email and join my regular Q+A session every week. Unfortunately, this week’s Q+A session is canceled as I need to be at an event, but I will be back in the regular slot next week on Wednesday at **7pm UTC** on [Ubuntu On Air](https://ubuntuonair.com/).
Refining and Improving Virtual UDS
Last week we ran our very first virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit. The event lasted two days and gave us an opportunity to try out a new format and to see how well it worked. Generally it seems we got some pretty favorable feedback, but there are definitely some areas in which we want to sand off the rough edges and improve the structure of the event.
I would like us to get the Virtual UDS format so tight and refined that it could be used to organize any kind of ad-hoc online set of meetings. As an example, I can imagine a similar event but focused explicitly on LoCo teams, or documentation, or translations. We want to make the format reliable enough and repeatable enough that anyone in our (or any other community) can use it. This will help our community to plan more regularly and get together more to do cool and interesting things.
We have been keeping an eye on some of the feedback, a combination of observations from comments and feedback send directly to the organizers. We had an initial chat today to discuss this initial feedback and we have a few changes we want to make already:
* **Wrap-up Session** – Many folks seemed to miss a wrap-up session with a set of track summaries. We want to add this for the next event.
* **Remove Launchpad Registration** – having to register in Launchpad seems rather futile and doesn’t service much of a purpose. We plan on removing this requirement for the next event.
* **After Hours Session** – at the last event there was an ad-hoc *free for all* hangout session at the end of sessions. This was a fun time to just hang out and be social with each other. We would like to do the same again and publicize it more.
* **Improve Session Pages** – the session pages (where you view each session) look rather cluttered right now. We want to tidy them up and also include features such as upcoming sessions and a Twitter stream so everyone can see what is going on at any time. Chris Johnston is currently working with our Web Development community to investigate better layouts.
* **Improve Prep Docs** – we discovered lots of useful best practices at the last event such as using the lower third to show the name of the person speaking, checking mic levels, and muting when not speaking. We want to improve and better promote this prep docs for everyone who joins the event.
* **Encourage IRC Integration More** – we noticed that in some sessions people pay attention to IRC better than others. I am going to update my introduction presentation to emphasize the importance of this more strongly, and we will build more awareness around the importance of doing this.
* **Fix Page Reloading on Early Terminations** – we noticed that on a few sessions there was a problem with the hangout and the session would need to be restarted but the page would not auto-reload the new feed (as the Javascript stops checking when the first hangout is successfully running). We want to fix this.
* **Two Factor Auth! Be Gone!** – no-one likes 2FA, it is annoying, so we want to see how we can remove it securely when you access the Etherpad so you don’t need to enter that damn code every-time-you-access-a-session. 🙂
* **Integrate IRC/Etherpad Into Hangout Console** – for those people in the actual hangout, one problem is that you have to constantly flip between the session screen with the IRC/Etherpad and the hangout window where you are broadcasting from. We want to integrate IRC and Etherpad into the hangout broadcast window to make this easier (and make it easier to keep an eye on IRC).
## We Want Your Feedback!
Although some of these conclusions presented here are a great start, we want to make sure we don’t leave any stones unturned! As such, I would like to invite everyone who joined the event to [take a few minutes to fill in this survey](https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/vUDS). This will help us get a better idea of your thoughts on the event, what worked well, and what we can improve. Can I encourage everyone to fill this survey in in the next week so we can start putting some solid plans in place for the next event.
I would also like to organize a community meeting on IRC and invite everyone to join and provide further feedback. I think it would be most beneficial to organize this meeting in a few weeks when folks have had a chance to fill in the survey.
You can also join the UDS IRC channel at `#ubuntu-uds` and discuss the event there; we all hang out in there.
## Want to Help Make Summit Rock?
Virtual UDS is a community event and we want to ensure everyone has an opportunity to contribute to making it as good as possible. One definitive area where folks can help is with our increasingly sophisticated [summit.ubuntu.com](https://summit.ubuntu.com).
The Summit project is Open Source, and always open to new contributors. It is written in Python and Django, with a large amount of HTML, CSS and Javascript work at well. If you have any of these skills, or are willing to learn them, we encourage you to come be a part of it.
You can get the code and look at bugs on [Summit’s Launchpad page](https://launchpad.net/summit). The developers hang out in `#ubuntu-website` on Freenode IRC, and are available there to help you get a local development environment set up. If in doubt, go and poke `mhall119`. 🙂
Thanks, everyone!
Ubuntu Q&A This Week
This week’s live video Q&A is in a slightly later time slot this week on **Wednesday at 8pm UTC** ([click here for the time in your location this week](https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?iso=20130313T20&p1=1440&ah=1)).
As usual everyone is welcome to bring any and all questions to the Q&A.
To join, head over to [Ubuntu On Air](https://ubuntuonair.com/) at 8pm UTC on Wednesday and you can ask your questions in the embedded chat box.
Look forward to seeing you all there!