Mark Shuttleworth | here be dragons

I spent a lot of time observing our community, this release. For some reason I was curious to see how our teams work together, what the dynamic is, how they work and play together, how they celebrate and sadly, also how they mourn. So I spent a fair amount more time this cycle reading lists from various Ubuntu teams, reading minutes from governance meetings for our various councils, watching IRC channels without participating, just to get a finger on the pulse.

Everywhere I looked I saw goodness: organised, motivated, cheerful and constructive conversations. Building a free OS involves an extraordinary diversity of skills, and what’s harder is that it requires merging the contributions from so many diverse disciplines and art forms. And yet, looking around the community, we seem to have found patterns for coordination and collaboration that buffer the natural gaps between all the different kinds of activities that go on.

There are definitely things we can work on. We have to stay mindful of the fact that Ubuntu is primarily a reflection of what gets done in the broader open source ecosystem, and stay committed to transmitting their work effectively, in high quality (and high definition :-)) to the Ubuntu audience. We have to remind those who are overly enthusiastic about Ubuntu that fanboyism isn’t cool, I saw a bit of “We rock you suck” that’s not appropriate. But I also saw folks stepping in and reminding those who cross the line that our values as a community are important, and the code of conduct most important of all.

So I have a very big THANK YOU for everyone. This is our most valuable achievement: making Ubuntu a great place to get stuff done that has a positive impact on literally millions of people. Getting that right isn’t technical, but it’s hard and complex work. And that’s what makes the technical goodness flow.

In particular, I’d like to thank those who have stepped into responsibilities as leaders in large and small portions of our Ubuntu universe. Whether it’s organising a weekly newsletter, coordinating the news team, arranging the venue for a release party, reviewing translations from new translators in your language, moderating IRC or reviewing hard decisions by IRC moderators, planning Kubuntu or leading MOTU’s, the people who take on the responsibility of leadership are critical to keeping Ubuntu calm, happy and productive.

But I’d also like to say that what made me most proud was seeing folks who might not think of themselves as leaders, stepping up and showing leadership skills.

There are countless occasions when something needs to be said, or something needs to get done, but where it would be easy to stay silent or let it slip, and I’m most proud of the fact that many of the acts of leadership and initiative I saw weren’t by designated or recognised leaders, they were just part of the way teams stayed cohesive and productive. I saw one stroppy individual calmly asked to reconsider their choice of words and pointed to the code of conduct by a newcomer to Ubuntu. I saw someone else step up and lead a meeting when the designated chairman couldn’t make it. That’s what makes me confident Ubuntu will continue to grow and stay sane as it grows. That’s the really daunting thing for me – as it gets bigger, it depends on a steady supply of considerate and thoughtful people who are passionate about helping do something amazing that they couldn’t do on their own. It’s already far bigger than one person or one company – so we’re entirely dependent on broader community commitment to the values that define the project.

So, to everyone who participates, thank you and please feel empowered to show leadership whenever you think we could do better as a community. That’s what will keep us cohesive and positive. That’s what will make sure the effort everyone puts into it will reach the biggest possible audience.

With that said, well done everyone on a tight but crisp post-LTS release. Maverick was a challenge, we wanted to realign the cycle slightly which compressed matters but hopefully gives us a more balanced April / October cadence going forward based on real data for real global holiday and weather patterns :-). There was an enormous amount of change embraced and also change deferred, wisely. You all did brilliantly. And so, ladies an gentlemen, I give you Mr Robbie Williamson and the Maverick Release Announcement. Grab your towel and let’s take the Meerkat out on a tour of the Galaxy 😉

Delighted to receive this today, and to proxy it through to Planets U and G:

Dear Ubuntu Community Council members,

on behalf of the openSUSE Board, I would like to extend this
invitation to you and your community to join us at the
openSUSE Conference in Nuremberg, Germany October 20-23, 2010.

This year more than seventy talks and workshops explore the theme of
‘Collaboration Across Borders‘ in Free and Open Source software
communities, administration and development. We believe that the
program, which includes tracks about distributions, the free desktop and
community, reaches across the borders between our projects and we
would like to ask you to encourage your community to visit the
conference so we get the chance to meet face to face, talk to and
inspire each other.

More information including the program and details about the event you
can find in our announcement at http://bit.ly/oconf2010

Thank you in advance and see you in October! 🙂

Henne Vogelsang
openSUSE Board Member

We’ll gladly sponsor a member of the Ubuntu community council to go, busy finding out if anyone can make it. I can’t, but appreciate the sentiment and the action and think it would be great if members of the Ubuntu community can take up the invitation.

Regardless, best wishes for the conference!

Saw this URL fly by today… wow and thank you to the Ubuntu Ads guys 🙂

So, who’s up for making Maverick Movies? It would be great to have a “10 best features in 10.10” video collection for release. Unity’s awesome and then there are things to show off in OO.o, Gnome, Firefox…. giving credit where it’s due.

I put together https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MaverickMovies as a starting place to aggregate content. Have subscribed, so if you update that page I’ll see it. If that goes nicely, we can beef the process up in the runup to release.

Let’s celebrate this milestone in Ubuntu reporting for and by the community. UWN is my favourite way to keep up with waht’s going on across the full length and breadth of the community. If you want a single read per week to know what you are part of, this is it. And if you’re doing something cool, these are the guys to tell about it, they’ll tell the world.

A big thank you from me to the team who makes it real every week.

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 200 for the week June
27 – July 3rd, 2010.

The purpose of this newsletter is to let everyone know what is
happening in all the different corners of the vast Ubuntu community.
It’s a snapshot of the Ubuntu Community one week at a time.

The first issue was unleashed June 4th, 2006, and a little over four
(4) years and seven (7) releases later UWN and the Ubuntu Community
continues to mature and grow together.

The Ubuntu News Team, which includes both UWN and Fridge, continues to
report what happens, effects, and relates to the the vast and ever
growing Ubuntu community, including information from the different
teams, LoCos, forums, mailing lists, IRC universe, and newsworthy
press coverage and blogs. A very important and helpful contribution
many LoCo Teams continue to do is spread the news by translating UWN.

It has undoubtedly been a fun and rewarding experience for all involved!

We would like to thank all our readers for your continued support and
feedback and encourage you to keep sending the Ubuntu News Team your
comments and corrections (yes, we do make mistakes!).

I’m absolutely thrilled to see this chart of untriaged bugs in Inkscape since the project moved to Launchpad:

As you can see, the Inkscape community has been busy triaging and closing bugs, radically reducing the “new and unknown” bug count and giving the developers a tighter, more focused idea of where the important issues are that need to be addressed.

A lot of my personal interest in free software is motivated by the idea that we can be more efficient if we collaborate better. If we want free software to be the norm for personal computing software, then we have to show, among other things, that the open, free software approach taps into the global talent pool in a healthier, more dynamic way than the old proprietary approach to building software does. We don’t have money on our side, but we do have the power of collaboration.

I put a lot of personal effort into Launchpad because I love the idea that it can help lead the way to better collaboration across the whole ecosystem of free software development. I look for the practices which the best-run projects follow, and encourage the Launchpad guys to make it easy for everyone to do those things. These improvements and efficiencies will help each project individually, but it also helps every Linux distribution as well. This sort of picture gives me a sense of real accomplishment in that regard.

Bryce Harrington, who happens to work for Canonical and is a member of the Inkscape team, told me about this and blogged the experience. I’ve asked a few other Inkscape folks, and they seem genuinely thrilled at the result. I’m delighted. Thank you!

Is it possible to have training materials that are developed in partnership with the community, available under a CC license, AND make those same materials available through formal training providers? We’re trying to find out at Canonical with our Ubuntu Desktop Course.

Billy Cina @Canonical has been making steady progress towards the goal of having a full portfolio of training options available for commercial users of Ubuntu. Companies that want to ensure that their staff are rigorously trained, and individuals who want to present their Ubuntu credentials in a formal setting, need to have a certified and trusted framework for skills assurance.

Most of the work we are doing in this line is following the traditional model, where content is funded as a private investment, and the content is then licensed to authorized training providers who sell courses to their local markets. These courses are usually sold to companies that have adopted a platform or tool and want to ensure a consistent level of skills across the organization. Many companies are moving to Ubuntu for both desktop and server, so demand is hotting up for this capability. We have a system builder course, and a system administrator course are now available from authorized training providers.

But we wanted also to try a different approach, that might be more accessible to the Ubuntu community and might also result in even higher quality materials. We think the key ingredients are:

• Use of an open format (Docbook)
• Content source available in a public Bazaar repository (here)
• Licensing under open terms (CC-BY-NC-SA)
• Working with the Ubuntu doc-team, who have a wealth of experience

The license is copyleft and non-commercial, so that it is usable by any person for their own education and edification with the requirement that commercial use will involve some contribution back to the core project.

It’s already a 400 page book which gives a great overview of the Ubuntu desktop experience, a very valuable resource for folks who are new to Linux and Ubuntu.

We are getting to the point where we can publish a “daily PDF” which will have the very latest version (“trunk”) compiled overnight. So anyone has free access to the very latest version, and of course anyone can bzr branch the content to make changes that suit them.

If you want to have a look at the latest content, try this:

• install Bluefish (useful as a docbook editor)
• make sure you have bzr 1.0
• make sure Launchpad has an SSH key for you

Type:

bzr launchpad-login <your-lp-username
bzr branch lp:ubuntu-desktop-course

The source is huge (712MB, lots of images in a large book), so grab a cup of tea, and when you get back you will have the latest version of the content, hot and well-brewed 🙂 This is a great set of materials if you are offering informal training. Corrections and additions would be most welcome, just push your branch up to Launchpad and request a merge of your changes.