When we announced Ubuntu for phones on the 2nd January, we also had a call for volunteers to help create the core applications that would be part of the platform. Like any phone OS we need to provide a calendar, calculator, email, social media apps and more. Ubuntu has long been an open community project and we wanted to work with our community from the outset to work on a set of apps that we can all be proud of.

To do this we included a form on developer.ubuntu.com and asked interested Qt/QML developers to fill it in if they were interested in participating. In just a few days we had over 1500 people fill in the form, expressing tremendous interest in being part of these projects and making an awesome Ubuntu phone platform.

We then finalized our list of apps that we think we need and then reached out to the most experienced of these volunteers and broke them into teams, with one team per application (these teams are fairly small, we couldnt use everyone who volunteered, but we will be having an Ubuntu Phone App Showdown in future, so stay tuned!)).

For each of the applications we then worked on some user stories and functional requirements to deliver the core functionality in each of these apps and documented them on the Ubuntu wiki. These applications are all available here.

Call For Design

So, we have a good set of developers assigned for each app, but we would like to invite our community to contribute design ideas for each of these apps. We have already defined a set of user stories and functional requirements, and for each app we have also defined a set of the core screens and functionality that we will need design for. We would like to invite you wonderful designers out there to contribute your design ideas, and these ideas can provide food for thought for the developers.

To do this we are using the popular Balsamiq online mock-ups tool, and the Balsamiq folks have very generously provided an Ubuntu MyBalsamiq site where all of these designs can be storied, commented on, and refined. As such, you can contribute your designs there and then link them to the wiki page for the application the design is for.

A while back I asked Ivo Weevers, head of the design team at Canonical, for a set of design guidelines for these contributed designs to follow, but unfortunately his team has not had the time to deliver this yet, but we do have a simple set of overall design suggestions we would like to ask you to follow as well as some example designs that you can use to match your work to.

If you would like to contribute some designs, simply pick one of the following apps and follow the instructions on the page:

• Calendar
• Clock/Alarm
• Weather
• Calculator
• Email Client
• RSS Feed Reader
• File Manager
• Document Viewer
• YouTube
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Terminal

If you don’t want to contribute a design but would like to offer input on the existing designs, simply click on the designs submitted on the wiki page and you use the comments box on the MyBalsamiq site to provide your feedback. I would like to also encourage you folks to share your designs on your blogs, on the Ubuntu Reddit, on social media, and other places!

Obviously not all designs will ultimately be implemented, but the goal here is to primarily provide a great opportunity for the best designs that match the design ethos of the Ubuntu phone to bubble to the surface.

Other Contributions

All of the applications we are working on here have Launchpad projects set up and the code will be publicly available and Open Source from the beginning. We are currently working on a base template project to land in each trunk for the development teams to get started from.

There will definitely be other opportunities for contributing in the future (e.g. icon design, QA, testing), but for now we are focusing on the design and development phase. Stay tuned!

Keeping In Touch

To other members of the Ubuntu for phones community, be sure to join the #ubuntu-phone IRC channel on freenode and you can join the mailing list. I will also be providing regular updates on this work on my weekly Q+A videocast every Wednesday at 7pm UTC on Ubuntu On Air.

This week’s live video Q&A is back to the normal time slot of every Wednesday at 7pm UTC (click here for the time in your location this week). The day is different this week as I need to join a sprint later this week.

This week I will be running the usual hour long Q&A session as well as talking about some upcoming community projects.

To join, head over to Ubuntu On Air at 7pm UTC on Wednesday and you can ask your questions in the embedded chat box.

Look forward to seeing you all there!

When we announced Ubuntu for phones on the 2nd January we also announced the developer preview of the SDK. The SDK includes QML and the Ubuntu Phone Components that provides a set of controls for building applications. It includes a comprehensive development environment.

If you want to play with the developer preview, go and get it, then follow the tutorial, and be sure to ask questions if you get stuck.

We have already been seeing some interesting experiments going on on the Ubuntu App Development Google+ Community with people writing applications and playing with the SDK developer preview. I just wanted to share some of this work here.

Francisco Gómez García has been working on cProg inside a terminal:

Stuart ‘Aq’ Langridge has been working on a game:

Martin Kaistra has also been working on a Reddit reader for the phone:

Micha? Pr?dotka has also been experimenting with QML for his app:

See the video here.

Daniel Wood has written a simple calculator:

We have also seen some interesting ideas and mock-ups for apps for the phone such as this from we Love Ubuntu:

And lastly, Mark Johnson, who obviously has far too much time on his hands, has ported his “JonoBoard” app to QML, thus unleashing the mighty power of community:

See the video here.

Remember, if you want to play with the developer preview, go and get it, then follow the tutorial, and be sure to ask questions if you get stuck. Enjoy!

After missing my weekly live Ubuntu and Community Management video Q&A last week due to exhibiting at CES, I will be doing this week’s live video Q&A on Monday 14th January 2013 (tomorrow) at 7pm UTC (click here for the time in your location). The day is different this week as I need to join a sprint later this week.

I will be kicking off the session with a summary of Ubuntu at CES and a summary of the response to Ubuntu on phones in general as well next steps. We will then get into the Q&A, and as ever, you are welcome to ask me absolutely anything on the show.

To join, head over to Ubuntu On Air at 7pm UTC on Monday 14th January 2013 and you can ask your questions in the embedded chat box.

Look forward to seeing you all there!

On Sunday last weekend I flew out to CES to join the rest of my colleagues to exhibit Ubuntu at the show. We were there to show the full range of Ubuntu form-factors that we have available; desktop, TV, Ubuntu for Android, and most recently, Ubuntu for phones.

The Ubuntu booth was located in the South Hall within the cornucopia of screens and gadgets that is CES. The show is huge, really, really, huge, and one could be forgiven for thinking that Ubuntu would be a mere drop in the ocean when you have exhibitors such as Samsung and Sony with their warehouse sized booths. Fortunately, Ubuntu seemed to be one of the highlights at CES.

Although many people were there to see Ubuntu for phones, the phone is really only one part of the true magic of Ubuntu’s focus and direction; a single ubiquitous convergence story that runs across every device you care about and the cloud. This is a story that is a lot clearer when you see each of these different form factors sitting side by side in the same booth, it really helped to connect the dots with our visitors.

Ubuntu TV on display.

Ubuntu is about delivering a beautiful user experience that is perfectly tuned to the screen you are using, yet consistent in design and content across these different form factors. If you have used Ubuntu on the desktop, Ubuntu on the phone and TV looks and feels familiar. We have worked to build the content that you own (and the content that you could own) into the core of the platform, as opposed to it being buried in applications that you need to juggle to access it. We have worked to liberate web apps from the browser tabs that they are trapped in to integrate them with the core of the platform, and we have reduced the on-screen clutter that gets in the way of your content. Ubuntu One provides the connection points between these screens with your personal cloud in which your files, content, settings, and other content is neatly synced between all of your devices; as an example, if you buy or download a new song on your phone, it will sync effortless to your desktop, TV and other devices. This convergence presents a consistent design, user, and content experience across all of your devices, and underlined by Ubuntu; a platform that has a long heritage of openness and community participation.

Our booth at CES was comprehensive. We had two large TVs with high quality cameras attached on either side of the stand where we did demos of the phone to interested passers by. In between these screens we then had stations for demonstrating Ubuntu for TV, Ubuntu One, Ubuntu for Android (which also demonstrated the Ubuntu Desktop), and the Ubuntu developer platform. Between these stations we gave out bags, t-shirts, literature, caps, DVDs, and other material.

An Ubuntu for phones demo station.

At the far end of the booth we also had our meeting room. With CES being a trade-only show, a primary goal for attending was to work with handset manufacturers and operators to explore how they can deliver Ubuntu to their customers. Mark Shuttleworth (founder of Ubuntu/Canonical), Jane Silber (CEO of Canonical), and Chris Kenyon (Head of Business Development at Canonical) spent most of their time in the meeting room talking with potential customers. Fortunately, their calendar was packed throughout the week with meetings and great progress was made.

I spent most of my time at the booth presenting the phone on the big screens to the crowds that visited us. Now, I am not using the word crowd here in an exaggerated sense either – the Ubuntu booth was packed throughout the week, and most people who I spoke to told me that one of the main reasons they came out to CES was to see Ubuntu and in particular to see Ubuntu for phones.

We saw a constant stream of visitors throughout the show.

We also had a huge number of press come along to the booth and myself as well as many of my colleagues did countless demos both on and off camera to these members of the press. Speaking of press, I was delighted to finally meet Timothy Lord from Slashdot and I did a short interview and demo with him. I saw that a video of one of my demos is available online as well as some questions about the phone that I answered. Also, be sure to see SJVN’s write up about Ubuntu for phones.

I have done trade-shows before, and I have exhibited Ubuntu many times at these shows. Although I had never done CES, I had done something similar in style and size (CeBit in Germany), and I had a broad idea of what to expect. Fortunately the show more than surpassed my expectations. We were absolutely inundated with people, and every time I gave a demo of Ubuntu for phone the audience smiled with interest as I walked them through the different features of the phone. Ubuntu for phones was very, very positively received, and from a “things often go wrong when demoing at trade-shows” perspective, we didn’t experience a single crash or failure with the phone (or anything else that we demoed). The only problem we had was rather flakey Internet access which impacted me demoing the deep integration of websites and social media into Ubuntu for phones.

We also had a few other fun things happen. The week set off on the right foot when we won the Editors Choice award at CES from Popular Mechanics magazine, and we also had will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas show up to see the Ubuntu phone. We were also expecting MC Hammer to visit us, which unfortunately didn’t happen, but infamous hacker Kevin Mitnick did make an appearance, to which my colleague Michael Frey and I swooned like Justin Bieber fans.

The team holding the Popular Mechanics award.

All in it was a tremendously productive and positive week.

I have never been so excited to be part of Ubuntu and part of this convergence story that we are creating. Not only is this a great opportunity for Ubuntu, but it is a great opportunity for Open Source and Free Software, which continue to drive the ethos and values that form Ubuntu. Everything that we exhibited at CES is Open Source, and our community are a core part of how we build this platform and bring it to the masses.

We have the potential of building a an ubiquitous platform that is simple and elegant for anyone to use, but driven by the values of Free Software. This is what freedom is all about; freedom of technology, freedom of choice, and freedom that is accessible to everyone. Let’s do this.

Just a quick post to wish all of you a safe and happy holidays, wherever you may be, and whoever you are spending it with.

This year was a great year for Ubuntu, and a great year for Free Software. Step by step we are bringing freedom of technology to more and more people across the desktop, cloud, and devices, and underlining this freedom with a continued focus on elegance and quality. We still have a long road ahead of us, but our wheels are rolling and we are cranking out some AC/DC for the journey; anything is possible.

On a personal note, I just want to thank all of you for reading my blog and social networks and participating in the conversations therein. I know sometimes my posts have sometimes generated some dissenting views, but I cherish all perspectives that you folks share, both supportive and challenging to the work that we do in Ubuntu and the work I do personally as a community manager. I have always been a firm believer in personal growth and evolution, and this year I have been blessed by many of you providing me with different ways of viewing challenges, and different ways of seeing opportunities. These views help me to be a better person, and do a better job.

This is a very special Christmas for me and my family with our new little addition, Jack, and I hope all of you have an equally special and relaxing break. Thanks!

At the beginning of the 13.04 cycle one of the plans I put in place for my team was the deployment of Ubuntu Accomplishments as a production service for our community. This work involves the following components:

1. Deploying the validation server on Canonical hardware and managed by the IS team.
2. Deploying the web gallery to trophies.ubuntu.com.
3. Updating the client to support publishing to trophies.ubuntu.com (publishing is not switched on by default and has to be enabled).
4. Packaging and releasing the daemon and viewer in the Ubuntu Software Center.
5. Performing a round of QA and testing to ensure the quality of the release is high.

I just wanted to provide a quick update on this.

Canonical IS recently provisioned the machine that the validation server and web gallery will run on. Yesterday Michael Hall and I re-deployed the validation server on a CanoniStack instance to ensure the deployment instructions worked correctly. Mike then went onto deploy the web gallery and update the deployment instructions there. We expect IS to deploy this in the next few weeks and then I will shut down to current validation server that is running on my own Bytemark server. Thanks again to Bytemark for providing the server for free to support the project!

You can see a live demo of the current web gallery by clicking here (this shows my own set of accomplishments); also see Michael Hall’s accomplishments as another example. Clicking on an accomplishment shows more information about it and you can also view all opportunities online too. There is still work to be done, but good progress is being made.

Share your community achievements with the world!

There has been active discussion around the packaging requirements for the software in the Ubuntu Software Center. Michael is coordinating these needs with Rafal so any required changes can be made. One challenge here is how DBUS works with the daemon. Thankfully, didrocks is supporting Rafal to achieve this work. One way or another, there will be Ubuntu Accomplishments available for Ubuntu 13.04 (not installed by default but installable from the Ubuntu Software Center.

In other news, Matt Fischer and Chris Wayne have built support in Ubuntu Accomplishments for the Fitbit; the awesome little personal fitness device. This is not a commercial service or engagement; just adding support to see your Fitbit badges in your Ubuntu Accomplishments viewer. With this you can find out more information about how to achieve the different Fitbit badges right within Ubuntu Accomplishments. It looks like this:

Getting fit wasn’t fun…until now!

What is neat about this is that this support makes use of the Online Accounts feature in Ubuntu, so you simply authenticate with your Fitbit account and then you are good to go. Read more about this from Matt, from Chris, and from Rafal.

Getting Involved

Ubuntu Accomplishments in Ubuntu 13.04 is going to be an awesome feature and achievement for the project. While it won’t ship by default in Ubuntu 13.04, it will only be a click away in the Ubuntu Software Center.

To make this first major release as good as it can be, we need help! Thankfully, there are lots of ways to help, such as:

• Hacking
• Documentation
• Testing
• Translations
• Creating Accomplishments
• Support

You can also find out how to get the development branch set up and if you have any questions feel free to reach out in #ubuntu-accomplishments on Freenode or on our [mailing list](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Accomplishments/GetInvolved/DevelopmentSetup.

Please feel free to ask any questions in the comments!

A little while back I posted about an idea I was discussing with the rest of the community team about a downloadable advocacy kit that, similar to an SDK for software, provides everything you need to get started spreading the word about Ubuntu. Dubbed the Advocacy Developer Kit (ADK), the idea is that a single .zip file (or package) would contain everything you need to get started, including:

• Well written, simple, and detailed documentation for joining, creating, and running LoCo Teams, as well as general advocacy, tips, and tricks.
• A selection of high-quality posters, banners and other materials.
• Resources for creating new materials.
• Presentations that can be used for giving an Ubuntu demo / Charm School etc.

This content would make it easier for advocates to get going, instead of navigating the wealth of unorganized content on the wiki and variety of promotional materials. The ADK provides a set of curated content that gets someone up and running quickly.

We will include some resources in the ADK such as banners, posters, presentations, templates and more. The idea is to only pick a few of each category (e.g. just a few posters) for inclusion in the ADK but provide a link to further content on SpreadUbuntu. The analogy here is similar to Ubuntu; in Ubuntu we provide a single high-quality text editor, but we provide simple access to alternatives in the Ubuntu Software Center. We can then decide on the best content in the ADK based on criteria such as general quality, brand guidelines etc.

One of the motivations behind the ADK is to provide a project that our advocacy community can collaborate around. Our theory is that having a branch that people can contribute to will feel worthwhile as a participant, and we can more easily track issues in the ADK with bug tracking, and also support translations of the content (we can provide localized ADKs). We are using the same technical foundation that has gone into the Ubuntu Packaging Guide.

To kick this off I asked Daniel Holbach to create a branch that we can work from, and I spent some time tonight populating it with some initial content. We have lots of awesome content on the wiki, so I started moving it over to the ADK.

Getting The ADK

Very early start to the ADK.

Currently the ADK lives in a Launchpad branch. You will need python-sphinx to build it. To get it run:

bzr branch ubuntu-adk

When you have checked the code out simple run:

make

Now load _build/html/C/adk/index.html in your web browser and you will see what we have so far.

Importantly, although you need to build the ADK here, this would not be the case with each release of the ADK. Normal users won’t download this branch; this will only be the branch contributors use. We will then run make to generate a bunch of .zip files for each translated ADK and distribute those .zip files as part of each ADK release.

Each zip file will have a base-level index.html that makes it simple to get started. In the future it could be awesome to have the guide packaged and in the Ubuntu Software Center, and make it accessible in the dash with an icon that loads it in your web-browser. We would also like to auto-generate a PDF of the ADK so users can load it on their tablets/phones/e-book readers.

You can see the Launchpad project here.

Volunteers Needed!

We have a stunning advocacy community, and together we can make the ADK something that is fun, informative, and useful to our global set of teams. As such we are looking for volunteers!

We are primarily looking for folks to help with documentation and bringing the best wiki content over to the ADK. We are also looking for some folks to help bring the best promotional materials and presentations over to it.

Documentation in the ADK is written using reStructured Text which provides a simple way of adding markup to content (it is similar to Markdown). Included in the ADK is a page that explains how to contribute documentation to the ADK – simply click the How To Help link on the front page.

To kick things off we are going to have a meeting on Thursday 13th Dec 2012 at 3pm UTC in #ubuntu-community-team to discuss the next steps in the project. Hope to see you there!

Some ago I used to host weekly public IRC meetings for my team at Canonical. Back then we used to primarily use it as an opportunity to provide a status update of what we had been working on. The meetings then tapered off a little bit as we needed to use the slot for other meetings related to getting the Ubuntu app developer platform in place.

I want to get these meetings back on track, so we are going to do them in the same slot; every Tuesday at 4pm UTC (find your time here) in #ubuntu-community-team on the Freenode IRC network. We would like to welcome you all along!

Everyone is welcome to bring any agenda item to the meeting for discussion! Just show up with a topic and propose it at the beginning of the meeting.

Focusing On LoCo Teams

On Friday last week I had a great call with Randall Ross about how we can grow and empower our LoCo Teams to do fun, productive, and rewarding work, and Randall is interested in helping to coordinate much of this work. I have also asked Daniel Holbach on my team to help coordinate this work with Randall, and in our meeting tomorrow we want to discuss some of the challenges that we think we need to focus on.

I am interested in discussing this topic in the meeting of how we can help our LoCo teams to be successful. Some food for thought:

• How do we help how LoCo teams can communicate with each other? Today we have loco-contacts but it doesn’t seem to get much traction from the wider range of teams. How can we find a better way for teams to help each other be successful? One thing I would like to explore is using Ask Ubuntu for posting LoCo-related questions and how we can encourage teams to do this.
• How can we help to showcase the great work going on with teams? Today we recommend people use the #locoteams tag on Twitter/identi.ca, but what other approaches can we take to encourage more LoCo blogging and importantly to share and focus on the great work going on with that blogging? One approach here is to expand and improve loco.ubuntu.com as a place to read about great work going on in the community. What other ideas can we come up with?

Another topic for discussion is the Advocacy Development Kit that I mentioned a little while back, but I am going to follow up with a new post on that so we can have a more focused discussion in the comments.

We hope to see you at the first of our regular meetings tomorrow!

On Friday I wrote an article responding to a post by Richard Stallman. Over the weekend both posts caused quite a flurry of discussion; thank-you to everyone who contributed constructive feedback.

In my post I referred to Richard’s position as seeming a bit ‘childish‘ to me.

As with every post that I write, I reflect carefully over the words I write before and after I press the publish button. In all of our writing our words affect the thoughts and feelings of others, and I think this resonates even more-so in the Free Software and Open Source world where we all put so much passion and time into what we do as volunteers as well as for those lucky enough to do this as a career too.

Unfortunately, sometimes I end up saying some things I wish I hadn’t, as is the case here.

It was wrong of me to refer to Richard’s position as ‘childish‘. Quite possibly the most significant reason why so many of us respect Richard for his lifelong body of work is due to his clarity and commitment to his view of freedom, and although there is debate about the approach in which he articulates these views at times, it was nonetheless wrong of me to describe his position as ‘childish‘; he is not a child, quite the opposite.

As I reflected on my words (and many of your comments, which I appreciate you contributing), it became clear to me that the right thing to do was to apologize.

As such, Richard, I apologize whole-heartedly to referring to your position in your post as ‘childish‘ and I continue to have great respect for the work you do to encourage and grow software freedom around the world.

While I still feel that referring to the Ubuntu dash as malicious software that collects information about users without their knowledge (spyware) and as a result that Ubuntu should be shunned for “spying”, somewhat over-sensationalizes the issue, my issue with his post was not as much about content but more of language and tone, and that didn’t justify me being childish myself in referring to his position as ‘childish‘.

As I mentioned in my original post, when these debates arise, my aim and responsibility is not to convince our community that the decisions made in Ubuntu or at Canonical are right or agreeable. My goal is to simply ensure that our users and community have all the information available to make up their own minds.

Likewise, I am also not going to claim that I have the influence or capabilities to change these policies based on community feedback; I don’t drive the technical policy and decision making of what goes into Ubuntu. My goal here instead is to reflect the pulse of community feedback to those people who do make these decisions to help them make the most informed decisions they can.

What I do have full control over is the way I articulate my own words and invite discussion and debate on my own blog, and I am constantly learning, sometimes making mistakes as we can see here, and trying to do the best by Ubuntu. Apologies again to Richard, and I am going to chalk this one down as another one of life’s lessons.

For quite some time now we have had some information about how to join the Ubuntu community at www.ubuntu.com/community. This documentation has traditionally been pretty limited, doesn’t really help get people started effectively, and doesn’t represent the humanity and personal nature of being part of the Ubuntu community.

We want to change that in this cycle.

At UDS we had a great discussion about solving this problem. The challenge that we were faced with in refreshing this content is that the Canonical web team own these pages and have limited bandwidth for incorporating changes and improvements. As such we agreed to transition this content to a site where we can more readily make improvements and updates.

This week I asked Michael Hall to deploy WordPress (which we agreed at UDS as our platform) with the Ubuntu theme to CanoniStack. Today we had a discussion to flesh out the information architecture for the site (largely inspired by the current IA). We are now in a position where we have the skeleton of the site and we want to produce some awesome content tuned to the needs of new community members, as well as other content for our entire community (such as information about governance and the code of conduct).

To get this content in shape we have created a series of pages on pad.ubuntu.com for each page of content and we are transferring our existing content to these pages. We as a community can then collaborate on these pages and ensure they are crisp, concise, and provide all the information we need. When these pages are complete we can then transition them to the WordPress instance. When the content is there we will then ask the Canonical IS team to deploy it.

Help Us! Join the Docs Jam!

To get this content in shape, on Thursday 13th Dec 2012 we are going to be holding a documentation jam to work together and get this content refined and finalized. This is how it works:

• You can see the list of pages and the links to the pads by clicking here.
• We will spend the day working on the content, refining and improving it and ensuring there are no typos.
• All the content should be writting using Markdown format; this makes it simple to write and merge into the WordPress site. For how to format your content with Markdown, see this guide.
• We will coordinate this work in the #ubuntu-doc channel.

The day after we will then move the completed content over to the WordPress site and finalize any stylistic changes. We should then be in good shape to get things moved over to production.

We are looking to our wider community to help us get this content rock solid. If you have a few hours (or longer) to help with this effort, please join us in #ubuntu-doc on Thursday 13th Dec 2013!

This is a personal post and does not neccessarily represent the views of Canonical or the Ubuntu community.

Today Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU project and Free Software Foundation wrote a critical post accusing Ubuntu of shipping spyware (which is referring to the online search capabilities of the Ubuntu dash).

He goes on to suggest “in your Software Freedom Day events, in your FLISOL events, don’t install or recommend Ubuntu. Instead, tell people that Ubuntu is shunned for spying.“.

This is FUD.

When controvosies such as this kick off from time to time about Canonical and/or Ubuntu, my approach has never been to try and convince our critics that they are wrong. My goal is not to turn the unbelievers into worshippers at the church of Ubuntu. My only goal has been to ensure that everyone who participates in the debate trades in facts and not in misinformation and FUD; there is enough misinformation and FUD on the Internet without us all adding to it.

If someone has an accurate set of facts and accurately respresents the topic but is critical about the position…no problem. We can then engage in respectful, accurate debate that will likely enrich all perspectives and ultimately result in better software.

The goal of the dash in Ubuntu has always been to provide a central place in which you can search and find things that are interesting and relavent to you; it is designed to be at the center of your computing experience. Now, this is a big goal, and we are only part-way along the way to achieving it.

Today it is not perfect – we need to improve the accuracy of the results, present the data more effectively, and continue to expand the coverage and capabilities of the data in dash searches. With each new release of Ubuntu we get awesome feedback from our community and users and we strive to refine and iterate on all of these areas so that subsequent releases offer a more and more compelling experience, freely available and sharable for all.

Naturally, privacy is critically important to us in doing this work. In the eight year history of Ubuntu and Canonical we have always put privacy forward as a high priority across the many, many different websites, services, and software that forms the Ubuntu platform and community.

The challenge of course is that privacy is a deeply personal thing and the way in which you define your privacy expectations will likely radically differ from each of your friends, and vice-versa.

With this in mind, just because someone may have differing views to mine on the implementation of privacy in software doesn’t mean they are wrong. Likewise, just because my views may differ to theirs doesn’t mean I am wrong. We are all different and we all manage our information and our expectations around information sharing in different ways.

Just look at Facebook; the privacy debates there have been raging on for years and have encompassed many different views and perspectives ranging from “I want to control every detail of my privacy in Facebook” to “I don’t care, if it is on the Internet, I don’t care who sees it”, and everything in-between.

We want Ubuntu to be a safe, predictable, and pleasurable platform for everyone, irrespective of their personal views on privacy, but we also respect that there will be some folks who don’t feel we are doing enough to represent their particular personal privacy needs.

When we implemented the Amazon search results feature we didn’t get it 100% right with the first cut in the development release of Ubuntu, but that is how we build Ubuntu; we add software to our development branch and iterate on it in response to feedback and bugs. We did exactly this with these functional and privacy concerns…responding and implementing many of the requirements our community felt were important. We will continue to make these improvements in the future in much the same way.

Now, some of you may share Richard’s concerns over some aspects of this feature, and as I mentioned earlier, I am not here to convince you otherwise. Richard has every right to share his views on privacy, and who am I to tell him or you that he is/you are wrong?

What concerns me more is the FUD in his post. Statements such as:

In your Software Freedom Day events, in your FLISOL events, don’t install or recommend Ubuntu. Instead, tell people that Ubuntu is shunned for spying.

…and

Any excuse Canonical offers is inadequate; even if it used all the money it gets from Amazon to develop free software, that can hardly overcome what free software will lose if it ceases to offer an effective way to avoid abuse of the users.

These statements simply generate fear, uncertainty, and doubt about Ubuntu; a project that has a long history of bringing Free Software to millions of users around the world with an open community and governance.

But then again, this is not particularly surprising from Richard.

I have tremendous respect for Richard and his fantastic work in laying the foundations for the Free Software and Open Source world that we have today, but I think he is short-sighted at times. His views on software projects are pretty binary: either a strict set of ethics (defined by him) are observed, or it should be shunned.

The challenge here is that freedom is also a deeply personal thing.

I believe that freedom is far more than simply freedom of source code or a specific policy around privacy. When I got involved in the Free Software community 14 years ago my passion from then onwards was not driven by creating awesome Free Software code, it was more about creating awesome Free Software experiences that open up technology, education, creativity and collaboration to everyone. Free Software code is simply one mechanic in how we deliver these experiences; it is not the be all and end all of what we do.

A completely free set of source code that implements a system that is difficult to use, lacks the features that users want, is not competitive with proprietary competitors, and/or does not offer a desirable and delightful experience is not going to bring Free Software to the wider world. It may bring Free Software to a passionate collection of enthusiasts (as we saw back in the early days of Linux), but in my mind true freedom is software that is not just available to all but usable by all, even those who are not enthusiasts.

Just look at the success of Apple. General consumers have voted with their feet, and people want beautiful, desirable products that let them do useful and fun things with their friends, families and colleagues. There is absolutely no reason why we can’t achieve this with Free Software.

In Ubuntu we want to build a platform that is even more beautiful, elegant and delightful than Apple, but is infused with the Free Software values that empower that technology, education, creativity and collaboration in everyone.

But unfortunately, as far as Richard is concerned, if Ubuntu doesn’t meet his specific requirements around privacy or Free Software, irrespective that it has brought Free Software to millions of users and thousands of organizations, and despite the fact that you might not share his viewpoint, you should shun it.

This just seems a bit childish to me.

Let’s turn the tables around. Do I agree with everything the Free Software Foundation does? Not at all, but I do think their general body of work is fantastic, worthwhile, and provides an important and valuable service, and I would never want to suggest you should boycott them if you disagree with one part of what they do. Quite the opposite, I would encourage you to see their website, donate, and consider joining them as they provide a valuable piece of the wider Free Software ecosystem, in much the same way Ubuntu provides another piece. Let’s work together, not against each other.

UPDATED: I posted an apology to Richard about to refering to his position as ‘childish’ you can read it here.

A few months ago the second edition of my book The Art of Community was released. You can buy the book in print or for your e-reader/tablet, or you download the Creative Commons licensed PDF. If you download the free PDF all I ask is that you put a review up somewhere online to help spread the word about the book. If you are reviewer for a website/magazine and want to review the book, please get in touch with me and we can coordinate a review copy.

For those of you who have not released a book yet, it is a bowel-shakingly nerve-wracking experience. You invest months of your spare time into writing it, and you really want people to enjoy it. This nervousness is particularly amplified in the case for a book that you write about your profession, such as The Art of Community was for me.

Little did I realize that writing a second edition would be even more nerve-wracking. You see, the first edition of the book did pretty well; it had four-and-a-half star ratings on Amazon and performed favorably in the reviews. While naturally thrilled with the response, a big chunk of me concluded that this positive response was simply down to dumb luck.

Then, when I started writing the second edition, my worries ballooned. I was now concerned that my rookie-luck with the first edition could be washed away with a poorly written and released follow-up edition, thus tarnishing the reputation of something I was already proud of. Now, this might sound a bit silly to some of you, but this was actually keeping me awake at night throughout the writing process. When I finally clicked send to submit the final manuscript to O’Reilly I was a combination of relieved that it was complete, but also nervous that my writing was now cast in stone, ready for the feedback cycle to begin.

So, with a nervous gulp, the second edition was released. I didn’t want to jump to conclusions with the first few reviews; it takes time to take the pulse of opinion in your readers, so I left it for a few months to see how it did.

It has now been those few months since it’s release and fortunately it seems the second edition is doing great too. If the Amazon.com page is anything to go by (and I think it is generally could summary of feedback), it has received positive reviews and maintains a four-and-a-half star rating with 43 reviews.

In reading the page, it seems Amazon pulls out summary quotes from its range of reviews and the summaries (which can be a combination of good and bad quotes). It starts with this one:

Referencing his experiences as community manager of Ubuntu, Jono Bacon provides best practices.

…then this:

The stories laced throughout the book show practical applications of the material and make it a thoroughly enjoyable read.

…and then this:

In other words, this is one of the best books I have had the pleasure of owning in some time, and has earned a permanent spot on the book shelf.

I will take ‘em! I was pretty surprised and flattered to see these summaries. Thank-you to everyone who has purchased and reviewed the book. If you enjoyed the book and haven’t reviewed it yet, please do post your review either on your blog or wherever you purchased it.

About The Book

If you are unfamiliar with what is in the second edition of The Art of Community, here is a rundown of the content, coverage, and interviews. Remember, you can buy the book in print or for your e-reader/tablet, or you download the Creative Commons licensed PDF. If you download the free PDF all I ask is that you put a review up somewhere online to help spread the word about the book.

1. The Art of Community
2. Planning Your Community
3. Communicating Clearly
4. Processes: Simple Is Sustainable
5. Supporting Workflow with Tools and Data
6. Social Media New!
7. Building Buzz
8. Measuring Community
9. Managing and Tracking Work New!
10. Governance
11. Handling Conflict and Relationships
12. Creating and Running Events Expanded!
13. Hiring a Community Manager
14. Community Case Book New!
15. Onward and Upward New!

Foreword

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief at Wired magazine, and author of the New York Best-selling The Long Tail.

Also includes the foreword from the first edition with Leo Laporte, founder of the TWiT Network.

Chapter 1: The Art Of Community

I begin the book with a bird’s-eye view of how communities function at a social science level. We cover the underlying nuts and bolts of how people form communities, what keeps them involved, and the basis and opportunities behind these interactions.

Coverage Includes:

• Collaboration-Driven Ethos
• The Essence of Community
  • Building Belonging into the Social Economy
  • The Basis of Communication
  • Unwrapping Opportunity
• A Community Manager: Becoming the Community
  • Cracking Open the Personality
  • Trust Is Everything
  • The Value of Listening
  • Avoid Ego, or Others Will Avoid You
  • Theory Versus Action: Action Wins
  • Becoming Yourself
• Moving Forward

Chapter 2: Planning Your Community

Next we carve out and document a blueprint and strategy for your community and its future growth. Part of this strategy includes the target objectives and goals and how the community can be structured to achieve them.

Coverage Includes:

• Planning for Success
  • Community: The Bird’s-Eye View
• Teams: The Building Blocks of Belonging
  • Finding Your Place
  • Units of Belonging
  • Read Versus Write
  • Read-mostly communities
  • Write-centered communities
• Meritocracy
• Working Together Is Success
• Diversity
• Designing Your Community
  • Baking in Openness
• Building a Mission Statement
• Building a Strategic Plan
  • Structuring the plan
• Filling Out the Plan
  • Brainstorming Ideas
  • Technique 1: Question assumptions
  • Technique 2: Think outside the box
  • Technique 3: Let’s make it suck
• Pulling Together the Threads
  • Teams: Divide and Conquer
  • Identify how we can divide our community into teams
  • Define the scope of each team, and help team members understand that scope
  • Understand the extent and range of collaboration among our teams
  • Ensure that teams can communicate clearly and effectively
• Documenting Your Strategy
• Financially Supporting Your Community
  • Revenue Opportunities
  • Online advertising
  • Selling
  • Donations
  • Sponsorship
• Wrapping Up

Chapter 3: Communicating Clearly

At the heart of community is communication, and great communicators can have a tremendously positive impact. Here we lay down the communications backbone and the best practices associated with using it.

Coverage Includes:

• He Said, She Said
• Building Your Communication Channels
  • Striving for Clarity
• Choices, Choices
  • Communication fetishism
• The Mediums
  • Mailing lists
  • Discussion forums
  • Social media
  • IRC
• Leading by Example
  • Daily Communication
  • Netiquette
  • Avoiding bikeshedding
• Longer Writing
  • The mechanics of writing
  • Don’t write like an institution
  • Untwisting the tail
  • Setting tone
  • Inspiring your community
• Summary

Chapter 4: Processes: Simple Is Sustainable

We now move on to focus on putting the facilities in place for your community to do great things. In this chapter we build simple, effective, and nonbureaucratic processes that enable your community to conduct tasks, work together, and share their successes.

Coverage Includes:

• Eyes on the Prize
  • Keeping Things in Perspective
  • The Impact of Processes
• Building Great Processes
  • Breaking Up the Puzzle
  • Building a process
  • Process Considerations
  • Simplicity is key
  • Avoiding bureaucracy
  • Transparency
• Assessing Needs
  • Community Cycles
  • Leading by example: Ubuntu
  • The Gates of Your Community
  • Reviewing new developers: In depth
  • Assessing Contributors
  • Managing Feedback
  • Gathering feedback
• Getting Buy-In for Your Processes
  • Document Them
  • Make Them Easy to Find
  • Using Your Processes
• The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes
  • Identifying the On-Ramp
  • Developing Knowledge
  • Determining Contributions
  • Growing Kudos
• Process Reassessment
  • Building Regularity
• Moving On

Chapter 5: Supporting Workflow With Tools and Data

We continue our discussion of community facilities to build workflows that are driven by accessible, sensible, and rock-solid tools that enable your contributors to do great work quickly and easily.

Coverage Includes:

• Understanding Your Workflow
  • Roles
• Building a Simple Workflow
• The Mechanics of Collaboration
  • An Example: Ubuntu Bug Workflow
  • Getting to know the problem
  • Breaking down the conversation
  • Lessons learned
  • Building Great Infrastructure
  • Software As a Service
  • Avoiding Resource Fetishism
• Technical Considerations
  • Bug Tracking
  • Bug reporting
  • Bug triage
  • Source Control
  • Collaborative Editing
• Building and Maintaining Transparency
  • Tool Access
  • Communications
  • Reporting
• Regular Workflow Assessment
  • Gathering Structured Feedback
• Moving On

Chapter 6: Social Media

We now take a look at social networking, what it is, how it can help us, how to avoid the hype, and how to harness it in our communities.

Coverage Includes:

• Don’t Be That Guy/Girl
• Being Social
• Social Media Services in a Nutshell
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Google+
• Harnessing Social Media
  • Broadcasting
  • Getting more eyeballs
  • Tuning up your messages
  • Avoiding social media overkill
  • Feedback
  • Where to look
  • Debates
  • Asking for feedback
  • Collaboration
  • Communication
  • Campaigns and awareness
  • Events
• Social Media on Your Terms
  • Controlling the Fire Hose
  • Optimizing How You Post
  • Being Socially Responsible
  • Organizing a Community Event
  • The buildup
  • At the event
  • Running a Campaign
  • The preparation
  • The buildup
• Providing Community Updates

Chapter 7: Building Buzz

With a solid foundation in place, we move on to build excitement and buzz around your community and encourage and enthuse every man and his dog to get involved and participate.

Coverage Includes:

• Mindshare
  • The Mindshare Opportunity
• The Building Blocks of Buzz
  • The Mission
  • Uniting Together
  • Inspired Words
  • Becoming the Advocate
  • Getting It Right by Not Getting It Wrong
  • Honesty
• Setting Up Your Base
  • Aims
  • Staying Current
  • Building Conversation
  • Getting Online
  • Syndication
• The Buzz Cycle
  • Planning
  • Buildup
  • Announce
  • Review
• Buzz Targets
  • Announcing Your Community
  • Attracting Contributors
• Building Alliances
  • The Professional Press
  • The Amateur Press
  • Blogs
  • Blog wars
  • Podcasts
  • Videos
• Events and Conferences
  • Choosing Events
  • Submitting your paper
  • Promoting your talk
  • Delivering Presentations
  • Creating attractive slides
  • Long versus short presentations
• Summary

Chapter 8: Measuring Community

Although many consider community touchy-feely and unmeasurable, this chapter confronts the myth and guides you in tracking, monitoring, and otherwise measuring the work going on in the community so that it can be optimized and simplified.

Coverage Includes:

• Community Self-Reflection
• The Foundations of Feedback
  • Defining Purpose
• Hooks ’n’ Data
  • Statistics and Automated Data
  • The risks of interpretation
  • Plugging your stats into graphs
  • Surveys and Structured Feedback
  • Choosing questions
  • Showing off your survey reports
  • Observational Tests
  • Measuring Mechanics
  • Gathering General Perceptions
  • Perception of you
• Anonymity and Privacy
  • Anonymity
  • Privacy
• Moving On

Chapter 9: Managing and Tracking Work

Continuing on from measuring our community, we now explore methods by which you can ensure that your community projects and participants stay on track and deliver great results.

Coverage Includes:

• Credibility and the Need to Track Progress
• The Importance of Tracking Our Work
  • Tracking the Right Things
  • Within the Context of a Company
  • Defining value
  • Communicating up and down
• What We Need to Manage
• Tracking Projects
  • Structuring Your Projects
  • Managing Work Items
  • Structuring work items
  • Documenting work items
  • Visualizing Data with Burndown Charts
  • Using burndown charts
  • Observing burndown patterns
  • Generating additional information
  • Building burndown charts into your workflow
• Tracking Growth and Decline
  • Visibility Is Key
  • Ensuring Effective Processes
• Tracking Health
  • Promoting a Feedback Culture
  • Building a Set of Generals
• Reacting to Community Concerns
• Moving On

Chapter 10: Governance

Our next stop is the wide-ranging and seemingly complex topic of governance. We explore what options are available for a low-friction, capable, and representative governance strategy for your community.

Coverage Includes:

• Accountability
• Governance Does Not Suck
• Governance and Community
• The Case for Governance
  • Follow the Leader
  • Engage the People
  • Aspire to Inspire
  • To Bring Peace
• Learning from the Leaders
  • Dictatorial Charismatic Leadership
  • Enlightened Dictatorship
  • Delegated Governance
• Setting Up a Community Council
  • Designing a Council
  • Responsibilities
  • Structure
  • Commercial sponsorship
  • Membership
  • Codifying Your Council
  • Nominating and Electing Council Members
  • Forming a new council
• Ubuntu Governance Example
  • In the Beginning…
  • The Structure of the Ubuntu Community
  • Mark Shuttleworth
  • Community Council
  • Technical Board
  • Team councils
  • Membership
  • Ubuntu Member
  • Developer
  • Council or Board Member
  • Escalation
• Expanding Governance
  • Knowing When It Is Time
  • Building the Subcouncil
  • Escalation
  • Communicating Between Councils
• Summary

Chapter 11: Handling Conflict and Relationships

One of the most sensitive topics in community leadership is handling conflict. In this chapter we explore how to identify, handle, and prevent irksome conflict; handle divisive personalities; and unblock problems.

Coverage Includes:

• The Nature of the Beast
  • The Structure of Strife
• The Calm Before the Storm
  • Contentious Personalities
  • Profiling the polemical
  • Sharing feedback about personality issues
  • Poisonous people
  • Barriers to Input
  • Problems with Responsibility
  • Lack of Justice
• The Conflict Resolution Process
  • The Role of a Facilitator
  • Be objective
  • Be positive
  • Be open
  • Be clear
  • Resolving the Conflict
  • Part 1: Calm and reassure
  • Part 2: Get the facts
  • Part 3: Discuss
  • Part 4: Document
  • Part 5: Reflect and maintain
• Dealing with Burnout
  • Detecting and Treating Burnout
  • Required rest and relaxation
  • Work/Life Balance
  • Addiction
• Handling Absence
• Handling Bereavement
• Summary

Chapter 12: Creating and Running Events

Events offer an excellent opportunity for your community to bond, be productive, and have fun, and this is where we cast our beady eye in this chapter.

Coverage Includes:

• Building Family Values
• Events
• Getting Organized
  • Step 1: Identify Requirements
  • Step 2: Find Help
  • Step 3: Set Deadlines
  • Step 4: Make Time
• Organizing Physical Events
  • Common Attributes
  • Location/venue
  • Accommodation
  • Equipment
  • Date/time
  • Cost
  • Registering attendance
  • Catering
  • Insurance/unions
  • Organizing a Sprint
  • Organizing a Summit
  • Structure and scheduling
  • Inside a session
  • Event-specific notes
  • Organizing an Unconference
  • Event-specific notes
• Getting Sponsorship
  • Understanding Your Needs
  • Finding and Handling Sponsors
  • Setting expectations
  • The pitch
  • Handling the Money
• Case Study: The Ubuntu Developer Summit
  • The Ethos of the UDS
  • How It Works
  • The Organizational Team
  • Organizational cadence
  • The Venue
  • Meeting room requirements
  • Location
  • Facilities
  • Assets
  • Infrastructure
  • Room Layout
  • The Timetable
  • Opening keynotes
  • Plenaries
  • Lightning talks
  • Sessions
  • Scheduling
• Organizing Online Events
  • Common Attributes
  • Mediums
  • Online Discussion Meetings
  • Choosing a time
  • Advertising the meeting
  • Setting the agenda
  • Running the meeting
  • Organizing Online Tutorials
  • Scheduling
  • Preparing for a session
  • Running a session
• Summary

Chapter 13: Hiring a Community Manager

We now explore some advice and guidance for organizations that want to hire a community manager to conduct and implement the wide range of topics that we have discussed throughout the book.

Coverage Includes:

• Why Community Building Has Become a Big Business
• The Role of a Community Manager in the Corporation
  • Setting Expectations
  • Scope of the Role
  • Risk
  • Breaking Tradition
  • Control and Reporting
  • The ability to enact change
  • The Responsibilities of Community Engagement
  • Salary
  • Communicating Expectations to the Candidate
• Managing Your Community Manager
  • Induction
  • Internal reputation
  • Community reputation
  • Strategy
  • Management and Communications
  • Weekly engagements
  • Community feedback
• Summary

Chapter 14: Community Case Book

Next I present a fascinating collection of interviews from accomplished community builders about how they created their own inspirational communities to help round off your knowledge with the experiences of these leaders.

Includes Interviews With:

Chapter 15: Onward and Upward

Finally, we close The Art of Community with some additional resources and events to continue your journey.

Coverage Includes:

• Building Our Own Community
  • Social Media
  • Videos
• The Community Leadership Summit
  • How It Works
  • Joining Us
• Keeping in Touch

Last week was Ubuntu Community Appreciation Day, but for the last few weeks I have been on paternity leave, so I didn’t get a chance to blog about it. I just wanted to take a few minutes to offer some thanks.

Choosing people for Ubuntu Community Appreciation Day is always tough as we have so many wonderful people who actively participate in our community. From our developers to docs writers to translators to testers to advocates and more, everyone puts their brick in the wall to build a strong, competative, and proficiant Ubuntu. We would be nothing without your contributions.

I just want to throw out a few highlights though (some of these folks work at Canonical, but I consider Canonical employees to be community members too):

• Rafal Cieslak, Janos Gyerik, and Matt Fischer – Rafal, Janos, and Matt have been doing a wonderful job taking care of much of the Ubuntu Accomplishments project. The project is moving forward in leaps and bounds and their tireless efforts have been instrumental in doing so.
• Chris Johnson – Chris has always been a phenomenal contributor to Ubuntu and helped above and beyond the line of duty when it comes to summit.ubuntu.com. Chris also contributes extensively to other parts of the project, such as status.ubuntu.com.
• José Antonio Rey and Benjamin Kerensa – José and Ben have done a wonderful job helping with Ubuntu On Air and helping for us to get more tutorial and educational content out and more opportunities for Q+A out to more people.
• Marco Ceppi – Marco is an all-round rockstar. His work on Juju, Ask Ubuntu, bug work and other areas has been phenomenal. We really should have a ‘Break Glass For Marco‘ box for when need a jolt of rock star.
• My Team – I am blessed to have a wonderful team at Canonical – Daniel, David, Jorge, Michael, and Nick all put 100% of their passion into Ubuntu and bring their expertise and guidance in helping to make Ubuntu and Canonical successful. They are not only great community leaders, but wonderful guys to work with, and great friends. Thanks, guys.
• Jef Spaleta – this may seem an unusual one, but we need people like Jef to keep us on the right track. A while back I considered Jef a bit of a troll and sometimes a little inarticulate, but in recent years his commentary and critique has become increasingly focused, articulate, and balanced, and I respect that in him. Thanks, Jef.

Finally, I want to thank Mark Shuttleworth for his continued passion for Ubuntu and Free Software. In the years I have known Mark I have never seen his passion for Ubuntu diminish; he is as excited, focused and determined to make Ubuntu successful as ever, and I am thankful for his leadership.

We have many exciting times ahead for Ubuntu and together as a community we can do wonderful things in helping to bring a powerful and elegant platform to the desktop, cloud, and devices.

A little while ago I talked about our goals to get the core Ubuntu Desktop running on the Nexus 7. Again, just to be clear: the goal here is to get the lower level foundations of the Ubuntu Desktop running efficiently on the Nexus. This work is focused on optimizing the kernel, X, networking, memory consumption etc of the core of Ubuntu and not focused on making Unity into a tablet user interface. You can’t build a great house without a solid foundation.

Like many of you, I installed Ubuntu on my Nexus 7 that arrived yesterday and the installation instructions were a breeze:

You can always revert back to Android if you need to, so come on, give Ubuntu a whirl!

Currently Ubuntu on the Nexus 7 boots and Unity runs, albeit a little slowly, but with the core touch gestures working. So far the desktop, networking, suspend/resume, and sound works, but things such as a the camera, accelerometer and other bits are still not working. The goal is to optimize the stack to run more efficiently and ensure all the hardware functions work in due time.

One of the questions many people have been asking is if these performance improvements will benefit Ubuntu in general. While some improvements will be specific to the Nexus 7, most should benefit Ubuntu in a more general sense in terms of improving performance, lowing memory consumption etc. So yes, if you contribute to helping this work, your contributions will likely benefit Ubuntu on desktop machines, servers, cloud, and elsewhere too. Also, given the nature of how our flavors are built on the foundations of Ubuntu, many of these improvements should also help our flavors too. If you are not picking up the subtlety of my prose, this is all valuable work for everyone.

Growing Community Participation

As part of this work we are really keen to work with our wider Ubuntu community and over the last few weeks I have been working with Daniel Holbach on my team as well as Alex Chiang on the Nexus team to identify the different ways in which community members can help. This is on-going work, but I wanted to sync you up on what is going on.

We want to provide a means in which everyone can help with these efforts, but there are two core types of contribution here:

1. Development – helping to optimize software, package bug-fixing, and otherwise contribute to the core distribution running on the Nexus 7.
2. Testing – testing different parts of the Nexus 7, running benchmarks to to see how the development work is progressing, and reporting bugs.

Now, some of you may be interested in helping with other areas such as advocacy, translations, documentation etc. We will get to those parts soon, but right now we want to get developers and testers up and running and then we can widen the net of potential contributions further after those folks are up and running. We are definitely keen to ensure that everyone can help though.

Now, in terms of the former (Development) we are working to put the following resources in place:

• Instructions for how to contribute as a developer, and areas of focus each week.
• Details for how to learn the skills to participate.
• A common list of bugs that we can point developers too.

We already have some documentation availabe where you can find out how to work with patched packages and test the PPA. The other documentation needs above will be added soon.

Testing

For latter much of this work will focus around benchmarking. We want to identify parts of the system that are slow and inefficient and optimize those parts to work better. Part of this optimization work will involve creating new builds of these different components and inviting community members to test them, and run benchmarking tests to see what efficiency benefits we get.

To help with this we are working on the following:

• Instructions for how to test the Nexus 7 and what kind of bug reports we need.
• Getting benchmarking suites that we can use to track the effiency of different parts of the stack.
• Provide a good workflow that benchmarking results and bugs can flow into the development pipeline so our development community can fix these issues.

A lot of this work is starting to land, and if you want to help with bugs be sure to read Matt’s blog entry about how to get involved.

If you are interested in helping with measuring and debugging, see this documentation where you can find out how to measure power consumption, measure memory usage, and simulate realistic usage when benchmarking a browser.

More documentation and resources will be available soon.

Meeting and Support

To get the ball rolling we have scheduled a weekly meeting every Friday at 4pm UTC in #ubuntu-meeting. The goal of the meeting is to discuss progress being made, identify areas of focus, and provide a means for our community to get involved in this work. The meeting will be chaired by Alex Chiang.

To get in touch with the development team, be sure to join #ubuntu-arm and #ubuntu-devel on Freenode, and you can also ask questions on Ask Ubuntu right here. If you have been using Ubuntu on the Nexus 7, also be sure to go and answer any questions you can; that is a great contribution!

Moving Forward

We are still very much at the beginning of this journey but we are determined to be successful in making Ubuntu rock on the Nexus 7. For us to do a great job here we will need lots of help from our community to get involved, and we want to make this as simple as possible, so please do share your feedback about how we can make this easier. A great place to share this feedback is in the weekly meeting too; we can then note down suggestions and work on solutions.

Ubuntu has made tremendous progress in recent years on the desktop and in the cloud, and we think we have a real shot at making a real change on devices too. Together we can bring Free Software to more people across the desktop, cloud, servers, and devices, and every contribution from our community edges us another step further. Please be sure to ask any questions that I can help with. Thanks!

As I mentioned last week, our LoCo Teams are a core part of the Ubuntu community. They provide wonderful contributions in spreading the word about Ubuntu, introducing users in how to get started with the desktop/server, and providing a fantastic support safety net for new users. I want to help to better support the work of LoCo Teams in the 13.04 cycle.

One idea I was discussing with my team the other day was the idea of an Advocacy Development Kit (ADK). Let me explain…

In the software world, if you want to write applications for a particular platform you typically use an official Software Development Kit (SDK). This is a downloadable collection of tools that provides everything you need to get started writing software for that platform.

I would like to explore the notion of creating a similar downloadable kit but focused on the needs of LoCo Teams to perform advocacy. This kit would be used to organize and run outreach projects, represent Ubuntu at events, and spread the word further and further afield about Ubuntu and Free Software.

How It Would Work

Imagine this scenario. You go to http://loco.ubuntu.com and you download the ADK as a .zip file. When you unzip it there is the following content included:

• Promotional Materials – we include a set of posters, signs, banner ads, and other materials that most teams will use in their advocacy. Teams can then print out this content quickly and easily.
• Assets – we include the assets teams need to create their own materials. This would include our logos, color palettes, pictograms, and other content.
• Organizational Materials – if teams want to organize outreach campaigns, organizational efforts and other projects, we can include things such as organizational spreadsheets that ease this work, lists of things you should bring to staff a booth etc.
• Documentation – we would include some written guides for performing different types of advocacy such as organizing jams, booths, giving out CDs etc.

At the top level of the ADK would be a README.html file that provides a summary of the content included so it is easy to find what you need.

I think providing an ADK would fulfill a number of benefits:

• This would be an active project that would benefit all LoCo Teams. It would provide a single concise place to find everything you need to perform great advocacy and get great results.
• It would be a fun project to participate in and open to everyone to contribute. This would be a Launchpad project with branches, translations, milestones etc. I think having a project such as this that our wider LoCo Teams community can rally around would be useful and and fun.
• The ADK would not serve to provide a library of promotional materials (SpreadUbuntu already does a great job there), but instead pick a small number of the very best materials to include and point people to SpreadUbuntu if they want more choice. This is similar to how we build Ubuntu; the default install ships the best text editor, web browser etc, but then you can access other options in the Ubuntu Software Center. We would likewise deliver the best content in the ADK and point people to SpreadUbuntu for more choice.
• This project could be useful for other flavors and projects too. Imagine that a Kubuntu LoCo Team wants to perform some specific Kubuntu advocacy; they could take the ADK, switch out the Ubuntu assets with Kubuntu ones, but keep most of the content the same. This could also be useful to other projects outside of the Ubuntu world to take the Ubuntu ADK and patch it with their own content.
• We could write the documentation and guides in RestructuredText (this is how the Ubuntu Packaging Guide works) which is simple to write, and this would make it easier to (a) generate additional output formats (e.g. HTML and PDFs) as well as (b) support translations so that teams can have documentation available in their own language. Translating these docs for different languages would be a tremendous contribution.
• We would give the project a release cadence and release a new version every six months; this would match Ubuntu releases and provide fresh content for all of our teams.

Feedback Welcome!

So, I wanted to share the idea with you folks and encourage you to share your ideas in the comments. Specifically:

• Do you like the idea?
• What kind of content do you think should go in the ADK?
• Would you be interested in helping?

I have asked Daniel Holbach to put together a first cut of the ADK and put it in a Launchpad project and then we can use some of the ideas discussed here (please let us know if you are volunteering to help too) and then we can start working on a shared branch to build a first iteration of the ADK.

Thanks for reading and thanks in advance for your comments!

As many of you will know, there is a lot of work going on to get the core Ubuntu Desktop running on the Nexus 7 tablet.

Thus far we have focused on the 8GB and 16GB tablets, but now the 32GB Nexus 7 can be used too. This tablet is available for around $299 if you don’t have one.

We want to encourage as many of you to test Ubuntu on the Nexus 7, report bugs, and get involved in making Ubuntu rock on it. To get involved, simply follow the installation instructions (don’t worry, you can roll back to Android if you need to) and be sure to ask for help if needed.

If you find bugs, be sure to report them with ubuntu-bug, here’s how.

Thanks for helping!

With so much going on at UDS it can be difficult to get a crisp summary of the key decisions, plans, and goals for the next release. Even if you are attending in person, you only get to see a small sliver of everything that is going on, so a broad set of summaries is useful for those both at UDS and those who could not attend.

I have created this wiki page where we can document these summaries, decisions, and conclusions. Please go and contribute to this page – if we can divide and conquer in getting most of the content landed this week we can then tidy it up next week and release it.

Thanks!

It has been interesting listening into the UDS sessions remotely (find out how to join remotely here) this week. While I wish I could join more sessions (unfortunately the timezone difference is pretty brutal) there have been a number of key topics and themes discussed this week, of which a few in particular have caught my attention in the Community track.

Two topics in particular appear to be LoCo Teams and Communication. In a nutshell some of the feedback from UDS is that our LoCo Teams provide tremendously valuable advocacy for the Ubuntu project and but we could do with helping and harnessing these teams more. In terms of communication there is a desire for better communication regarding how announcements are made and how widely news is disseminated across the project. There was also feedback about improving community involvement in Canonical projects but I will dedicate another blog entry to that.

I am in full agreement with both of these points of feedback, and I agree these are valuable areas for us to focus on in 13.04 and I am going to commit my team to help drive improvements in both of these areas.

Next week when UDS is finished I will be spending a few days syncing up with my team to get more details about the discussions that I could not be part of due to the timezone, and then I am keen for us to put together a plan with our community. These plans will naturally take into account the discussions and suggestions put forth at UDS and we will coordinate with many of the participants in the sessions around the plans for 13.04.

I would also like to put together a small community team that my team can have a regular call with to check in and ensure this work is on track, make any adjustments and improvements as we execute it, and be able to bounce ideas and discussion points off. We may break this into two teams: one to coordinate around the LoCo work, and one to coordinate around the communications work.

I do have a few thoughts about these two areas I wanted to share below as points for further discussion. If you are at UDS please do discuss these topics there and feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below.

LoCo Teams

The Myanmar Loco Team.

There is no doubt that our LoCo Teams are a tremendous part of our community. There is also no doubt that we can help Loco Teams more to help and support their teams in being successful.

From the perspective of the Canonical Community Team I feel a bit guilty about this. In previous cycles we have spent more time on LoCo Teams, but the last few cycles we have not had as much time to devote to helping teams be successful (the last few cycles have been hectic to say the least). As some of you will know, I used to have weekly calls with some LoCo Leaders and I want to get that back on track in 13.04.

In my mind there are three strands of LoCo Team work that we can focus on in 13.04:

• Leadership – as with previous cycles I think there is a great opportunity to continue to support, inspire, and motivate great leadership in our LoCo Teams. There is no doubt that a team with a great leader (if not a formal leader, someone who inspires work and contributions and coordinates projects) typically ends up being a happier and more motivated team. As such, for us to increase the number of happy, motivated teams, helping our LoCo Teams to develop great inspirational leaders is a great area to focus our efforts.
• Participation – one area in which I think we have done a pretty poor job in recent cycles in involving our LoCo Teams in activities surrounding the next release. As an example, on my team Nick Skaggs is going to be growing the number of manual testers, Daniel Holbach will be working with Nick to grow the number of Automated testers, and Michael is going to be growing the number of people participating in the skunkworks project. These are great areas in which we can reach out to our LoCo Teams for active participation, to share skills, and take part in wider campaigns. All to often we have focused on the specific communities in that work (e.g. the testing community in the QA work) and we should widen this to involve our wider LoCo Team community. As an example, I can see Nick reaching out to and support LoCo Teams to participate his his regular cadence testiing every two weeks.
• Sharing Stories – when a community reads awesome stories of LoCo Teams doing great work, it inspires and encourages great work too. A few cycles back we implemented changes to loco.ubuntu.com to highlight many of these stories and I think it would be wonderful for us to continue this work and make the site a hub of exciting storytelling and discussion. I would like to get this back on track.

Do you think these are valuable areas of focus? What other areas do you think we can help make LoCo Teams be more successful?

Communication

Communication is definitely an area in which we can drive some improvements. Within the context of the discussions at UDS, it seems the primary concern here is to improve (a) how new features, policies and information is communicated to the wider community and (b) improve how that information is disseminated so as many people as possible see it and people don’t miss it because they didn’t read a particular mailing list, blog, Twitter feed or otherwise.

In terms of (a) you can break these announcements down into (1) announcements from the community (e.g. governance voting, CoC changes etc) and (2) announcements from Canonical (e.g. new features that might be landing, changes in policies etc).

For (2) this is something I am passionate about improving in the 13.04 cycle. I have already reached out to Mark Shuttleworth and the Product Strategy / Online Services leads about improving how these big new features and changes are messaged outwards. As part of these improvements I am maintaining an internal spreadsheet with when these features and policy changes are going to be ready. This will give my team more time to prepare for this work, help us to provide other community teams with a heads up (e.g. the Community Council and the News Team), be able to plan resources and documentation, and be able to plan the discussions and feedback loop better. I am confident that this will improve significantly in the 13.04 cycle. Mark and the Product Strategy/Online Services leads are all on board to participate in this work.

For (b) we started getting into this discussion in the community roundtable yesterday and I think that this deserves a longer discussion. Ideally we want to find a way in which we can utilize existing communication channels but be more efficient in how we message out to our wider community. As an example, the Fridge serves a useful purpose as a community orientated blog, but we need to ensure that the information and announcements get posted there more often (something that we can improve in my team). We also have other potential resources such as mailing lists and Twitter/Google+ feeds and we need to find the best way of merging these different resources together into a more scalable strategy for how we message outwards.

I am keen to hear of any further discussions on this topic at UDS and for us to continue the discussion next week and put in a place a plan. Comments and feedback are welcome!

This week the Ubuntu Developer Summit is taking place in Copenhagen from Monday – Thursday. This is the event where we plan the features and goals for the next release of Ubuntu, Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail.

Unfortunately I won’t be there in person this week in person as my wife, Erica, and I are expecting a stork to fly into our house and deliver a baby (at least that’s how I understand how it works), so I am at home in California on stork duty. I am not going to deny that although being here is absolutely the right thing to do, I am pretty bummed that I can’t be there in Copenhagen with our community.

Some of you may not be able to attend in person too, but fortunately you can still participate in every session at UDS by joining in remotely.

How do I Remotely Participate?

You can find all the details of how to remotely participate right here, but in a nutshell you can view the schedule here (obviously all times are in local European time) to see the list of sessions and which rooms they are in and then hear the session audio feed from the appropriate room. You can communicate with the room by connecting to the Freenode IRC network and then joining one of the following rooms that corrospond to the session you are in:

• #ubuntu-uds-b3-m1
• #ubuntu-uds-b3-m10
• #ubuntu-uds-b3-m2
• #ubuntu-uds-b3-m3
• #ubuntu-uds-b3-m4
• #ubuntu-uds-b3-m5
• #ubuntu-uds-b3-m6
• #ubuntu-uds-b3-m7
• #ubuntu-uds-b3-m8
• #ubuntu-uds-b4-m5
• #ubuntu-uds-b4-m6
• #ubuntu-uds-b4-m7

If you connect to a room and can’t hear people loudly enough, don’t hesitate in asking the room to speak up or certain speakers to sit closer to the microphone.

How do I Watch the Plenaries?

Every day there are a series of plenaries; these are short presentations that are presented to the full UDS audience. Apart from the keynote plenary on Monday at 9pm, the main plenaries take place every day at 2pm and then a final set of track summaries is presented in the last hour of UDS on Thursday at 5pm.

You can watch the plenaries every day by viewing the live video feed.

This is the schedule of plenaries:

Monday

• 9.00am – Jono Bacon – Introduction to UDS

• 9.10am – Mark Shuttleworth – Keynote

• 2.00pm – Ivo Weevers – Design and Community

• 2.15pm – Drew Bliss – Valve
• 2.30pm – David Planella – Ubuntu and App Developers
• 2.45pm – Nick Skaggs – Growing The Ubuntu QA Community

Tuesday

• 2.00pm – Chris Kenyon – VP of Sales and Business Development
• 2.30pm – HP

Wednesday

• 2.00pm – Flavors Roundtable
• 2.30pm – Evan Dandrea and Matthew Paul Thomas – Reliability and Ubuntu

Thursday

• 2.00pm – Lightning talks (an hour of short, topical talks covering a range of areas).
• 5.00pm – Track Summaries – each of the track leads will summarize the key decisions and findings from their tracks. This provides a great summary of the topics discussed at UDS throughout the week.

I hope you all have a wonderful and productive week at UDS, and I hope many of you can join in remotely too!