Last Day Today
Recently I [announced](https://archivedblog.jonobacon.com/2014/05/19/goodbye-canonical-hello-xprize/) I am stepping down as Ubuntu Community Manager at Canonical and moving to [XPRIZE](https://xprize.org/) as Senior Director of Community. Today is my last day at Canonical.
I just want to say how touched I have been by the response. The comments, social media posts, emails, and calls from you have been so kind and supportive. You are all good people, and I am going to miss every single one of you.
The reason why I have devoted my life to understanding communities is that I believe communities bring out the best in people, and all of you are a perfect example of that. I cannot express just how much I appreciate it.
Over the course of the next few weeks my replacement will be sourced and announced. and in the interim my team (Daniel Holbach, Michael Hall, David Planella, Nicholas Skaggs, Alan Pope) will take over my duties. Everything has been transitioned over, and remember, the weekly Q&As will continue at 6pm UTC every Tuesday on [Ubuntu On Air](https://ubuntuonair.com/) with my team filling in for me. As ever, any and all Ubuntu questions are welcome!
Of course, I will still be around. I am going to continue to be a member of the Ubuntu community and an avid Ubuntu user, tester, and supporter. I will continue to be on IRC, you can email me at `[email protected]`, I will continue to do [Bad Voltage](https://badvoltage.org/), and I have a [busy schedule at the Community Leadership Summit, OSCON, and more](https://archivedblog.jonobacon.com/2014/05/29/community-leadership-summit-2014-new-forum-oscon-training-and-more/). I am also going to continue to have my own Q&A session every week where you can ask questions about my perspectives on Ubuntu, Canonical, community management, XPRIZE, and more; I will announce this soon.
Ubuntu has a tremendous future ahead of it, built on the hard work and passion of a global community. We are only just getting started with a new era of Ubuntu convergence and cloud orchestration and while I will miss being there in an official capacity, I am just thankful that I can continue to be along for the ride in the very community I played a part in building.
I now have a few weeks off and then my new adventure begins. Stay tuned. 🙂
Community Leadership Summit 2014, New Forum, OSCON, Training, and More!
As many of you will know, I organize an event every year called the [Community Leadership Summit](https://www.communityleadershipsummit.com/). The event 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 these 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.
This year’s event is shaping up to be incredible. We have a [fantastic list of registered attendees](https://communityleadershipsummit.com/attendees/) and I want to thank our sponsors, [O’Reilly](https://oreilly.com/), [Citrix](https://www.citrix.com/), and [LinuxFund](https://linuxfund.org/).
The event is taking place on **18 – 19 July 2014** in Portland, Oregon. I hope to see you all there, it is going to be a fantastic CLS this year!
I also have a few other things to share too…
## Community Leadership Forum
My goal as a community manager is to help contribute to the growth of the community management profession. I started this journey by publishing [The Art of Community](https://artofcommunityonline.org/) and ensuring it is available freely as well as in stores. I then set up the [Community Leadership Summit](https://www.communityleadershipsummit.com/) as just discussed, and now I am keen to put together a central community for community management and leadership discussion.
As such, I am proud to launch the new [Community Leadership Forum](https://www.communityleadershipforum.com/) for discussing topics that relate to community management, as well as topics for discussion at the Community Leadership Summit event each year. The forum is designed to be a great place for sharing and learning tips and techniques, getting to know other community leaders, and having fun.
The forum is powered by [Discourse](https://discourse.org/), so it is a pleasure to use, and I want to thank [discoursehosting.com](https://discoursehosting.com/) for generously providing free hosting for us.
Be sure to go and sign up!
## Speaking Events and Training
I also wanted to share that I will be at [OSCON]() this year and I will be giving a [presentation called Dealing With Disrespect](https://www.oscon.com/oscon2014/public/schedule/detail/34248?cmp=tw-prog-confreg-info-os14_tweet_general) that is based upon my [free book of the same name for managing complex communications](https://dealingwithdisrespect.com/).
This is the summary of the talk:
> In this new presentation from Jono Bacon, author of The Art of Community, founder of the Community Leadership Summit, and Ubuntu Community Manager, he discusses how to process, interpret, and manage rude, disrespectful, and non-constructive feedback in communities so the constructive criticism gets through but the hate doesn’t.
> The presentation covers the three different categories of communications, how we evaluate and assess different attributes in each communication, the factors that influence all of our communications, and how to put in place a set of golden rules for handling feedback and putting it in perspective.
> If you personally or your community has suffered rudeness, trolling, and disrespect, this presentation is designed to help.
This presentation is on **Wed 23rd July at 2.30pm in E144**.
In addition to this I will also be providing a full day of [community management training at OSCON](https://www.oscon.com/oscon2014/public/schedule/detail/34247) on **Sunday 20th July in D135**.
I will also be providing full day community management training at [LinuxCon North America](https://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/linuxcon-north-america) and [LinuxCon Europe](https://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/linuxcon-europe). More details of this to follow soon in a dedicated blog post.
Lots of fun things ahead and I hope to see you there!
Goodbye Canonical, Hello XPRIZE
After nearly eight years of service at Canonical, I will be stepping down as the Ubuntu Community Manager and leaving my fellow warthogs at Canonical on 29th May 2014.
I have always been passionate about two things in my life. Firstly, I want to go to work every day and feel that my efforts are having a wider impact on the world. Secondly, I believe that community and collaboration is at the core what makes us human and what drives us to create beautiful things.
Canonical has provided room for me to explore both of these areas in droves. Free Software is an undeniable power for good in making technology accessible to all. Ubuntu has been at the forefront of this; focusing on simplicity, elegance, and ease of use to make technology as accessible and widely available as possible. Canonical and the Ubuntu Community has also provided an environment in which I could explore the many facets of community building, leadership, and growth…trying lots of ideas, learning from what worked and what didn’t, and evolving what we do.
This has resulted in me having the opportunity to learn from great people, in fun and challenging situations, and to further the art and science of building great communities.
## A new chapter
…and this is where a new chapter in my life opens.
Recently I was presented with the opportunity to go and work at the [XPRIZE Foundation](https://www.xprize.org/).
For those of you unfamiliar with XPRIZE, their focus is to solve the major problems facing humanity. This work is delivered by incentivized competitions to solve these grand challenges.
This started with the $10million [Ansari XPRIZE](https://space.xprize.org/ansari-x-prize) that spawned the commercial space-flight industry. Other examples include the [Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE](https://www.qualcommtricorderxprize.org/) (to create an affordable handheld device to diagnose health issues), the [Google Lunar XPRIZE](https://www.googlelunarxprize.org/) (to achieve the safe landing of a private craft on the surface of the moon), the [Wendy Schmidt Ocean Health XPRIZE](https://www.iprizecleanoceans.org/) (improving our understanding of ocean acidification), and the [A.I XPRIZE](https://www.xprize.org/ted) (create the first A.I. to walk or roll out on stage and present a TED Talk so compelling that it commands a standing ovation).
XPRIZE is an organization with significant ideas and ambitions to have a profound impact on the world. If you want to get a better feel for this, I recommend you watch [this video by founder, Peter Diamandis](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mx8qYmkV5NQ); it is tremendously inspiring.
Peter believes that competition is in our DNA. I believe that collaboration and community is in our DNA. As you can imagine, these concepts are complimentary to each other and this is why I feel like this such a natural fit for me.
As such, I will be joining XPRIZE as *Senior Director of Community*. I will be there to look at the full breadth of what XPRIZE does and inject community and collaboration into the many different layers from how the prizes are picked, how teams are formed, how R&D is created, how technologies go into production, and more. I am tremendously excited about the opportunity.
## Difficult decisions
Although XPRIZE is an exciting (if unknown) road forward, leaving Canonical is bittersweet.
To put this in starker terms, Canonical quite literally changed my life. It helped to transform my career from a position of observation of communities to one of structured best practice. It helped me to think differently, challenge myself, and be open to being challenged by others. It afforded me the opportunity to travel the world, meet incredible people, see incredible things, and ultimately led me to meet my wife, Erica, who has become the corner-stone of our family. This was *never* a job, it was a *way of life*, and Canonical provided every ounce of support in helping me to achieve what I did here and to be the best that I could be.
Working with the Ubuntu community has not just been a privilege, it has been a pleasure. One of the many reasons why I love what I do is that I am exposed to so many incredible people, minds, and ideas, and the Ubuntu community is a text-book definition of what makes community so powerful and such an agent for making the world a better place. I will be forever thankful for not just the opportunity to meet so many different members of the global Ubuntu family, but to also continue these many friendships into my next endeavour.
Now, some of you reading this may be concerned by this move. Some of you may be worried that my departure is due to a negative experience at Canonical, or that the community is somehow less important than it used to be. I want to be very clear in responding to this.
I am *not* leaving Canonical due to annoyance, frustration, bureaucracy, lack of support or anything else negative. I have a wonderful relationship with Mark Shuttleworth, Jane Silber, Rick Spencer and the other executives. I have a great relationship with my peers and my team, and I love going to work every single day. These people are not just colleagues, they are friends. I have long said I have the very best job in community management and I feel as strong about that today as I did when I joined.
I am not leaving Canonical due to *problems*, I am moving on to a new *opportunity* at XPRIZE. I actually wasn’t looking for a move; I was quite content in my role at Canonical, but XPRIZE came out of nowhere, and it felt like a good next step to move forward to.
Likewise, I can assure you that the relationship with community at Canonical has not changed at all. Mark Shuttleworth and the rest of the leadership team are passionate about our community and they are intimately aware that our community is *critical* to the success of Ubuntu.
I believe in Ubuntu as much as I did when I joined. I have long talked about how Free Software and Open Source is only truly game-changing if the technology is simple, powerful, and accessible. Ubuntu is the very best place to get Open Source across the desktop, cloud, and now the mobile space too. Canonical has hired a phenomenal team over the years to drive this, and we are seeing the fruits of this success. I look forward to seeing this story unfold more and more and seeing Canonical achieve wider and wider ambitions.
Before I wrap up, I just want to offer some thanks to Mark Shuttleworth, Jane Silber, Rick Spencer, my team, my peers in the Ubuntu Engineering Management Team, my fellow warthogs at Canonical, and everyone in the Ubuntu community for being so supportive over the years. You all helped me turn my dream into a reality and help me become the person I am today.
I also want to say a special thank-you to Mark who gave me a shot in 2006 and has been a constant beacon of support and inspiration for so many years. I consider Mark a mentor, but more importantly a friend.
We have taken on some tough challenges over the years in Ubuntu, challenges that were necessary for us to grow. I have never questioned Mark’s commitment to our values and our success as a project once, and I am thankful for him to lead Ubuntu towards success; successful projects need leaders who can constantly ask new questions and explore new territory.
## You don’t get rid of me that easily
Now, I won’t *actually* be going anywhere. I will still be hanging out on IRC, posting on my social media networks, still responding to email, and will continue to do [Bad Voltage](https://badvoltage.org/) and run the [Community Leadership Summit](https://communityleadershipsummit.com/). I will continue to be an Ubuntu Member, to use Ubuntu on my desktop and server, and continue to post about and share my thoughts about where Ubuntu is moving forward. I am looking forward in many ways to experiencing the true Ubuntu community experience now I will be on the other side of the garden.
As I step out of my position at Canonical, I am hugely proud of the accomplishments of my team (Daniel Holbach, David
Planella, Michael Hall, Nicholas Skaggs, Alan Pope (and alumni, Jorge Castro, Kyle Nitzsche, Ahmed Kamal)). I can’t think of a better group of people to continue to help our community to do great work and be successful.
To wrap things up, I will be doing my very last Q&A session on **Tuesday 27th May 2014 at 6pm UTC** on [Ubuntu On Air](https://ubuntuonair.com/) – I hope to see you all there!
So, here is to fun and fond memories, and here is to a new set of challenges helping to create a a better world with XPRIZE. Thanks!
Announcing Ubuntu Pioneers
Ubuntu has always been about breaking new ground. We broke the ground with the desktop back in 2004, we have broken the ground with cloud orchestration across multiple clouds and providers, and we are building a powerful, innovative mobile and desktop platform that is breaking ground with convergence.
The hardest part about breaking new ground and innovating is not having the vision and creating the technology, it is getting people on board to be part of it.
We knew this was going to be a challenge when we first took the wraps off the Ubuntu app developer platform: we have a brand new platform that was still being developed, and when we started many of the key pieces were not there such as a solid developer portal, documentation, API references, training and more. Today the story is very different with a compelling, end-to-end, developer story for building powerful convergent apps.
We believed and always have believed in the power of this platform, and every single one of those people who also believed in what we are doing and wrote apps have shared the same spirit of pioneering a new platform that we have.
As such, we want to acknowledge those people.
And with this, I present [Ubuntu Pioneers](https://developer.ubuntu.com/pioneers).
The idea is simple, we want to celebrate the first 200 app developers who get their apps in Ubuntu. We are doing this in two ways.
Firstly, we have created [https://developer.ubuntu.com/pioneers](https://developer.ubuntu.com/pioneers) which displays all of these developers and lists the apps that they have created. This will provide a permanent record of those who were there right at the beginning.
Secondly, we have designed a custom, limited-edition Ubuntu Pioneers t-shirt that we want to send to all of our pioneers. For those of you who are listed on this page, please ensure that your email address is correct in MyApps as we will be getting in touch soon.
Thank-you so much to every single person listed on that page. You are an inspiration for me, my team, and the wider Ubuntu project.
If you have that pioneering spirit and wished you were up there, fear not! We still have some space before we hit 200 developers, so [go here to get started building an app](https://developer.ubuntu.com/).
Unwrapping ‘Dealing With Disrespect’
With the growth of the Internet and the ease of publishing content, more and more creative minds are coming online to share videos, music, software, products, services, opinions, and more. While the technology has empowered a generation to build new audiences and share interesting things, an unfortunate side-effect has been a culture in which some consumers of this content have provided feedback in a form that is personalized, mean-spirited, disrespectful, and in some cases, malicious.
We have all seen it…the trolls, the haters, the comment boxes filled with venom and vitriol, typically pointed at people just trying to do good and interesting things.
Unfortunately, this conduct can be jarring for many people, with some going as far to give up sharing their creative endeavours so as not to deal with the “wrath of the Internet”.
As some of you will know, this has been bothering me for a while now. While there is no *silver bullet* for solving these issues, one thing I have learned over the years is how to put negative, anti-social, and non-constructive comments and feedback into perspective.
To help others with this I have written a free book called [Dealing With Disrespect](https://www.dealingwithdisrespect.com/).
*Dealing With Disrespect* is a short, simple to read, free book that provides a straight-forward guide for handling this kind of challenging feedback, picking out the legitimate criticism to learn from, and how to not just ignore the haters, but how to manage them. The book helps put all communication, whether on or offline, into perspective and helps you to become a better communicator yourself.
My goal with the book is that when someone reads something anti-social that demotivates them, a friend can recommend ‘Dealing With Disrespect’ as something that can help put things in perspective.
Go and [check out the new website](https://www.dealingwithdisrespect.com/), watch the [introductory video](https://www.dealingwithdisrespect.com/), and go and [grab the PDF, read it online, or get it for your Kindle](https://www.dealingwithdisrespect.com/read/). There is also a [FAQ](https://www.dealingwithdisrespect.com/download/).
The book is licensed under a Creative Commons license, and I encourage everyone who enjoys it and finds it useful to share it.
Ubuntu 14.04 Is Out!
My apologies in advance for the shorter blog post about this, but like many other Ubuntu folks, I am absolutely exhausted right now. Everyone, across the board, has been working their collective socks off to make [Ubuntu 14.04](https://www.ubuntu.com) LTS a fantastic release on desktop, server, and cloud, and pull together our next iteration of Ubuntu for smart-phones and tablets. Consequently, when the trigger is pulled to share our final product with the world, release day is often less of a blistering and energetic woo-hoo, but more of an exhausted but satisfying oh-yeah (complete with beer firmly clenched in hand).
I am hugely proud of this release. The last six months have arguably been our busiest yet. No longer are we just working on desktop and server editions of Ubuntu, but we are building for the cloud and full convergence across the client. No longer are we “just” pulling together the fruits of upstream software projects but we are building our own platform too; the Ubuntu SDK, developer eco-system, charm store, image-based updates, push notifications, app lifecycle, and more. While the work has been intense and at times frantic, it has always been measured and carefully executed. Much of this has been thanks to many of our most under-thanked people; the members of our tremendous QA and CI teams.
Today, tomorrow, and for weeks to come our users, the press, the industry, and others will assess our work in Ubuntu 14.04 across these different platforms, and I am very confident they will love what they see. Ubuntu 14.04 embodies the true spirit of Ubuntu; innovation, openness, and people.
But as we wait to see the reviews let’s take a moment for each other. Now is a great time to reach out to each other and those Ubuntu folks you know (and don’t know) and share some kudos, some thanks, and some great stories. Until we get to the day where machines make software, today software is made by people and great software is built by great people.
Thanks everyone for every ounce of effort you fed into Ubuntu and our many flavors. We just took another big leap forward towards our future.
I Am Hiring
I just wanted to let you folks know that I am recruiting for a community manager to join my team at Canonical.
I am looking for someone with strong technical knowledge of building Ubuntu (knowledge of how we release, how we build packages, bug management, governance etc), great community management skills, and someone who is willing to be challenged and grow in their skills and capabilities.
My goal with everyone who joins my team is not just to help them be successful in their work, but to help them be the very best at what they do in our industry. As such I am looking for someone with a passion to be successful and grow.
I think it is a great opportunity and to be part of a great team. Details of the job are [available here](https://ch.tbe.taleo.net/CH03/ats/careers/requisition.jsp?org=CANONICAL&cws=1&rid=803) – please apply if you are interested!?
Ubuntu Online Summit Dates
At the last Ubuntu Developer Summit we discussed the idea of making our regular online summit serve more than just developers. We are interested in showcasing not just the developer-orientated discussion sessions that we currently have, but also including content such as presentations, demos, tutorials, and other topics.
I just wanted to give everyone a heads up that the first Ubuntu Online Summit will happen from **10th – 12th June 2014**. The website is not yet updated (we are going to keep everything on [summit.ubuntu.com](https://summit.ubuntu.com) and uds.ubuntu.com can point there, and Michael is making the changes to bring over the static content).
We are really keen to get ideas for how the event can run so I am scheduling a hangout on Thurs 10th April at 5pm UTC on [Ubuntu On Air](https://www.ubuntuonair.com) where I would welcome ideas and input. I hope to see you there!
Open Source Think Tank Community Leadership Summit Soon
As some of you will know, I founded the [Community Leadership Summit](https://www.communityleadershipsummit.com/) that takes place in Portland, Oregon every year. The event brings together community leaders, organizers and managers and the projects and organizations that are interested in growing and empowering a strong community. Each year we discuss, debate and continue to refine the art of building an effective and capable community, structured in a set of presentation and attendee-driven unconference sessions.
This year’s event is happening on **18th – 19th July 2014** (the two days before [OSCON](https://oscon.com/)), and is shaping up to be a great event. We have [over 180 people registered already](https://www.communityleadershipsummit.com/attendees/), with a diverse and wide-ranging set of attendees. The event is free to attend, you just need to [register](https://www.communityleadershipsummit.com/register/) first. We hope to see you there!
In a few weeks though we have an additional sister-event to the main Community Leadership Summit at the [Open Source Think Tank](https://www.osthinktank.com/events/open-source-think-tank-spring-2014/event-summary-bafe74fefce34c9a8dcbef90bc8cab20.aspx).
The *Community Leadership Summit* and *Open Source Think Tank* have partnered to create a unique event designed for *executives and managers involved in community management planning and strategic development*. While the normal annual Community Leadership Summit serves practicing community managers and leaders well, this unique event is designed to be very focused on *executives in a strategic leadership position* to understand the value and process of building a community.
I have been wanting to coordinate a strategic leadership event such as this for some time, and the Think Tank is the perfect venue; it brings together executives across a wide range of Open Source organizations, and I will be delivering the Community Leadership Summit track as a key part of the event on the first day.
The event takes place on **24th March 2014** in Napa, California. See the [event homepage for more details](https://www.communityleadershipsummit.com/about/thinktank-cls/) – I hope to see you there!
The track is shaping up well. We will have keynote sessions, break-out groups discussing gamification, metrics, hiring community managers, and more, a dedicated case study (based on a real organization with the identity anonymized) to exercise these skills and more.
If you want to join the Community Leadership Summit track at the Open Source Think Tank, please drop me an email as space is limited. I hope to see you there!
Ubuntu Developer Summit Next Week
Next week we have our [Ubuntu Developer Summit](https://uds.ubuntu.com), taking place online from **Tues 11th March 2014 – Thurs 13th March 2014**. Go and see the [schedule](https://summit.ubuntu.com/uds-1403/) – we still have lots of schedule space if you want to run a session. For details of how to propose a session, see [this guide](https://uds.ubuntu.com/getinvolved/propose-a-session/).
I just want to highlight a session I would like to really invite input on in particular.
Today the online Ubuntu Developer Summit is largely based on the formula from our physical UDSs that we used to have, and that formula goes back to 2004. While these have traditionally served the project well, I am cognizant that our community is much bigger and more diverse than it used to be, and our current Ubuntu Developer Summit doesn’t serve our wider community as well as it could; there is more to Ubuntu to rigorous software engineering.
UDS is great if you are a developer focused on building software and ensuring you have a plan to do so, but for our translators, advocates, marketeers, app developers, and more…the format doesn’t suit those communities as well.
As such, I would like to discuss this and explore opportunities where UDS could serve our wider community better. The session [is here](https://summit.ubuntu.com/uds-1403/meeting/22201/re-imagining-our-online-summit/) and is on **Wed 12th March at 15.00UTC**. I hope you can join me!