Recently the Canonical Online Services team, led by Cristian Parrino, has been in discussions with the Banshee project to coordinate a suitable revenue share for the built-in Amazon store. Unfortunately, there were a few crossed wires, but a call today helped to clarify the position.

For clarity, Cristian wanted to pass on the plan for Ubuntu 11.04 to the Ubuntu community, so here is a copy of the email he shared with the Banshee core developers after the call today:

Thanks again for the call, your participation and understanding is very much appreciated. As discussed, I wanted to follow up with the plan I outlined on the call – and reiterate my apologies and responsibility for a situation that has resulted in the worst outcome for everyone, including putting the Banshee team in an awkward position. As such:

• In Ubuntu 11.04, Banshee will have both the AmazonMP3 and Ubuntu One music stores turned on by default.
• We will contribute 25% of the revenue from the AmazonMP3 store to the GNOME Foundation.
• We will also also start contributing 25% of revenue from the Ubuntu One Music Store on both Banshee and Rhythmbox, to the GNOME Foundation.

Recognizing that it is important to not only bring choice to Ubuntu users, but to also generate revenue to continue our investment in Ubuntu, and to ensure we can contribute effectively to the GNOME Foundation – we believe this plan fairly addresses the interests of all parties.

The Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) is the most important event in the Ubuntu calendar. It is where we get together to discuss, design, and plan the next version of Ubuntu; in this case the Ubuntu 11.10 release.

The next UDS takes place at Corinthia Grand Hotel, Budapest, Hungary from the 9th – 13th May 2011. You can find out more about why UDS is interesting from the perspective of a member of the community, an upstream contributor, and a vendor. We also welcome everyone to participate remotely if you can’t attend the event in person. More more details on how to get there, see this page.

At the heart of a great UDS is a diverse group of attendees who can bring their experience and expertise to the discussions. You don’t have to be technical, or be a programmer or packager to attend – UDS is open to everyone (including non-Ubuntu folks) and free to attend. We encourage everyone with an interest in Ubuntu to attend.

Sponsorship

For every UDS Canonical sponsors the hotel and accommodation of a set of community members to ensure they are free to contribute and bring value to the discussions. We have a limited budget so we can’t sponsor everyone, but we are always keen to have a capable and diverse group to sponsor:

• We strive to support community members who are actively involved in Ubuntu and who are providing significant and sustained contributions to the Ubuntu project.
• We always welcome Upstream contributors who are bring value to Ubuntu indirectly via active participation in their upstream project, but who are keen to see quality support for that upstream in Ubuntu.
• Contributors are willing to actively participate not only throughout the full Ubuntu Developer Summit week, but also following with active contributions throughout the release cycle.
• We are always keen to welcome members of the community who have never been to UDS before and are keen to participate and experience the event.
• You don’t have to provide technical contributions to apply – if you have participated in the areas of advocacy, documentation, testing, art, design etc, you are encouraged to apply.
• UDS is an event that encourages diversity – we welcome everyone to apply for sponsorship, irrespective of gender, race, impairment, technical expertise, or other factors.

If you are participating in the Ubuntu community, we would love you to apply for sponsorship. This is how it works:

1. You can apply for sponsorship by following these instructions. Apologies for the different forms you need to fill in – we are going to consolidate these forms at the next UDS. The deadline for submissions is 29th March 2011 so be sure to get yours in!
2. When the deadline is reached we will assess the applications and finalize who we will be able to sponsor.
3. You will then receive an email outlining whether we can sponsor you or not.

Simple! I look forward to seeing your applications, and seeing many of you in Budapest!

Building A Diverse Ubuntu Developer Summit

For the this UDS we have set out with a goal to promote an even more diverse and welcoming environment. We have been working with the Ubuntu Women and Ubuntu Accessibility teams to optimize UDS as a great example of diversity done right at an event.

As part of this, the Ubuntu Women team are engaging in an outreach campaign to encourage more women to apply for sponsorship at UDS. We would like to see a greater attendance and participation of women at UDS (not only sponsored, but local attendees too), and the Ubuntu Women team will be reaching out to encourage women to apply for sponsorship and attend.

As part of this work, the Ubuntu Women team are providing mentoring, help and assistance for women who want to apply for sponsorship and ensure they submit the best sponsorship application that they can. To find out more how to use this service, click here.

Thanks also to the Ubuntu Accessibility team for helping us to ensure accessibility needs are factored into the many different elements of the event.

Every cycle we organize the Ubuntu Global Jam; an event in which our global community gets together to help make Ubuntu better. The Ubuntu Global Jam is a great opportunity to get together and meet other Ubuntu fans and contributors, make new friends in your area, and help to make the next Ubuntu release a really rocking release!

Never before has the Ubuntu Global Jam been so important! In this cycle we are shipping Unity as the new desktop interface, and we are going to be working hard together to ensure that as many Unity bugs are squeezed out as possible. This is a great chance to come along and help test Unity, report bugs, fix bugs, triage problems, write documentation, help advocate Ubuntu in your area, and otherwise make a real difference that will benefit others. Together we can make Ubuntu 11.04 the best Ubuntu release yet!

So, I just wanted to give everyone a heads up that the date of the Ubuntu Global Jam is 1st – 3rd April 2011. I am really keen that everyone has as much notice as possible to get your events ready! Laura has added the Ubuntu Global Jam in the LoCo Directory so feel free to go and add your events there! We will also be having some tutorial sessions about how to organize events soon! When you add an event, but sure to Tweet/Dent/Facebook it and use the #ugj, #ubuntu, and #locoteams tags so others can see them!

To get the ball rolling, I am going to be dedicating a chunk of my videocast on Wednesday at 11am Pacific / 2pm Eastern / 7pm UTC to discussing how to get involved organizing an event, and answering questions about running events. Be there and join in the fun!

This is going to be an awesome global event, and you can help this rock! For more detail of how to organize an event, see this guide.

I am delighted to announce the Community Leadership Summit 2011, now in it’s third year! This year it takes place on the 23rd and 24th July 2011, the weekend before OSCON at the Oregon Convention Center. Thanks again to O’Reilly for providing the venue.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the CLS, it is an entirely free event designed to bring together community leaders and managers and the projects and organizations that are interested in growing and empowering a strong community. The event provides an unconference style schedule in which attendees can discuss, debate and explore topics. This is augmented with a range of scheduled talks, panel discussions, networking opportunities and more.

The event provides an opportunity to bring together the leading minds in the field with new community builders to discuss topics such as governance, creating collaborative environments, conflict resolution, transparency, open infrastructure, social networking, commercial investment in community, engineering vs. marketing approaches to community leadership and much more.

The last two events have been hugely successful and a great way to connect together different people from different community backgrounds to share best practice and make community management an art and science better understood and shared by us all.

I will be providing more details about the event closer to the time, but in the meantime be sure to register (it is entirely free!) and join the Facebook event.

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!

The Ubuntu Developer Summit is our twice-yearly event in which the Ubuntu community gets together to discuss, design, and plan the work for the next release of Ubuntu. It is an important staple in the Ubuntu calendar, and we meet next in May in Budapest, Hungary.

We always try to make UDS a welcome and inviting environment to meet people, engage in enjoyable discussions, and work together to improve Free Software. We also try to make UDS a diverse environment, and welcoming to everyone. This diversity has formed in a rather ad-hoc way though – we have not explicitly tried to reach out and encourage diversity and we can do better. As such, I just wanted to share some work that is going on and encourage those of you who are interested in this topic to participate.

These include:

• We now have an anti-harassment policy. This work was led by Charles Profitt and thanks to Matt Zimmerman and Valerie Aurora for their skillful guidance. We still have some event-specific contact details still to add there, but Marianna is getting this information and it will be updated soon.
• Matt Zimmerman is also working on a diversity statement. While this will encompass the wider Ubuntu project, it will also be added to the UDS website.
• A few weeks ago I reached out to the Ubuntu Women team to ask for their guidance on how we can encourage a more diverse environment at UDS. A number of interesting efforts are going on in this area:
  • Elizabeth Krumbach posted that she has created a page on the Ubuntu Women site for UDS which provides some basic information and the beginning of a FAQ. More feedback and content is welcome.
  • Elizabeth also created a UDS stories page which which provides some useful context for prospective women attendees interested to learn more about the event.
  • The team is also discussing how to provide support and guidance for filling sponsorship requests and including all the relevant information. I think this is a wonderful idea.
  • We are keen to work on a big outreach campaign to use these resources to raise the visibility of diversity at UDS and encourage more women to apply for sponsorship and participate. This is going to be the next phase of the discussion.

I just want to say a huge thankyou to the Ubuntu Women team for their contributions and guidance in this project, and I would like to encourage you to join in the discussion. I think we have a fantastic opportunity here to help UDS be wonderful example of how diversity should be core to the values of the event and offer a more reflective experience of great community working on interesting problems together.

A few weeks back I wrote about my desire to make Ubuntu feel more personal for new and existing contributors. The goal here is to help community members to have a fulfilling experience in which there is a very personal sense of engagement (i.e. people care about your specific contributions and experience with Ubuntu).

I wanted to share some work that we have been doing along these lines to not only show you kind of focus we are trying to take, but to also hopefully inspire some of you to take a similar interest in achieving the same kind of personal experience.

This project started when Daniel Holbach and I were discussing how to reach out to prospective developers better to give them a helping hand. One thing that struck us was that we didn’t have particularly good visibility on the timeline of someone’s contribution as a developer. Sure, we knew folks who would reach out to us for help and assistance, we knew people who would come to UDS, and we knew active contributors in #ubuntu-devel, but we suspected these folks were only part of the picture. Many people contribute to Ubuntu and we often don’t know some of them, let alone have an idea of their work so far.

Part of the goal here is to have better visibility on what someone has done so we can reach out and guide folks through their Ubuntu development adventure. The concept of a significant and sustained contributions has always been at the heart of how we assess our contributors for membership and upload access to our repositories, but it is often difficult to get a real feel for the sustained part. Daniel and I were keen to resolve this and get a better overview of people going through our developer programme and how much work they have performed.

To this end, we fleshed out a plan to programmatically generate a series of graphs for everyone who who was using the Ubuntu Sponsorship Queue to get their work in Ubuntu (in other words, prospective developers asking current developers to review their work and upload it), and then use this graph as a means to see the commonality of their contributions and how sustained they are.

Daniel put together these graphs by parsing upload emails and and the graph looks like this:

This is how it works:

• Each individual graph shows a different contributor who is currently using the sponsorship queue to get their work in Ubuntu.
• Each graph has the same start and end date (19th Sep 2008 – 23rd Dec 2010).
• Each spike shows the number of accepted uploads made to the archive (i.e they had an upload successfully sponsored by a developer). Please note: unlike the X axis in the graph, the Y axis does not share the same scale (e.g. the top graph ranges from 0 – 7.5 contributions and the bottom is 0 – 6).

So what do these graphs tell us? Well, they give us a reasonable indication of those people who are actively contributing to Ubuntu in a significant and sustained way. This page gives us an opportunity to instantly look at all the people currently engaging with the sponsorship queue and see their contribution history. This enables us to do a number of things:

• Reach out to those people who have been clearly performing significant and sustained contributions and ask them if there is anything we can do to help, give them encourage and respect, and otherwise make their experience more pleasant and encouraging.
• It can sometimes be difficult for a prospective developer to know when they should apply to be a MOTU or core-dev. This provides us with a useful resource to see significant and sustained contributions and recommend those developers to apply for developer approval.
• It gives us a chance to see commonalities of spikes of activity and dips in activity and to see what those causes are.

When the graph was in place and looked over it, I asked Daniel to start reaching out to different people to offer this help and guidance and already we have seen some wonderful results. These folks seem genuinely happy that we have reached out to them, and here are two examples of their feedback:

“Thanks for getting in touch, much appreciated and shows how Canonical cares about its community.”

“I appreciate your direct correspondence, this kind of stuff is what sets Ubuntu apart.”

This is exactly the kind of sense of personal care that I am keen for us to grow in the project. I want to say a huge thankyou to Daniel for his efforts on this, and I am looking forward to suggestions for other areas in which we can build a more personal and human Ubuntu experience.

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!

Community is a deeply personal experience. While write communities such as Open Source get together to make things (as opposed to read communities who consume content together), the attraction and thrill is only partially in the collaboration. What really makes write communities fun are the personal relationships that develop; what starts as nicknames on a screen shortly burst with life and become friends who we enjoy spending time with, sharing our ideas with, and in many cases relying on to help us through tough patches of our lives. The very reason Open Source and community attracted me in the first place is that this is not just boring, cold, and unfeeling computing, it is computing driven by people who share their humanity to make the world a better place.

I like that.

I like that a lot, and I think lots of you good people do too.

Over the years in my role as Ubuntu Community Manager I have seen the project grow from strength to strength. I am hugely proud of all of the efforts the community has made and the achievements that we can associate with the project. I really feel we are on target for breaking new ground for desktop Linux. While there are many desktop distributions, and many of them perform stunning work, the furthest many have got to mainstream success with users (aside from just Linux enthusiasts) has been getting close to the chasm…but not taking a run-up to get over it. I feel like we are teetering on the edge of the chasm with Ubuntu, and now we have the opportunity to thrust it over into the mainstream, and therefore thrust Free Software into the mainstream.

Throughout the growth in our community, we have naturally needed to develop some processes and procedures in how people can participate. As we have scaled more and more, we have relied on these processes more and more. We can broadly break these down into two areas; education and assessment.

Education is how new contributors can learn how to participate and interact with Ubuntu and it’s contributors in a safe environment that (a) encourages the new contributor to try things and learn, but (b) protects Ubuntu from mistakes that rookies often make. Assessment is how we assess new contributors when they take this education and experience and apply to gain elevated privileges in our community such as uploading packages to the archive, becoming a governance council member, or being sponsored to the Ubuntu Developer Summit.

Let’s look at an example of what I am talking about.

If someone chooses that they would like to contribute to Ubuntu as a packager — that is, packaging software, fixing bugs, and other maintenance work — well, we have a pretty standard workflow for how this happens. It looks like this:

Education

• The new contributor reads our documentation, joins our learning events, and otherwise grows their skills in Debian packaging and Ubuntu.
• They then road test this knowledge by fixing bugs and contributing their changes to the sponsorship queue. This queue is a list of contributions that new packagers make from across the project.
• We then ask our existing core-dev and motu developers to review these contributions, offer feedback, and when the contribution is in shape after a little bit of back and forth, it is uploaded.

Important points to note: the contributor may provide ten contributions and get ten or more different people providing feedback. That is ten mini-relationships growing, with each not necessarily getting to know the contributor in any significant detail, and the contributor not getting to know any Ubuntu developers in any significant detail either. This process also assumes that someone will pick up their contribution and review it.

Assessment

• When the contributor has made a number of contributions, it is often unclear when they should apply for upload rights (as many different people have reviewed their work and don’t see the amalgamated growth in skills). Typically another community member will encourage them to apply.
• The contributor puts together a wiki page outlining their contributions and the work they have performed. They also ask others to write testimonials advocating their approval as an uploader.
• A governance board then reviews the wiki page, asks the contributor some questions, and then has a vote to either accept or reject their application for upload rights.

Important points to note: (a) the governance board may have never worked directly with the contributor, and (b) are therefore basing their assessments on what I would refer to as a tick-box review. That is, a set of criteria that show that the contributor has performed useful technical skills, but does not really assess the trust in that person (i.e. do we trust this person to have the keys to our archive?). The reason: trust is difficult to assess when the contributor has had a wide range of small interactions with other peers (and again don’t see the amalgamated growth in skills), and the governance board may have not had any direct contact with the contributor themselves.

While this process has certainly born much fruit and many contributors have successfully been through it, it is far less personal than I would like. I would like to see a contributor’s education and assessment experience be more attuned to a specific mentor or small set of mentors, of which I will discuss a little later.

What I Want To Shoot For

Over the years I have met a number of people who have proudly told me who inspired them to get into Open Source and a given community. Often statements of “XYZ really inspired me to get involved” or “XYZ really helped me over some obstacles in getting involved” really resonate with us when we hear these stories. Essentially, people join because of the software, but they stay because of the community.

We often here of these heartening experiences, but they are not systematically part of our community. Our community processes are not designed to produce those kinds of statements, but to ensure everyone gets a fair crack of the whip at learning the skills required and being able to contribute if they meet quality requirements. Our processes are designed to deliver education and assessment in a form that results in successful contributions. What I am proposing is that we improve our processes and community to engineer exactly those kinds of statements; statements that celebrate that personal interactions with another community member helped someone realize their full potential and stick with it, despite any obstacles in their way.

As an example, I think it could be a more pleasant experience for a prospective new developer to have a single mentor who guides them through their education and assessment experience. This person would review their work, see their progress, and frankly, if that person is already a trusted core-dev, I think they should be empowered to have the responsibility to approve someone for upload access (possibly with another person as a co-supporter of the new contributor if we want to be sure). I think this would be a far more enjoyable experience for the new contributor and would save a lot of time and effort in which the new contributor has traditionally had to build a case to convince a governance board that they have the chops.

Growing a Community-wide Personal Experience

Of course, the aforementioned developer review case is just one example of an opportunity for injecting more of a 1-on-1 social connection into our community. While I don’t think for a second that our culture is broken, my suggestions here are merely wishing to optimize our culture around what so many of us truly enjoy about community – a sense of personal engagement.

This personal engagement can apply to many other areas. Here are just a few examples after a few minutes of thinking:

• Highlighting inspirational leaders – the Ubuntu community is jam-packed with incredibly inspirational leaders. Not all of these people have the words leader, manager, team contact or other such title; many are regular Joes and Josephines who we know and respect as always performing good work and having a constructive, balanced and positive approach. I would like to celebrate these people more. We have done this in the past with the Hall Of Fame, blog entries, and more, but I think we can do even more of this.
• Encourage more and more mentoring – mentoring is a hugely valuable feature in a community and is the heart of building a 1-on-1 connection between new and existing contributors. Of course, it is a complex challenge at times – it requires good mentors who have time to help new contributors. I wonder if we can come up with some ideas for improving mentoring in our community.
• Building a culture of trust – as I said earlier, I think we may want to consider thinking more about how we build a culture of trust in which a solid demonstration of trust and capability can open doors. Put it this way, if a Colin Watson, a Martin Pitt, or a Iain Lane recommended someone for upload access, I personally would take their word for it and trust their judgment; they are smart people who take care and attention in their work. Sure, we have governance boards who we ratify as having this capability, but I wonder if we should expand it beyond governance boards? While we should be conscious to not turn Ubuntu into an “old boy’s club”, I also think there is a huge opportunity to make our processes leaner and trust the judgment of people who we trust to have good judgment.

So what is my goal with this blog entry? I really have no fixed goal other than sharing some of my thoughts recently. This is something I want to have a discussion in the community about, and I welcome your (constructive) feedback and ideas. How can we create more experiences that feel personal, social, and like someone cares about your success in our community?

We have an absolutely rocking development platform in the Ubuntu, GNOME, KDE and Linux and world. Today I was chatting to some of the Severed Fifth Street Team folks and we were talking about how awesome a Severed Fifth Desktop App could be. Imagine an app that shows you recent news, pops up notification bubbles when new Severed Fifth tweets are posted, has a small in-built media player for playing Severed Fifth music easily, has an embedded IRC channel so you can meet the Severed Fifth community and more. This could be a super cool app for Street Team members and Severed Fifth fans to use.

I wrote some ideas for the app and while I would love to hack on it, all of my spare time is taken with rehearsing with the band and getting ready for the album.

As such, I wanted to put the call out to see if any of you would be interested in hacking on a Severed Fifth Desktop App.

See the post here and follow up there if interested – thanks in advance to everyone who helps!

2010 has been a great year for Severed Fifth and I am delighted with the growth in the project. Over the holiday I put together a 2010 Recapped video which summarizes this progress, the growth of the Severed Fifth Street Team, and more:

<embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/sjPNdYJMBAc?fs=1&hl=en_US&hd=1&color1=0×3a3a3a&color2=0×999999″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”630″ height=”480″”>

Can’t see the video? Click here!

Thanks to everyone who has participated and contributed their talents to helping us to change the music industry.

There is quite the buzz in the community about the new Compiz-driven Unity, and I know many of you are keen to play with it. Of course, do remember that it is incredibly early in the cycle and more things are likely to be broken than fixed as the transition is made. Some of you will be bummed out with the announcement that there will be no Maverick PPA for Unity, but fortunately, it is really easy to try Natty and Unity in a way that won’t involve sacrificing your current stable installation, or even touching your hard drive. You simply install and boot from a USB stick, and I wanted to share how to get this running.

NOTE: although Unity has now landed in Natty, some features such as the dash (the Ubuntu button) and the Applications/Files places have not landed yet. They should land ready for Alpha 2.

To do this you will need…wait for it…a USB stick! Get one with at least 2GB of space. Fortunately there are some pretty large USB sticks that are really cheap. In fact many are given out for free at conferences. Just sayin’…

Just follow these steps to get started:

Step 1: Download the latest Daily Natty image

Go to this page and download an ISO for your computer. It should be saved to the Downloads directory on your computer.

Step 2: Create the USB stick installation

Click Applications -> System -> Startup Disk Creater. It looks like this:

When you start the application, it will likely automatically find the ISO you downloaded, which is displayed in the top pane. If you don’t see it, click the Other button and go and select the ISO (typically in your Downloads/ directory in your home directory).

It is recommended you first erase your USB stick, so select it in the bottom pane and click the Erase Disk button. When this is complete, you can then use the slider underneath the Stored in reserved extra space slider to select how much disk space can be used for saving files, documents and other things. I personally move the slider all the way to the right to use the maximum space available.

Finally, click the Make Startup Disk button and Natty will be installed to your USB stick.

Step 3: Reboot

Now you need to boot from USB stick. To do this you may need to enter your BIOS to enable your computer to be able to boot from the USB stick. When this is enabled you will typically need to hit a button when you boot to see the BIOS’s boot menu (e.g. on my Thinkpad T400 it is F12) and then you can select the USB drive.

Ubuntu should boot and look and function the same as usual, apart from being much slower as you are running from the USB disk.

Step 4: Update

Although you installed the latest daily you should ensure it is up to date, and you can do this with:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Step 5: Test and Report Bugs

Although Natty is still very much in the early stages of development, we want to know when you experience bugs. If we don’t know about the bugs our community can’t fix them!

Many of you will be particularly interested in testing Unity, and we are really keen to hear about bugs and problems in Unity. Filing a bug is simple. Just open a terminal and run:

ubuntu-bug unity

The ubuntu-bug program zips up some debugging data from your system and will then fire up a page in your browser where you can enter a bug report. This will then provide details of the problem to the Unity developers to help fix the bug.

Before I go on, a few clarifications. Firstly, this blog post represents the views of me, myself, and I, and not the views of Canonical or the Ubuntu project. Secondly, throughout this blog entry when I say “community” I am referring to the wider Open Source and Free Software community, and not the Ubuntu community specifically.

The last week has been pretty intense. Many of you will have seen the discussion surrounding OpenRespect and the different write-ups, comments, and views expressed about it. While I expected OpenRespect to get some attention, I never expected the sheer level of attention it has received, and today I have been reflecting on it all and wanted to share some conclusions.

While I feel OpenRespect has raised some important points and people have shared some constructive feedback, I have made some mistakes, and I have always believed that mistakes deserve sincere apologies. I started OpenRespect with the best intentions and out of a love for our community and maintaining pleasant and healthy discourse, but honesty goes both ways, both in intent, and in putting your hands up when you screw the pooch and get something wrong. Let me re-cap the story so far.

The Back Story

Over the last few years I have been picking up on increasing levels of snarky, unconstructively critical, bickering and name-calling in our community; this is not just people having different views — differences in opinion and views are how we grow and learn — I am instead referring to the conduct in which these views are expressed. In addition to this, many community members would talk to me about this conduct and how it makes their Open Source and Free Software experience less enjoyable. Over the years I have also been privy to people who have left our community because they were tired of this conduct; good hackers and good contributors who just didn’t want to put up with back-biting any more.

Over the years I have taken a pretty calm approach to all of this, and I have always tried to be a calming voice to others who have experienced this disrespectful conduct and felt exasperated by it. I have tried to reassure these folks that when this snarky, unconstructively critical bickering is in full swing, just try and remember the bigger mission and importance of bringing freedom to people. My response has often been “there are good and bad days in the revolution” to help them focus on the bigger picture that we are all working towards. We are all doing great work here, in whichever way we choose to contribute to our wider Open Source and Free Software community.

But as time went on I had become more and more conflicted over all of this. I love this community. I have seen some of the most wonderful acts of human decency and sharing happen in our in community. I have seen countless people volunteer time away from their families and friends to help participate in something they care about. As far as I am concerned where people contribute doesnt matter, be it Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuSE, GNOME, KDE, Linux…wherever…the point is that they feel a personal sense of empowerment that ultimately benefits the project they choose to join. I would then find it heartbreaking that these good people with the best intentions would get riled in disrespectful conduct from others, some of whom would offer little other than commentary from the peanut gallery.

I have always felt a personal sense that I need to do something about this. I appreciate and understand that I am seen as a leader in some parts of the community, and I believe that leaders have a responsibility and often have an increased chance at bringing change in dealing with risks to the health of our community. The challenge is that this is not a tractable problem: it is not something we can make a blueprint for, agree on some work items, and fix. It is a cultural problem, so how do we resolve it?

An Idea Of What To Do

A little while back I shared some of these concerns about these issues and that I was conflicted about what I could do to help. My initial idea was inspired by the Ubuntu Code Of Conduct to write a statement that reminds us all of some of the common elements in polite discourse and discussion. The Ubuntu Code Of Conduct has been a surprisingly effective tool in setting expectations around conduct in Ubuntu, and the majority of discussions in the Ubuntu community do indeed respect the attributes of the Code Of Conduct.

I shared this idea of a statement with two friends of mine who are also leaders in other projects, Stefano Zacchiroli the current Debian Project Leader and Jared K. Smith the current Fedora Project Leader, and I mentioned this in my original blog entry:

“Over the last two or three weeks I have been kicking around the idea of putting together some kind of statement, inspired by the Ubuntu Code Of Conduct, that many of us could put our names behind. In fact, I registered openrespect.org and started putting together a draft. I shared this idea with Stefano Zacchiroli the current Debian Project Leader and Jared K. Smith the current Fedora Project Leader, two guys who I have unending levels of respect in their viewpoints. They thought it was a pretty good idea to have a statement, and were happy to participate”.

Later in that blog entry I mentioned that I felt less and less comfortable putting the statement I had prepared online and in an official capacity as a specific project, and so shared the statement in the blog entry instead. Shortly after there was a series of public and private comments in support of the idea, as well as some feedback and criticisms.

In a fit of inspiration, and feeling that this positive feedback may suggest that I may be able to help with this non-tractable problem, and knowing full well that I didn’t have much time to go through a more lengthy back and forth process with Stefano and Jared to get a text that represents the full community (which would likely result in ire from others who were not involved who disagree with the statement anyway), I put the statement (with a few suggestions from others from original blog entry) up on openrespect.org and announced it. I made it clear that the the statement was my take on respect.

Since then there has been multiple articles in the press, blog entries, and lots of comments, and a really divided mix of opinion on OpenRespect. Many have expressed that they feel OpenRespect is an important and worthwhile effort, and many have criticized it for various reasons.

Some of the criticisms I think have been reasonable, and some less so, and while I have sought to clarify areas of concern, some of these clarifications have been either missed or some cases ignored. Before I go on, I want to tend to these criticisms and set the record straight:

• “you said Stefano and Jared supported the idea, but you didn’t consult their input” – I screwed up here, and I certainly could have handled this much better. While I specified that Stefano and Jared were supportive of the idea of a statement, which they were, my mentioning this in the blog entry (as quoted above) inferred their support for a statement that they were not involved in the production of. I have apologized to both Stefano and Jared about this, and I want to offer my sincerest public apologies too. I didn’t mean to infer they supported the statement, but instead the idea, but I appreciate that it didn’t come across that way. I am an idiot sometimes, and this is a good example.
• “you are doing this because Canonical wants to shield Ubuntu of criticism” – let me be 100% clear about this: neither Canonical, the Ubuntu Community Council, the Ubuntu Technical Board, Mark Shuttleworth, Jane Silber, my manager, nor any other entity inside Canonical or Ubuntu asked me to work on OpenRespect, and I have not sought to suggest that it is a product of either Canonical or Ubuntu. I don’t deny that some of the disrespectful criticism that I have seen leveled at Canonical and Ubuntu will have partially inspired OpenRespect, but it is not designed for Ubuntu and Canonical; the real inspiration is the disrespectful discourse I have seen throughout the wider Open Source and Free Software community.
• “you hypocrite! LugRadio was disrespectful!” – I can understand how some may say this, but there are few thoughts here. Firstly, when we did LugRadio, we were all younger, stupider, and we bathed all of our content in LugRadio in satirical and entertainment value. At the time we ruffled some feathers, and that was part of the appeal of the show, but sometimes we did inadvertently take it too to far. Sometimes we were disrespectful, and frankly, sometimes we were also inadvertently assholes. We never set out to be assholes, but we did set out to be edgy in a satirical way, but we sometimes went too far and I apologize for that. But you know what, we all grow and mature in different parts of our lives. The Jono Bacon in LugRadio and the Jono Bacon today are two different people. My growth in my career, getting older, getting married, and just understanding the world and reflecting on my previous experiences, have all helped to mature me, and I know this has happened to the other LugRadio presenters too.

I hope this tends to main criticisms applied to OpenRespect. I am sure others will find further faults and disagreements in the project, and I am happy to deal with them where I can.

Moving Forward

So where do we stand today after all the articles, the blogs, the comments, and the opinion? I still believe this is an important problem for us to solve. In my 12 years in Open Source and Free Software I have found it the most rewarding and invigorating time of my life, and I get so pumped up when I see people join our community and feel that incredible sense of empowerment and excitement. I remember when I first got involved feeling this intoxicating sense of opportunity that I could contribute to almost any part of our community, and even if I didn’t possess the skills to do, there were always people who were kind enough to help me learn. When I started I knew nothing about Linux or Operating Systems, all I knew was that this community thing was cool and maybe, just maybe, I could help make a difference too.

I love this community and I love this sense of empowerment, and it really pains me when I see the snarky, unconstructively critical, bickering and name-calling. I want everyone, irrespective of which project they join, to have the best possible experience with our community. This is why I have taken an interest in sharing my experiences in my writings and book, and encouraging community leaders to get together at an event I and some friends organize each year. No-one gets a monopoly on community, and we can all share and learn together to make it better for everyone.

OpenRespect was an effort forged with the best intentions in the world of encouraging us all to have polite, constructive and respectful discussions. As I have said before, I never want to dissuade the act of sharing disagreements and sharing different opinions and approaches, but I do believe that all discussion and debate should be on a firm footing of respect and polite discussion.

Now, maybe OpenRespect is not the best solution to the problem, some would argue it isn’t, and some would argue that just a statement is ineffective anyway. I am not suggesting OpenRespect is the only solution to the problem, and I would love to hear other tractable suggestions for how we can improve and avoid disrespectful conduct. A good example came from Jef Spaleta who suggested maybe we need a set of suggestions or guide for how people express concerns or criticism of decisions or policies in a project in a way that is respectful and constructive. I think this is a wonderful idea.

As I wrap this War And Peace sized collection of personal blatherings I do believe that this is still an important problem for us to solve, and we all have the ability to contribute to making our community a cordial and pleasant place by just being cordial and pleasant ourselves. Sure, there will always be trolls, but those people often get bored and move on eventually. Some of us will also get things wrong sometimes and accidentally take things too far, I am as guilty as anyone for doing this, but those experiences are always a good opportunity to apologize and move on. Unfortunately I am back in the position I was at the start of this story: I feel a need and a responsibility to do something to help out, but I am not sure what to do.

Finally, I want to again apologize to Stefano and Jared for idiocy on my part, and to also thank everyone who did participate with respect and constructive feedback in the discussions surrounding this topic.

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.

I am pleased to announce that the proceedings from the recent Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando, Florida are now available.

This set of proceedings summarizes many of the key decisions made at UDS in the tracks. Please remember a few caveats though:

• These are plans. Many of these plans will reach fruition, but some won’t. That is the nature of community contributions, but many of these plans are planned and scoped work that Canonical stuff are expected to deliver.
• UDS has a huge amount of activity and these proceedings don’t summarize every decision that was made.

Thanks to everyone who took notes, and thanks to the track leads for helping me make the content more digestable in the form of the proceedings.

READ THE PROCEEDINGS HERE.

The Ubuntu Desktop Team are looking for an engineer to make LibreOffice rock in Ubuntu. The role is described as:

We are seeking a Software Engineer to play a key development and integration role on the Ubuntu Desktop Team – one of the technical teams that makes up the Ubuntu Platform Team. As part of the core Ubuntu team, the Engineer will work on a broad range of technical tasks: including feature planning, packaging, integration,bug-fixing and maintenance. The successful candidate will ensure a first class user experience by envisioning new desktop integration features for office productivity, packaging, desktop integration, bug fixing and development of office productivity related software such as Open Office. Strong communication and relationship skills are as important as superb technical skills in this role, as the successful candidate will be responsible for process communication and coordination between Ubuntu and external partners, as well as ensuring commonality of purpose and technical approach. This job involves international travel several times a year, usually for one week.

The Desktop Team is awesome team to join at Canonical, and if you would like to ensure the office productivity experience in Ubuntu is rocking, be sure to check out the job description and apply if you think you would be right for the role.

I am just sending the message on, so don’t ask me queries about the role – feel free to ask the hiring manager, Jason Warner, who is jasoncwarner on #ubuntu-desktop on freenode IRC.

Good luck!

I remember when I first got involved in Linux and Free Software, the Linux desktop was a pretty ugly place. Much of the reason for this was that getting a graphical display running was in itself a bit of a luxury, and one earned with lots of config file hacking and poking. When you did manage to get it up and running it looked a little like this:

Today things are really quite different. I was thinking about this sheer change in desktop quality, and felt an incredible urge to share the reasons why I love my desktop and love the integration. All of this is based on a default Ubuntu 10.04 Maverick Meerkat installation with Unity enabled as the desktop. You can switch on Unity with:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install unity

…and then at the login screen select Ubuntu Netbook from the list of available sessions. Rock and roll!

Unity

I am really digging Unity. While still quite new and still maturing, I find it’s current form really sleek and easy to use. I like the design and the structure of how I get at my apps, my data, and control what is going on on my desktop:

One element of Unity that I really enjoy is the theme and the new Ubuntu font. It really gives the desktop a subtle sheen, and the dark theme makes it look slick and sexy.

One key feature of Unity that is going to become an increasingly big deal is the Places API:

Unity provides a consistent user interface for displaying different types of content (such as files and applications), but this extendable. Neil Patel who is one of the lead Unity hackers has already created an example of this work which plugs YouTube in, and it is great to see this kind of content embedded into the experience. I can’t wait to see how application authors will use this technology to provide better access to content, all using this consistent user interface.

As many of you know, Unity will be switched on by default in Ubuntu 11.04, and the performance and accessibility issues are currently being tended to. For more details see this blog post.

Microblogging

Microblogging has become all the craze over the last few years, and Twitter, Facebook, identi.ca, and others have all made the micro-blogging experience simple and useful. I love the micro-blogging support built right into my desktop, firstly with Gwibber:

Gwibber is an awesome micro-blogging tool. It provides simple and quick access to see all of my accounts together, helps me see a standard set of searches that I care about, and lets me tweet once and have the message go to all of my accounts.

In addition to this I love how I can tweet right from my desktop with the Me Menu:

This is how it should be: when the thought or inspiration takes me, I always have a quick interface for tweeting, irrespective of what I am doing, because it is built into the shell of the desktop. Rock and roll!

Indicators

Speaking of indicators, I use the indicators all the time. In particular, I find the Messaging Menu really useful:

It is incredibly handy having all the things that need my attention to appear in the same place, all neatly packed into that menu, and when it lights up I know I need to check it.

In addition to this, the recent addition of the Sound Menu enhancements are awesome:

Like many, I put music on during the day when I work, and typically the only things I need to with it are use the transport controls (e.g. to fast forward, replay, or pause a song), or more often than not, see which artist/album is currently playing if I have it on shuffle. No longer do I need to keep showing the Rhythmbox window to do this; it is right there in my sound menu. Really handy.

Rhythmbox

Speaking of Rhythmbox, I love it to bits:

Rhythmbox lets me manage my music collection easily, and has lots of nice features to really enjoy the music I listen to.

Sure, we are moving to Banshee in 11.04, but I love that too – I think we have such great choice in the media player world. One thing I really love about Rhythmbox is that I can enable the DAAP plugin and I can control and listen to my songs via my Playstation 3 and hear my tunes on our home theater system. Much better than laptop speakers, and a doddle to do this.

Evolution

Like many of you, email is at the center of my life, and I find Evolution serves me really well:

A lot of people talk a lot of smack about Evolution, but I think the Evo team have done a great job. I get a lot of mail, and Evolution helps me set up filters to prioritize how I see, respond to, and manage my mail. What’s more, it integrates nicely into my desktop, and integrates perfectly in the Messaging Menu.

Empathy

Instant messaging is a common thing I use my desktop for, and again this is all perfectly handled with Empathy:

I love how Empathy brings all my messaging accounts together and provides the same interface for interacting with my friends. It looks beautiful, works smoothly, and is a pleasurable experience.

Getting More Software

I have also been delighted to see how the experience of getting more software has been refined with the Ubuntu Software Center:

We have always had this incredible catalog of software available for Ubuntu, but now it is finally becoming more accessible for new users. This will also becomes infinitely more useful when ratings and reviews land in the Ubuntu 10.10 release – this will help all the really great software bubble to the surface!

In Conclusion

In addition to my Ubuntu machines, I have a Windows 7 machine that powers my home studio. When I compare and contrast my Ubuntu installation with Windows 7, it feels like Ubuntu is much better attuned to what most users want – awesome web browsing, email, communications, media playback and production, and a consistent, attractive experience.

I think we should all be hugely proud of how far we have come with the Linux desktop, and I am intensely proud of how slick and integrated Ubuntu is, and the impact the design team has had on the experience. I would love to hear why others love their desktops too, do share!

Another quick update. The website now has a little more content, I have started adding some support resources for dealing with conflict and disrespect, and you can help spread the word that OpenRespect is a good thing with some rather nice buttons.

Recently I blogged about some concerns that I have had about increasing disrespect in the Open Source, Free Software, and Free Culture communities. My blog entry shared some of the work I started on an OpenRespect Declaration, but I wasn’t sure if I should publish it.

I did some thinking on this, and reviewed some of the fantastic comments on my blog, and I decided to go ahead and launch openrespect.org. There I have listed the declaration with a few extra points about:

• the importance of honesty (thanks Jef Spaleta for the suggestion)
• the importance of remembering that people pour their heart and soul into their work

The site is pretty simple, and pretty minimal, so don’t expect a rip-roaring experience there, but it gets over the most important point – the OpenRespect Declaration.

In my spare time I plan on adding some additional materials there — tips and suggestions about keeping conversation respectful, and how to deal with disrespectful folks — so if anyone would like to propose some content, just drop me an email.

Before I wrap, I just want to offer a few notes to bear in mind regarding openrespect.org:

• this is not specific to the communities I am part of, but designed to apply to any community.
• this is not a United Nations declaration, it is not necessarily representative of what the entire Open Source and Free Software community, it is representative of what I feel is a fair set of guidelines around respect. Don’t like it? No worries, ignore it!
• I don’t plan on turning openrespect.org into a mission; I am too busy and pre-occupied with other things, but I felt I needed to do something – this is a start, and I hope can grow the site to be more useful as time goes on.
• this won’t solve all the problems, but it is a start, and if helps just one conversation be more respectful, it was was worth the minimal amount of effort that I put into kicking this off.

If you think openrespect.org is a good idea and would like to help, I would just encourage you to encourage people to read it, encourage your projects to be inspired by it, and otherwise spread the word. I would also like to encourage all of you who think the OpenRespect Declaration makes sense to blog it, dent it, tweet it etc to spread awareness.

Thanks, everyone for providing constructive feedback on the idea.

I just wanted to say a quick congratulations to our friends in the Fedora Community for their work on Fedora 14 which was released today! The Fedora team have been putting out some great releases, so congrats to the community for all their hard work! Time for a few glasses of something cold and frothy to celebrate!

You can download Fedora 14 here.