A week ago I flew to Budapest for an Ubuntu Engineering Team Rally. This is where we get the Ubuntu Engineers at Canonical and some other groups together for a week to work together, plan future work, have meetings and make progress on our existing commitments. It is in this week that I gather together with the guys on my team and we have the rare privilage of working together from the same office (we all work remotely usually).

Daniel Holbach, Jorge Castro, and David Planella were there, and we welcomed Nicholas Skaggs to the team who started his first day at Canonical on the first day of the Rally; a brave man! Unfortunately Michael Hall could not join us, but we had a tablet with his gleaning smiling face beaming into our room on Google+. He was there in spirit, if not physically.

Chris Farley was also there in spirit, if not physically.

We made some great progress and put quite a dent in our burn-down chart, but I wanted to summarize some of the work going on right now that might interest you:

• David, Daniel, and I spent quite some time opening up the ARB process and helping to get things back on track. We now have a flow of lenses coming through and the queue is looking in better shape. Thanks to the ARB for their work here and we will be continuing to build refinements into the process over the coming weeks.
• Nick got on-boarded at the event and met the QA team (Gema, John-Baptiste, Carlos, Pete etc). We discussed plans around putting in place a manual test case system (we will be piloting Case Conductor). We also centralized QA communication channels (#ubuntu-testing on Freenode) and Nick started cleaning up the documentation for how people participate in Ubuntu QA. I am excited by the progress happening here…more to come soon!
• Jorge made further progress on the charms front and we planned out a tour of events to run charm schools. Good progress is being made on upstream charm targets and awareness of Juju is growing.
• David and I discussed next steps for developer.ubuntu.com. Things will be on hold a little in this cycle due to the web team being re-assigned to other work. Instead we are fixing up chunks of developer.ubuntu.com, particularly around publishing apps and reference materials.
• Daniel (who just got back from an awesome holiday in Morocco) and I synced up on the sponsorship queue which has got a little out of shape recently, so Daniel is re-focusing on that over the coming week as well as building out the developer advisory group and identify prospective developers and providing 1-on-1 guidance to get them through the developer process.
• Michael is going to be putting in place a patch pilot scheme for the DX team to ensure community merge proposals are getting through in a timely manner. He also coordinated the move from #ayatana to #ubuntu-unity on Freenode.
• Michael also connected with Jorge regarding the transition of Unity responsibilities and he will be coordinating further relationships with upstreams. The goal here is simple: encourage more participation in Unity development as well as the consumption of our APIs by upstreams.
• I spent some time with the team on team-related workflow. Everyone is pretty happy with how we are working, are happy with the public IRC meetings and comfortable in how we are tracking our work and moving forward on projects.
• We discussed raising the awareness of cool things going on in Ubuntu and discussed how we can provide a more representative view of this work across blogs and social media. You can expect more blogging out of our team and other teams.

Of course, there were many other things that happened, but these were some of the main ones. Remember you can keep up to date with out work on the burndown chart and in #ubuntu-community-team on Freenode.

Quality has always been an important value in the Ubuntu community, but over the last few releases we have faced some challenges in how we can assure and deliver quality. There have been various reasons for this, which include:

• Fewer automated tests that we would like and limited coverage in key components (e.g. Unity).
• Out of date manual tests with limited coverage.
• No acceptance testing for the distribution (this mean’t that some broken features would land in the development release).
• Limited support and leadership from the Canonical Community Team in harnessing community participation.

Over the last year quality has become a strong area of focus inside Canonical. This has included re-factoring the roles and responsibilities of QA staff (focusing them on defect analysis as opposed to just bug triage), Pete Graner has been leading an effort to get an extensive automated testing infrastructure in place, Jason Warner has led an effort to put acceptance criteria in place for Canonical upstreams (this requires that a certain level of quality is assured before Unity updates are landed in the development branch of Ubuntu), and I have hired Nicholas Skaggs who starts in January to build out our QA community, with a particular focus on manual testing and triage.

Defect Analyst hard at work.

I also wanted to share an interesting post from Olli Ries about how he is building out his team around quality, and Thomas Voß followed up with an interesting post on the new Product Team QA Blog. Thomas and Olli will also be holding their first meeting on the 10th Jan in #ubuntu-qa.

I will be following up more in the new year about QA as Nicholas joins the Canonical Community team and we build out our QA community infrastructure, communication channel, and focus.

I am pleased to announce that we will be welcoming a new horseman to the Canonical Community Team. His name is is Nicholas Skaggs, he is based in Florida (as well as Jorge and Michael), and he will be joining in January 2012 as our QA Community Coordinator.

Nicholas will be growing our QA community and his focus in his first few months will be on assessing the on-ramp for participating in QA in Ubuntu, and growing a comprehensive community of testers and triagers. He will have a particular focus on manual testing and a regular cadence of testing throughout the release cycle. I am excited to welcome him aboard the team!

When Nicholas joins, the team will look like this and their primary responsibilities:

• Daniel Holbach – coordinating and growing Ubuntu developers.
• Jorge Castro – growing the Juju and cloud communities and encouraging the development of charms.
• David Planella – growing our app developer community, as well as coordinating our translators community.
• Michael Hall – working with upstreams, and a particular focus on helping Canonical upstreams to have a great community relationship.
• Nicholas Skaggs – growing our QA community, with a particular focus on manual testing and triage.
• Me – I manage the team and work with Canonical and community stakeholders to develop strategy around where we focus community resources and growth.

You can read more about the team from this earlier blog entry and feel free to ask your questions in the comments.

Give Nicholas a warm welcome, folks!

Seen just now in a Google Hangout:

Google, we salute you.

Just a quick reminder, tomorrow (Tues 22nd Nov 2011) we will be holding our usual weekly Canonical Community Team meeting at 8am Pacific / 11am Eastern / 4pm UK / 5pm Europe. The meeting takes place in #ubuntu-meeting on the freenode IRC network.

You can also join our general IRC channel at #ubuntu-community-team.

We hope to see you there!

I am delighted to announce that Michael Hall, also known as mhall119 on IRC will be joining the Canonical Community Team and working with our upstreams, with a particular focus on growing participation in Unity and other upstreams closely related to Ubuntu. Michael has a strong development background, has been involved in the Ubuntu community for quite some time, has contributed to many Ubuntu projects (including loco.ubuntu.com and summit.ubuntu.com), and I am excited to welcome him to the team.

Michael starts his new role in my team in 2012. Please give him a warm welcome!

Seven years ago Ubuntu 4.10, the Warty Warthog, was released. It was the very first Ubuntu release.

I remember when it came out, feeling like this was the right step forward for Linux and Free Software. While the technology looked awesome (removable USB with automatic mounting, woo!), and it was built on the rock that is Debian, the community-orientated nature of Ubuntu right out the gate filled in the complete picture for me.

Since then I believe Ubuntu has become a defining technology, and we have only just begun. Here’s to the next seven years!

Happy birthday, Ubuntu, thanks to Mark Shuttleworth for investing so heavily Free Software, and to Mark and the original Ubuntu team for creating a release that inspired so many of us to develop such a passion to join the Ubuntu journey!

Today two important meetings took place in the venerable #ubuntu-meeting IRC channel that I wanted to point out.

• Firstly, the first meeting of the newly elected Community Council took place. You can see the log here for the meeting.
• Secondly, my team held our first Canonical Community Team meeting on IRC too. We spun through a series of round-tables of what we have been working on over the previous week. It was mainly our team doing to speaking, but as time goes on I suspect other folks will feel comfortable chipping in and participating too. You can read the log here.

As ever you can see the full schedule of community meetings on the Fridge Calendar.

Each week I organize a Google+ Hangout for our Canonical Community Team meeting. This regular team meeting is where we share roundtables of work each of us has been doing, sync up on projects and topics, and discuss any agenda items. We also discuss boring company topics like expense reports, booking days off work, and travel arrangements.

One piece of feedback I have seen in the recent research I have been doing with our community is that folks would like to see these weekly meetings be open, and preferably on IRC. This would help provide more transparency around the work of the team, and the meetings could be logged so people could read them later if desired.

I think this was really valuable feedback, so from next week we will be doing exactly this. From next week, our meetings will take place on #ubuntu-meeting every Tuesday at 3pm UTC. I have added the weekly meeting to the Fridge Calendar.

To be completely clear, this IRC meeting will be in the same form as the meetings we have been doing each week — it is not intended to replace the Community Council, Technical Board or other meetings — it is just a means for the team to sync up, but with the added value of the wider community being welcome to watch the session and feel free to chime in and contribute.

Look forward to seeing some of you there!

Just a quick thank-you to everyone who has participated so far in the community feedback survey I sent out last week. So far 286 Ubuntu Members have responded to the survey, but I would like to encourage all of you who have not responded to reply. You should have a link in your INBOX.

Thanks also to the folks who have provided me with email feedback about where you see our community today and the opportunities and challenges it faces. I am also reaching out to some community members to perform a bunch of phone interviews to get more data; I want to ensure I have the clearest, informed picture available. If you would like to share your feedback, please do email me at jono -AT- ubuntu –DOT– com.

I am seeing some really interesting patterns forming in the feedback, both positive and negative, and I am looking forward to presenting this feedback soon and working with our community leaders to help drive some solutions forward to ensure our community remains as fun, inspiring and productive as possible.

Thanks, folks.

Yesterday was my five year anniversary at Canonical. I know people tend to get pretty gushy on anniversaries, so I am going to keep this as short as possible.

When I joined Canonical life was quite different to how it is now. I was living in the UK, had more hair, Canonical was a small company with an office the size of my current living room, it had the fairly singular focus at the time of shipping an integrated Free Software desktop, and the community team comprised of just myself. Today I am now married and living in the USA, have less hair, have a team of four (soon to become five), and Canonical has grown extensively, diversified, and expanded it’s operations.

Over the last five years there has been tremendous change and opportunity in both Canonical and Ubuntu. From a company perspective, this growth has brought challenges surrounding how we scale our operations up while still maintaining our core values, and bringing a phenomenal range of talent to the company. In particular I have been delighted to see the contributions of the Design Team and the Desktop Engineering team who have entered a tight-knit engineering culture and helped us to think differently and innovate across our products and how we represent ourselves in professional and consumer environments.

From an Ubuntu perspective, we have been doing what I always dreamed of when I first got involved in Open Source – breaking down the barriers to bringing Free Software to everyone. Back when I joined Canonical, the game was more straight-forward; keep on integrating great upstream software into an Operating System that primarily meets the needs of Linux enthusiasts. Our vision has now expanded; while we certainly want to encompass the needs of Linux enthusiasts, we want the Ubuntu Desktop to also appeal to a wider consumer demographic and Ubuntu Server to appeal to a wider DevOps and cloud demographic too, and this has involved breaking down more and more complex barriers. Achieving this is not just a software engineering challenge, but a design, services, business, community, and product journey challenge.

There have been some tough times over the last few years in breaking down these barriers, and some folks have been critical of our decision-making, but I strongly believe the decisions we have made have been sound in charting a course for success and the intentions of my colleagues and myself continue to be sincere. While our strategy has adjusted, molded and reacted to change, our intentions of bringing freedom and opportunity to technology have been consistent and unwavering. Freedom of code and collaboration continues to be at the heart of what we do in Ubuntu, but I also believe the truest freedom we can bring is in making technology and the opportunities that technology presents available to all, not just to those who understand the devil in the detail.

While Canonical has grown and diversified, I am pleased to see the spirit, enthusiasm and values of Canonical have remained. The reason why I joined Canonical was because I felt it understood community and could provide an environment to enthuse and support community growth and also deliver success in bringing freedom in technology to everyone via Ubuntu. I still believe those values are strongly ingrained in the DNA of Canonical.

Over the years I have been excited about various decisions and features we have brought to fruition in Ubuntu, but in the history of my involvement in Ubuntu I have never been so excited about the opportunity that Ubuntu brings on the Client, Server and the Cloud. I believe we better understand the opportunity and the challenges that face us and we as a community have the capabilities to achieve great things and the confidence make complex and at times difficult decisions in the wider pursuit of bringing Ubuntu and software freedom and opportunities to everyone.

These are hugely exciting times, and I want to thank everyone in our community, my wonderful team, and my colleagues at Canonical for continuing to make the journey so worthwhile.

For those of you who missed the news, Ensemble is the white-hot new cloud deployment technology from the Ubuntu project. To see it is action, check out this screencast from Ahmed.

While Ensemble is awesome, it is only awesome with formulas to cover all the different deployment options in the archive (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla!, phpBB etc), and we need your help to write these formulas.

Ensemble is a pure community project and if we work together to make these formulas, we can make the Free Software powered cloud easier and powerful than ever.

How Can I Help?

Easy!

Every week Ahmed is preparing weekly posts that outline what work is going on in the community and highlighting areas where we really need formulas.

These posts all appear on the rocking cloud.ubuntu.com; a portal filled with Ubuntu Cloud news, articles, screencasts, discussion and more. Be sure to add it as a favorite in your browser.

See the latest Ensemble Hit List and get involved!

In the interests of transparency, at the beginning of each cycle I tend to summarize my team at Canonical’s plans for the forthcoming six month period of work. This is the result of an extensive process of assessing requirements, gathering needs, discussing topics at UDS, fleshing out actions, documenting blueprints, and determining resource availability. Part of the goal of this process is to ensure the team (Daniel Holbach, Jorge Castro, David Planella, and Ahmed Kamal) knows exactly what to do, but to also clearly communicate to other entities (such as senior management and the community) what the team is seeking to accomplish.

Remember also, folks, that I am looking to hire a QA community coordinator and will be fleshing out those goals and responsibilities too. If you have QA and community growth experience, check it out!

The practical output of this process is a set of blueprints, each of which contain a set of actions assigned to different people. Anyone and everyone is welcome to subscribe to the blueprints that interest them and to receive emails when those actions are completed, postponed, or marked as in-progress. This provides a great level of transparency for the community to keep an eye on what is going on in their areas of interest. Finally, I track this work and it’s continual completion via our burndown chart. This provides me as a manager with a useful tool for ensuring we make consistant and clear progress to drive to delivery.

Of course, part of my responsibility as Community Team Manager is also to be this guy sometimes.

So, as usual, I am going to list each of these approved blueprints. Before I get to this though, I also want to mention a few other activities that we will be working on as a team that don’t fit into the blueprints. This includes:

• the mentoring campaign I blogged about the other day to build more scalable community growth.
• Ubuntu Open Week
• Ubuntu Developer Week
• Ubuntu App Developer Week
• Ubuntu Global Jam
• Ubuntu Cloud Days
• Release Parties
• Organizing the next Ubuntu Developer Summit to take place in Orlando, Florida.
• Various day to day needs in the community, resolving bottlenecks and other bits and pieces.
• I am also really keen ratchet the LoCo Teams up to the next level to help encourage more advocacy work and making loco.ubuntu.com “tab-worthy”. See this blog post and this blueprint for more details.

So, onto the blueprints…

(you can see who on the team is driving which blueprint by the name in brackets)

Developers

In this cycle we want to refocus on getting more developers involved in Ubuntu, and Daniel Holbach will be leading much of this work. This also fits in to the more scalable mentoring strategy I blogged about recently.

• Showcase great work of new contributors in a personal way (Daniel Holbach) – https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-o-new-developer-showcase

• Spread Ubuntu Development stories in different channels. (Daniel Holbach) – https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-o-new-ubuntudev-outreach

• Start “get involved” initiatives (Daniel Holbach) – https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-o-developer-initiatives

Processes

In the Natty cycle we identified a set of common bottlenecks that Ubuntu Developers face as they contribute to Ubuntu. We are going to work to eliminate as many of these bottlenecks as possible throughout the 11.10 cycle.

• Reduce development bottlenecks (Daniel Holbach) – https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-o-development-bottlenecks

• Review and Improve Sponsorship Process (Daniel Holbach) – https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-o-review-sponsorship-process

Translations

As David Planella diversifies and expands his responsibilities he is going to be working to help deliver a more sustainable translations community.

• Sustainable Ubuntu Translations (David Planella) – https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-o-sustainable-translations

• Enable Launchpad Translations Upstream Imports for Ubuntu (David Planella) – https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-o-launchpad-translations-upstream-imports-presentation-and-plans

App Developers

Our continued focus on encouraging and enabling application developers will continue in this cycle.

• Developer Portal Next Steps (David Planella) – https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-o-developer-ubuntu-dot-com-plans

• App Review Board Review and Assessment (David Planella) – https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-o-app-review-board-review-and-assessment

• App Developer Community Outreach (David Planella) – https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-o-app-developer-outreach-plans

Cloud

Ahmed Kamal will be continuing his Ubuntu Cloud community growth and spending a lot of time encouraging and growing a community to build around Ensemble.

A key focus in this cycle is to drive traffic, participation and discussion to cloud.ubuntu.com as a primary source of cloud information and community discussion. Ahmed will be blogging more about this soon.

• Ensemble has great getting started documentation (Ahmed Kamal) – https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-o-ensemble-getting-started-docs

• Ensemble has exciting Screencast Library (Ahmed Kamal) – https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-o-ensemble-screencast-lib

• Ensemble Get-Involved Campaigns (Ahmed Kamal) – https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-o-ensemble-get-involved-campaigns

• Crystalize Ensemble formula contribution process (Ahmed Kamal) – https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-o-ensemble-formula-contrib-process

• Showcase great work of new contributors in a personal way (Ahmed Kamal) – https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-o-showcase-contributors

• Spread Ubuntu Cloud stories in different channels. (Ahmed Kamal) – https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-o-spread-cloud-stories

• Cloud and Ensemble Training Events (Ahmed Kamal) – https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-o-cloud-training

• Ensemble and Ubuntu Cloud Advocacy Material (Ahmed Kamal) – https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-o-ensemble-advocacy-material

Upstreams / Downstreams

Jorge Castro will continue to help grow a sustainable Unity and Ayatana community. We got off to a great start in the Natty cycle, and I look forward to seeing continued growth in the Oneiric cycle.

• Unity Developer Participation (Jorge Castro) – https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-o-unity-developer-participation

• Support Debian Collaboration Growth (Jorge Castro) – https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-o-debian-dex

• Ayatana Application Development Advocacy (Jorge Castro) – https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/desktop-o-default-apps-unity-integration

To be clear, I am only listing here the blueprints that my team at Canonical are working on; there are course many other wonderful blueprints that are being worked on by other teams and the community.

It is going to be an exciting cycle!

One of the most complex things we need to deal with in the Ubuntu community is scale. We are a big community and as I have talked about before, I am really keen to ensure that as many people as possible get a very personal Ubuntu experience. We are keen to ensure that everyone who strives to become an Ubuntu Member, Core Developer or MOTU gets the very best support and guidance they can from the community to help them be successful.

For us to get to 200 million users it is essential that we can grow and scale up our developer community. A strong developer programme built on the foundation of contributors getting this personal experience is key to our success.

Not success.

Inside Canonical, people have traditionally looked to my team to provide this community growth. While this is an understandable assumption to make, it doesn’t scale. While the team has made great strides in growing our community, we will quickly become a funnel if we try to mentor a significant number of contributors. My goal for this cycle has been to try and put together a strategic solution to resolve this scaling issue. This work is very much internal Canonical team related strategy, but I figured it could be of interest to the community to see where my thinking is.

Team Level Mentoring

In the Ubuntu Platform team we have a series of different sub-teams such as Desktop, Server, Foundations, Kernel and more. Outside of Ubuntu Platform we have teams such as Ubuntu One and the Desktop Experience team. My goal in building this strategy is to grow community where it makes sense for those different teams and to invest in skills acquisition and mentoring inside those skills; not simply my team becoming a proxy for that work.

To achieve this I have talked with many of the Engineering Managers and asked them to assign a member of their teams to be empowered to coordinate this work within their team. To match this person, I have assigned my team across these different teams. Here are some example pairings:

• Desktop – Daniel Holbach (Community Team) and Jason Warner (Desktop Team).
• Server – Ahmed Kamal (Community Team) and Dave Walker (Server Team).
• Kernel – David Planella (Community Team) and John Johansson (Kernel Team).
• Desktop Experience – Jorge Castro (Community Team) and Neil Jagdish Patel (Desktop Experience Team).
• Ubuntu One – Jorge Castro (Community Team) and Stuart ‘Aq’ Langridge (Ubuntu One Team).

With each of these teams I have discuss areas of focus for community growth in the 11.10 cycle that are of particular interest to those specific teams. These have been agreed upon as:

• Desktop – Encouraging new packagers and helping mentoring existing prospective developers.
• Server – Encouraging new packagers and helping mentoring existing prospective developers.
• Kernel – Growing the Kernel QA, Testing, and Triage community.
• Desktop Experience – Growing the Unity developer community with a particular focus on getting some developers to the point where they can commit to trunk and review branches.
• Ubuntu One – Encouraging the adoption of Ubuntu One by application developers in their apps.

For many of these teams there will be an explicit focus on a team-specific bitesize bugs campaign to act as an on-ramp for new contributors, so you can expect to see a lot of buzz and interest in those campaigns.

Our plan for ‘buzz’ basically involves this. And a free t-shirt.

With the Desktop and Server teams we are also going to be reviewing the active timelines of prospective developers and asking members of those teams to reach out and provide a helping hand to those prospective developers to help them over the hump in being approved as an Ubuntu Developer. We have found in trials of this approach that it provides a very positive personal experience for the folks being mentored.

To manage this work, I have asked each of the pairs above to prepare a roadmap for the 11.10 cycle to coordinate where they will focus and they will track this work with weekly calls. In addition to this my team will be having regular best-practice review calls to ensure the best techniques and approaches learned from this plan are shared across all teams to the benefit of everyone.

So anyway, that is the plan, and I look forward to kicking the tires on it soon!

At UDS last week I took an action to write up a quick blog post that explains how UDS sponsorship works. This discussion was born out of the view that some people feel a little bent out of shape when they don’t get approved for UDS sponsorship. This is a common reaction at every UDS, but it really shouldn’t be. Firstly, UDS sponsorship is not an entitlement…there is no rule that says “if you are a great Ubuntu contributor then you get sponsored to UDS“, and likewise there is no rule that says “if you are a bad Ubuntu contributor (if such a thing exists) then you don’t get sponsored to UDS“.

Let me make this point really clear:

Awesome contributors who do great work often don’t get sponsored due to sponsorship budget limitations.

OK, now, I want you all to go back and re-read that again. Furthermore, if you see anyone griping about not getting sponsored for whatever reason, I would like to ask you to point them to this blog entry.

How Sponsorship Works

As I mentioned, I said I would write a blog entry that explains how UDS Sponsorship works. Get ready, it isn’t exactly simple, but I think it provides a really fair method of identifying people who are most suitable for a given UDS. This is a system we have hammered out over the last few years.

This is how it works:

Firstly, we invite people to apply for sponsorship and they file their application in the sponsorship system. Sponsorship is open to everyone. We also ask the Ubuntu Engineering Management team and certain developers at Canonical to make recommendations in the system too. The outcome of this process often nets over 120 or so names in the system. We usually sponsor around 60 people, so our goal is to whittle the list down to the people who are likely to bring most value to UDS for the goals of that specific release.

The last bit is important…”that specific release“. There is always value brought by everyone at UDS, but given the limited number of people we can sponsor to UDS, it makes sense to bring in people who have valuable input for the goals and focus of the next release. This is not exclusive: we do also prioritize some folks based upon recurring value too (e.g. governance members, some core-devs etc), but as a general role we focus on that given release, not Ubuntu in general.

Inside our system we provide the ability for engineering managers and key staff to vote applications between +3 (considered essential for goals related to that release, and bringing huge input and value to sessions) and -3 (significant concerns or objections about that that person attending, such as worries about not attending sessions, wasting time, being disruptive to other attendees etc).

We then have two stages of scores being applied to candidates:

• Firstly we add +1 to everyone who has never been to UDS before. This is because we always want to provide an opportunity for new folks to join UDS who have not been before and take part in such a valuable experience in the Ubuntu community. We also apply a +1 to anyone who is an Ubuntu Member, core-dev, MOTU, or a member of a governance board. We pre-seed these scores because we consider the combination of new blood but also acknowledged experience to be a good combination.
• Secondly, we ask the Ubuntu Engineering Management Team and key staff members to go in and vote for people. They can vote between +3 and -3 and if they don’t know the candidate, the score is left at 0. Rarely do people get negative scores, and is typically only in cases when someone is considered extremely disruptive, abusive, a time-waster, or has demonstrated wasteful or disruptive conduct at a previous UDS.

The scores are aggregated to form a final score (e.g. if two engineering managers provide a -1 and a +3 the final score will be +2). With this we then have a big list of sponsored attendees listed in aggregated score order from high to low.

At this point we have to perform some editorial input on the lower part of the group. As an example, candidates 45 -> 55 may all have +2 scores, which gives us ten slots but then we might have 20 candidates with +2 scores. At this point I will assess the goals of the release and the needs of the engineering teams and shortlist this final ten in the group to form the final 55 or so. I usually approve 55 out of the 60 at this point because there are always engineering managers who have late-breaking needs that need to be satisfied, so I leave a buffer of 5 slots to accommodate these needs.

Finally, the list goes to Mark Shuttleworth who takes a final look and typically makes a few amends (typically people he wants to go who are not on the list) and then the list goes to Marianna who sends the invitations out.

At every UDS there people who are offered sponsorship but who cannot attend, so we also have a backup list of people with the next highest scores who we invite to take up the places of those people who can’t join us.

So that’s it – as you can see it is a pretty fair system – it takes multiple levels of input from a variety of staff and optimizes people if they have not been before or if they have achieved membership, are governors or are approved developers. I am sure some of you will take issue with the fact that this is all Canonical driven, but remember this is a Canonical funded event; UDS is not funded by a foundation or suchlike. I would though in future like to invite the perspectives of some governors on sponsorship applications if it makes sense.

Wrapping up, I want to drill this in one last time:

Awesome contributors who do great work often don’t get sponsored due to sponsorship budget limitations.

It doesn’t mean that we don’t love you. We do. Over half of the people who apply don’t get sponsored due to these space limitations, so don’t take it too personally. If you do take it personally, ping me on IRC and we can talk more.

I am pleased to announce that I am looking to hire a new member for my team (the Community Team) here at Canonical. I am looking for a bright, motivated, and experienced person to build, maintain and develop a cohesive, productive and effective Ubuntu QA community.

This role will be full-time working at Canonical, you will be working from home with regular travel to various events (such as UDS and team sprints), and you will be working in a fast-paced, productive, and energetic environment. This is a really exciting role that is designed to bring huge value to the Ubuntu community in the area of quality by refining, optimizing, and growing our QA community participation.

Key responsibilities and accountabilities:

• Build and maintain a strong, consistent, and consolidated QA community and to act as a point of reference for this community in continuing its growth and opportunities, and resolving issues.
• Maintain a set of online resources, produce content for those resources and build community participation to generate and optimize content for and from the community.
• Develop and refine better working practises to ease and improve how community members and stakeholders interact with the Ubuntu QA team.
• Liaise with the Canonical Ubuntu Platform Team to better align the direction of the Ubuntu QA community with internal QA needs and workflow.
• Regularly acquire and evaluate feedback from the community and our partners to help improve Ubuntu QA.
• Be responsive and sensitive to the concerns, ambitions and direction of the community, our upstreams and business units inside Canonical.

Required skills and experience

• Strong QA skills and experience, strong networking and social networking skills, good relationship building abilities, process driven, able to manage multiple work streams, good prioritisation, independent, willing to travel potentially 25% of their work time, able to resolve conflict, able to communicate well in written form and produce electronic content.
• Experience of working with community Open Source projects, technical experience with QA technologies and workflows.
• Have strong social skills, a good networker and a good technical knowledge of Ubuntu, Power and the Open Source and upstream/downstream development process. Candidates should be process driven, strategically minded and committed. Good public speaking skills a bonus.
• Candidates should provide evidence of existing experience and work in the Open Source community and suitable references.

How To Apply

To apply, see the job description and apply using the apply for this Position button.

Please don’t send me your resume directly; if you use the system it makes it much easier for me to track all the applications.

Good luck!

Today we released Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal, and you can find out more about it and download it here.

This has been a ferociously busy cycle and with it we set out with significant, audacious goals. We shipped a new shell, a new media player, significant improvements to Ubuntu One, and we worked hard to deliver all this change and opportunity in a predictable, stable and slick product. I am really proud of the result.

In this release we had over 320 developers contribute to it from both Canonical and the community, a new community of 17 new Unity contributors form, hundreds of translators translate Natty into 43 languages, countless LoCo teams get together for different global events and many other contributions made to documentation, testing, art, design, and more.

In short, out community came together and really delivered.

Thankyou.

Thankyou to everyone who shared their insights and skills to help make Ubuntu better for everyone. It is you all who are helping us to bring Free Software to the world, and I can’t think of a better family to be on this train with.

And now, we celebrate!

One thing we are always trying to improve and optimize is transparency in the Ubuntu project. One piece of work to this end is ensuring that the managers in the Ubuntu Engineering Team are available to answer questions that the community may have.

As such, this week we will be kicking off a regular Q+A slot with a rotating list of people who will be answering questions. This weeks session will be run by Pete Graner the Kernel Engineering Manager – do you have questions about our kernel, what we are shipping, how the community works, or anything else? Well Pete will be there to give you all the answers!

The sessions will take place every Friday at 5.30pm UTC in #ubuntu-meeting on freenode.

This is the schedule for the next few weeks:

• 4th Feb 2011 – Pete Graner, Kernel Engineering Manager
• 11th Feb 2011 – Robbie Williamson, Server Engineering Manager
• 18th Feb 2011 – Allison Randall, Ubuntu Technical Architect

For more details and to always check out the current schedule, see this page.

In addition to this I do my weekly Q+A videocasts at 7pm UTC every Wednesday.

Enjoy, folks!

Mark recently blogged about plans to make Qt a first-class citizen alongside GTK in Ubuntu. He outlined the reason for the plan in the opening few paragraphs:

As part of our planning for Natty+1, we’ll need to find some space on the CD for Qt libraries, and we will evaluate applications developed with Qt for inclusion on the CD and default install of Ubuntu.

Ease of use, and effective integration, are key values in our user experience. We care that the applications we choose are harmonious with one another and the system as a whole. Historically, that has meant that we’ve given very strong preference to applications written using Gtk, because a certain amount of harmony comes by default from the use of the same developer toolkit. That said, with OpenOffice and Firefox having been there from the start, Gtk is clearly not an absolute requirement. What I’m arguing now is that it’s the values which are important, and the toolkit is only a means to that end. We should evaluate apps on the basis of how well they meet the requirement, not prejudice them on the basis of technical choices made by the developer.

Mark then goes on to outline some of the challenges (e.g. system settings), some of the solutions (e.g. Canonical are funding development from Ryan Lortie to build dconf support into Qt), and he also discusses how Qt apps should be welcome in the Ubuntu installation if they represent best-of-breed for the Free Software desktop. I couldn’t agree more.

Before Mark wrote the blog entry, he talked to the Ubuntu Community Council and the GNOME Board, and the Community Council asked for a short FAQ that outlined some of the likely common questions. I prepared it and thought it would be useful to share it here:

• Why is Ubuntu shipping Qt on the CD in 11.10? – there are two drivers behind this decision. Firstly, the Ubuntu project is working to ensure that Qt application developers can write apps which fit into the Ubuntu desktop smoothly. It is important that Ubuntu, as a platform, address the needs of developers, giving them as much flexibility as possible while retaining a coherent standard experience for users. Secondly, giving developers the extra toolkit option should mean we end up with better apps all round as the range of apps for assessment and inclusion will be wider. The key criteria for evaluation of any app for inclusion are independent of the actual toolkit. We won’t ship an app by default that we don’t think offers a great experience, not just on a standalone basis but as part of the whole system.

• Does this mean you are moving away from GNOME and GTK? – we will still continue to ship Unity and GNOME applications. The decision to support Qt in the default install is an additive decision. It is not intended to replace GTK+ or GNOME. Qt has proven itself as a high quality toolkit, popular with developers, and we want to be able to support this effectively in Ubuntu as well as Kubuntu.

• Does this mean you are supporting GNOME less? – not at all. Ubuntu will continue to be built on GNOME technologies and ship GNOME applications. This decision is not reducing our commitment to GTK or GNOME, it is merely expanding it to include Qt.

• Are you now therefore moving to KDE? – we have no plans to ship KDE as the default desktop in Ubuntu. We will of course continue to provide the KDE experience in Kubuntu.

• How will you manage some of the outstanding technical integration issues? There are some areas in which Qt does not neatly fit into the Ubuntu desktop experience and Canonical is investing in resolving some of these issues with Qt. Our desktop team engineers will be performing work to first ensure Qt is a well supported component in Ubuntu, but also so it integrates as best as possible in the Ubuntu desktop experience. We are also going to fund the work needed to make Qt / QML apps talk dconf, which means they can share settings and setting-update behaviors with GTK apps very easily. This work is being performed by Ryan Lortie from the GNOME project under contract to Canonical.

• Does this mean Qt apps could be included on the CD? – we’ll be open to Qt apps being included in Ubuntu if they are appropriately integrated. If an application integrates well into the Ubuntu experience, we would be open to its inclusion in a release to offer the best experience for Ubuntu users. By “integrates well” we mean things like: uses the dconf configuration system with live adoption of settings changes, follows Ubuntu font and theme settings automatically, uses our menu and indicator and notification system appropriately etc.

Personally, I think this is a great step forward. I used to hack with Qt many moons ago, and while I changed to use GTK as my preferred toolkit, recent innovations in Qt (such as the incredible QML) and it’s popularity with developers, makes this not only a wise choice for app authors who want to build Qt apps on Ubuntu, but also for Ubuntu users who will have a rich set of Qt apps open to them. This doesn’t change our relationship with GNOME or GTK, it is purely an additive decision, and I think it will serve our users well.

Rock and roll!

With every cycle, part of my responsibility is to understand the needs of the Ubuntu community, understand the needs of some of the key stakeholders to my team, and to plan what the team will work on throughout the next cycle. Recently I have been asking the team (Jorge Castro, Daniel Holbach, David Planella, and Ahmed Kamal) to reach out to the community to get a feel of needs, and flesh out their goals in a set of blueprints. I then reviewed and accepted a set of blueprints ready for the cycle. I think this is a good, solid chunk of work and will make some inroads into some key areas.

In deciding on this strategy there were a set of high-level themes that we want to see work applied from the team:

• ensuring that the move to Unity in 11.04 is successful, and that we have an empowered and enjoyable community experience for those who participate.
• improve the Sponsorship Queue – the queue is where new contributors cut their teeth, and we need to better serve their needs.
• we want to see growth in the number of people who are interested in participating in Ubuntu packaging and development, and make it easier for the community to encourage and inspire people to join us.
• spread wider awareness and knowledge of translations as a key part of the Ubuntu ethos, and encourage people to participate in bringing Ubuntu to more people in their own language.
• start growing an inclusive cloud community, both in terms of end-users and people who want to improve the Ubuntu cloud-related products.
• spread better awareness of the capabilities of Ubuntu in the cloud via knowledge transfer and content.
• socialize the new Places API in Unity as an interesting target of opportunity for application developers.
• continue to grow awareness of Ayatana technologies for application authors.

In addition to this, there are a set of high-level goals that the team isnt explicitly tasked with, but I am keen to see improvements in:

• making the Ubuntu experience more personal and less process orientated.
• helping to encourage wider diversity in the Ubuntu project and at the Ubuntu Developer Summit.
• supporting the Ubuntu Accessibility team in their work, particularly in helping Unity to be fully accessible.
• helping to ensure that Brainstorm better informs the planning process of our user’s needs.
• helping to support the Ubuntu Beginners team; they are doing some truly awesome work.
• continuing to support the growth of our stunning LoCo Teams.

Of course, there will be other areas of focus throughout the cycle, but this provides a good idea of our thinking.

So let’s take a look at some of the work that I have committed the team to. As with previous cycles, you can track this work with our team burndown chart to see how on track we are.

Here are the items:

Developers

These are items related to the growth of developers in the Ubuntu project:

OBJECTIVE: Produce high-level overview of Ubuntu Development (Daniel Holbach) https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/ubuntutheproject-community-n-high-level-dev-overview

OBJECTIVE: Training Events (Daniel Holbach) https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/ubuntutheproject-community-n-dev-training-events

OBJECTIVE: Produce Outreach resources (Daniel Holbach) https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/ubuntutheproject-community-n-development-outreach-resources

OBJECTIVE: Improve the Sponsorship queue (Daniel Holbach) https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/ubuntutheproject-community-n-improving-the-sponsorship-queue

OBJECTIVE: Empower developers to encourage others to join Ubuntu Development (Daniel Holbach) https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/ubuntutheproject-community-n-developer-advocacy

Translations

These are items related to encouraging participation in translations and making Ubuntu available in your language:

OBJECTIVE: Translation Stories (David Planella) https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/ubuntutheproject-community-n-translations-stories

OBJECTIVE: Translations Training Sessions (David Planella) https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/ubuntutheproject-community-n-translations-training-sessions

OBJECTIVE: Translations Portal (David Planella) https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/ubuntutheproject-community-n-translations-portal

OBJECTIVE: Language Pack Updates Schedule (David Planella) https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/ubuntutheproject-community-n-translations-language-pack-updates-schedule

Cloud

These are items related to growing our cloud community:

OBJECTIVE: Start building server/cloud community contributers (Ahmed Kamal) https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/ubuntutheproject-community-n-buildingcloudcontributors

OBJECTIVE: Work on next Iteration of Cloud Portal (Ahmed Kamal) https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/ubuntutheproject-community-n-cloud-portal-iteration2

OBJECTIVE: Screencast Library (Ahmed Kamal) https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/cloud-community-n-cloudscreencastlib

OBJECTIVE: Training Events (Ahmed Kamal) https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/cloud-community-n-cloudsessionsandoutreach

OBJECTIVE: Merging-in cloud community outreach into existing outreach campaigns (Ahmed Kamal) https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/cloud-community-n-cloudsessionsandoutreach

Upstreams

These are items related to how our technology fits with upstreams:

OBJECTIVE: Socialize Unity Places API technology with upstream application developers (Jorge Castro) https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/appdevs-dx-n-unity-places

OBJECTIVE: Unity Community Bug Fixing Participation (Jorge Castro) https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/ubuntutheproject-community-n-unity-bugfixing-participation

OBJECTIVE: Ayatana Application Development Advocacy (Jorge Castro) https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/ubuntutheproject-community-n-ayatana-advocacy

In addition to this we will be running the usual set of initiatives throughout the cycle:

• Ubuntu Open Week
• Ubuntu Developer Week
• Ubuntu Application Developer Week
• Ubuntu Global Jam
• Ubuntu Release Parties

I would also like increase the visibility and focus of the different work going on throughout the community. There is some incredible work going on throughout the community, and I am keen to see people get recognition for that, so we are going to work to try and highlight these contributions where possible.

Like previous cycles, throughout this cycle I will also be having some regular catch-up calls with representatives of our community who are leading key initiatives – examples of this include Penelope Stowe from the Accessibility team, Laura Czajkowski from the LoCo Council, Stefano Zacchiroli the Debian Project Leader and others.

I am sure I have missed off some areas of focus you feel we need to make, so do suggest them in the comments.