At the heart of the Ubuntu Accomplishments system is the idea that you can read documentation in your own language about how to participate in different parts of the community. The motivation here is to provide plenty of help and guidance of how to participate so it makes the Ubuntu experience easier, more fun, and more rewarding.

The idea is simple: each accomplishment outlines a new skill or method of contribution and the user can double-click on it to learn more about how to participate. This puts help, instructions for what to do, links to further reading, and places to find help at the finger-tips of everyone.

This weekend I built translations support for this documentation into Ubuntu Accomplishments and I wanted to reach out to our wonderful translations community and everyone else to ask for help in providing this documentation. Fortunately this is as simple as contributing some text to a web page.

Not just a translation

Importantly, this is not just about word-for-word translation from English to another language, but instead providing awesome documentation designed for people who speak your native language.

As an example, every accomplishment has a Summary section which provides an introduction to the accomplishment, what is involved, and what the jargon means. Feel free to write the most detailed explanation you like in your language, even if the original English version is quite short. The English translation is provided as an example: feel free to improve on the summary in your own language.

Another good example are the Links and Help resources: the original English ones will be English resources – feel free to provide resources and links that are native to your language.

I want to encourage you all to help make the documentation for your language the best possible documentation for new users (e.g. “e.g. our French documentation is the most complete of any of the languages!“).

How to contribute

Contributing is really simple. Just follow these steps:

First, go to https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu-community-accomplishments/trunk.

When you go there you might see some languages listed below like this:

If you don’t or would like to select another language, click the Change your preferred languages link and select the languages you want to translate in to. Those languages will now appear like the ones above. The colored bar shows what proportion of the accomplishments are translated (green) and what are not (red).

Now click one of the languages (e.g. if I click on English (United Kingdom)) and you will see the list of things you can translate. Here is an example of one:

The translation of Ubuntu Accomplishments works a little differently. You should IGNORE the English line at the top (e.g. where it says member-loco-team_description) and instead look at the documentation just below. There it tells you which accomplishment you are editing and what the original English translation is. In the above image you can see we are writing German documentation, the accomplishment is ‘LoCo Team Member’ and this specific field in the accomplishment documentation is ‘steps’. More the different fields below.

You can now type your own language’s documentation into the New translation box. For the larger chunks of text you can use the grey button at the end of the New translation box to make the text entry bigger.

If there is already a translation there and you want to edit and improve it, click the Current <language> translation button and the text will be copied to the edit box where you can edit it.

Now click the Save button at the bottom of the page to save your contributions. Sometimes you have to scroll to the right to see the Save button due to some of the long chunks of the text on the page.

Thanks for making Ubuntu easier and more fun to participate in for our community!

Each accomplishment file has the following documentation you can add:

• Title – the name of the accomplishment (this should be a very short piece of text…it appears under the accomplishment icons).
• Description – a single-line description of what the accomplishment performs.
• Summary – a series of paragraphs that introduce the accomplishment, explain some of the jargon (e.g. explaining what a “bug” is), and what is involved in accomplishing this trophy. Always assume the user is quite new when writing this content. You should put each paragraph on a new line in the edit box.
• Steps – this is a set of instructions that the user can follow to achieve the accomplishment. Don’t include numbers or bullet points and put each step on a new line.
• Tips – these are a set of tips and tricks that you can recommend to help the user be successful in achieving the accomplishment. Put each tip on a new line and dont include any numbers or bullet points.
• Pitfalls – these are a set of pitfalls and things the user should avoid when working to achieve the accomplishment. Put each pitfall on a new line and dont include any numbers or bullet points.
• Links – a series of web address to further documentation (feel free to add links that are specific to your language). Put each link on a new line.
• Help – this is a set of place where the user can find help. Feel free to include IRC channels, website, or other resources and feel free to use resources in your language. Put each resource on a new line.

Quick FAQ

How can participate here?
Everyone! Everyone is welcome to help.

Do I have to be in an approved translation team to help?
No, everyone can participate.

There are no translations for a language I am interested in. Can I start translating it?
Sure! Go right ahead!

If I contribute a translation and the original English translation has a typo fix or other change, will I lose my contribution in my language?
Nope. The system has been designed so that your contribution to a particular field will not be lost.

How do I search for a particular accomplishment to edit?
When viewing the translatable items for a language, use the Search box in the top right-hand corner.

Why don’t you show the English translation in the actual ‘English’ field?
There are various technical reasons around being able to use Launchpad to translate accomplishments that mean’t I had to put the translation below in the comments.

Any more questions? Feel free to ask in the comments or join the mailing list!

It has been a few weeks since I last posted an update about the Ubuntu Accomplishments project. As such I wanted to take a few moments to update you lovely people with some of the progress being made in the project and show off some juicy screenshots too.

Let’s take a look at the eye-candy first and then I will get to the big changes. Firstly, I created a nicer looking icon for the GUI and a desktop file ready for when we package:

Next, Rafal Cieslak is a new contributor who has been doing some fantastic work. Rafal added support so that you can start the GUI without having to run the daemon first:

Rafal also added support so that you can click on accomplished trophies and some information is displayed about them:

Next up, inspired by the awesome Hello Unity by our very own Michael Hall, I added Launcher support for the GUI. Now when a new trophy is awarded to you the Launcher icon shakes to get your attention and displays the number of freshly awarded trophies to you:

Our final screenshot is thanks to the great work of Alessandro Losavio and the wonderful Italian Ubuntu community. Alessandro has created a collection of Italian accomplishments, complete with Italian documentation and custom icons. You can see this below:

Thanks also to Simon Watson for making the My Trophies and Opportunities buttons depress; this makes it much easier to know which view you are looking at.

There has also been a number of large structural changes going on as the project is maturing. Firstly, the backend service is now a full twistd application. This means it runs as a full daemon, starts and shuts down properly, and is properly logging events. This piece was an important part of getting the back-end service ready so we can deploy it on systems for testing. Thanks to Duncan McGreggor for his wonderful work in helping to make this happen.

Another important milestone, and one that I completed tonight, was adding support for multiple languages in accomplishment sets. The Ubuntu Accomplishments system can support accomplishments from any online or offline community or project and I wanted to ensure that the documentation that explains how an accomplishment can be completed is available in your own language. This is important not only to support different languages but to also be able to provide language and country specific resources (e.g. websites and IRC support channels). This is now in there and working pretty well. I will posting more in a few days to encourage our translations community to get involved and translate the accomplishments sets.

Following on from multiple language support inside the system itself, there has been a lot of activity going in the Ubuntu Accomplishments Web Editor project. The Web Editor project is designed to make it easy for our community to contribute documentation for available accomplishments, and part of this goal is to also enable translations via the web editor. This will feed into the multiple language support that I added tonight. Thanks to Janos Gyerik for driving this discussion forward and Bruno Girin for bringing his expertise to the fold too. We definitely need Django developers to help with this project, so if you are interested, please join the mailing list and help.

Finally, I want to offer my thanks to Matt Fischer for stepping up to help with packaging Ubuntu Accomplishments. He has already created a Daily PPA for the Ubuntu Community Accomplishments set, and Matt is now working to get the core system packaged too so that you folks can play with it, test it, participate, and file bugs.

Interested in joining the team and helping? We need all kinds of help…documentation writers, programmers, translators, web developers, and testers! To get involved join the mailing list and introduce yourself, join #ubuntu-accomplishments on Freenode IRC, and be sure to see the Wiki Homepage. Thanks!.

Here we are, just a matter of weeks away from the Ubuntu 12.04 release on 26th April 2012, and what a cycle it has been.

Ubuntu 12.04 is a release that has been talked about within the Ubuntu community for quite some time. It marks our next Long Term Support (LTS) release, an important milestone for Ubuntu deployment in business, education and elsewhere, and an important checkpoint in delivering precision and quality in Ubuntu.

Unlike previous LTS releases, Ubuntu 12.04 had a different history leading to it. In it’s preceding releases we had brought Unity in as the default desktop shell, and there had been some consternation about the design and quality of Unity and other elements of Ubuntu. Some of this criticism was deserved, and some was not. Throughout the 11.04 and 11.10 releases we were trying to get a balance in something that has always challenged software; the balance of innovation and quality.

While Unity was a disruptive technology, I believe it was important for the future of Ubuntu. The introduction of Unity was not just a new software component, it was an evolution of of the Ubuntu ethos: Linux For Human Beings.

Eyes On The Prize

I see a lot of talk in our wider community about Free Software and the various ethical opinions of it. I am sure you folks have seen the discussions too, debating the freeness of this license verses that one, the freeness of Ubuntu One, the freeness of various kernel components, where Ubuntu stacks up compared to other distributions in terms of these software freedoms and more. There are then the debates about what being a good Free Software citizen means, whether we refer to ‘Linux’ enough on our website, how much upstream development Canonical contributes, whether we work on existing upstreams, and the rationale around why we would dare to challenge the norm with such contributions as Unity.

These are all valuable debates, and if Linux and Free Software is your hobby they can be an entertaining way to spend an evening.

This is how I like to spend an evening.

Speaking personally, I think these debates sometimes dwell too much on which nuts and bolts we are using rather than how we build a more effective machine. They are important and valuable discussions, and they often do improve the Free Software machine, but sometimes they get a little too introspective and shoe-gazey. What really interests me and what was my primary attraction to Free Software when I first got involved in 1998 is how a collaborative community and Free Software can break down the digital divide and open up technology for everyone.

I think we would all agree that this is an important goal, but for this to happen our technology needs to be usable and accessible to all. Many of the core Ubuntu values speak to this; Ubuntu available freely, in your language, and available to all users regardless of disability. We don’t make technology accessible to all by just making great software though. We need to create great and memorable experiences that empower our users.

Traditionally the Free Software development model has been succinctly described as scratching your own itch. This approach works well: if you have the technical chops and want to see your computer work in a certain way to meet your needs, you can get the Free Software code and adjust it to work for you and deliver your requirements. If you then contribute your work to others, everyone benefits. Winner.

Sometimes the fruits of my sharing are not really worth sharing.

The challenge with the scratch your own itch philosophy is that it can sometimes produce fairly one-dimensional software that purely meets the needs of those who created it. As a part-time developer myself, I always start out writing programs that meet my own needs. As my programs mature though, the greatest improvements in my software has been when others have challenged the presumptions that I made as I created the software to meet my own needs. It helps my software grow, be more accessible, and more interesting to people not like me, and that is tremendously rewarding.

When Ubuntu was founded, one of it’s core principles was to build something that just works. As a vision, I believe that the introduction of the various Unity components, the messaging menu, notify-osd, application indicators etc, continued this philosophy. The goal was to build a simple, easy to use, elegant, Free Software Operating System that continues the evolution of Linux For Human Beings.

Of course, while the vision and design was evolving, there was both a technical and cultural chasm that we needed to cross. From a technical perspective Unity suffered from various quality issues; first performance, then stability, and finally rubbing off the rough edges in the design. From a cultural perspective the move to Unity was controversial. While it excited many, it also alienated some members of our community who felt uncomfortable with Ubuntu heading in this direction. I place no judgment or criticism at the feet of any of these folks; everyone has their own Free Software vision and story to tell, and we can’t please all the people all the time. I am confident we are now over the most challenging aspects of this cultural adjustment.

Ubuntu 12.04

Now this brings us to 12.04. Before this cycle kicked off we started making significant plans around meeting our quality responsibilities. Together we restructured QA in the Ubuntu Engineering team in Canonical, hired Nick Skaggs to grow our QA community, put in place acceptance criteria, built automated testing farms, developed manual testing plans for different milestones, and various other efforts. I believe that you can feel the quality in 12.04 far more than in the last few releases, and we are not finished yet. 12.10 is going to see more and more focus on quality and to ensure Ubuntu delivers a rock solid experience.

Going back to 1998 when I first got involved in Free Software, I always dreamed of the potential of a Free Software experience that is simple and effective to use by everyone.

Me in 1998. Sorry.

Spin forward to 2012 and I believe that Ubuntu 12.04 is shaping up to be a solid contender in continuing to break down the digital divide and bring a stable, simple, effective, and powerful experience for everyone, whether you are Martin Pitt (Ubuntu super-hero) or Martin Bacon (my brother who doesn’t care about his computer, just the experiences it can deliver).

Of course, Ubuntu 12.04 is not perfect; nothing is. There will be some bugs, and there will be some things that won’t please some users. Despite some of these elements though I do feel it offers a wonderfully integrated, slick, and fun experience. Sometimes I think it is important to just take a step back and look at what we created.

…and we as a community really came together to create Ubuntu 12.04. Whether you fixed bugs in packages, created features, filed bugs, translated Ubuntu, contributed art and design input, supported our users on the Ubuntu Forums and Ask Ubuntu, wrote documentation for the features, contributed news to our various websites, introduced Ubuntu to members of your local community or anything else, you should feel as proud as I do about Ubuntu 12.04 and how it is shaping up.

Thankyou to every one of you for being part of Ubuntu; you make it a pleasure every day.

A little while back I created the following video that outlines many of the technologies available in Unity that your apps can neatly integrate with:

Can’t see the video? See it here!

Thanks to the wonderful work of Michael Hall and David Planella, see the developer documentation and tutorials for how to get started integrating these technologies into your app by clicking here.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments!

Are you a web developer who uses Django to build web apps?

We are looking for a developer to contribute to the Ubuntu Accomplishments editor to help make it easy for people to contribute documentation for accomplishments across the community, Ubuntu desktop, and elsewhere. I started working on this, but I need to focus my time on the core system so I am looking for folks who might be interested in helping with this.

The first cut, but we need your help!

I have documented much of this into a spec which you can find here and you can also get the implementation I started putting together at:

lp:~jonobacon/ubuntu-accomplishments-system/accomplishments-web-editor

If you are interested in helping, either get in touch with me at jono AT ubuntu DOT com or feel free to join the mailing list. Thanks!

Sorry, folks, I forgot to blog these.

See the notes from today’s team meeting.

Speaking of the Ubuntu Global Jam, if you are in Northern California, you should come and hangout with us fun Ubuntu folks in sunny, beautiful, Walnut Creek on Fri 2nd March 2012 at Caffe La Scala in Walnut Creek.

What will we be doing? Hanging out, working on Ubuntu, sharing tips, tricks and other ideas, and helping to make Ubuntu 12.04 even better. Everyone is welcome, everyone can help (no matter what your experience, technical knowledge, or familiarity with Ubuntu), and everyone can have a fun time meeting new folks and enjoying Ubuntu…all within this really rather awesome little coffee shop.

It is easy to get to from BArt (Walnut Creek station), plenty of parking nearby, and great coffee.

All the details can be found right here.

Hope to see you there!

This weekend is the Ubuntu Global Jam happening all over the world with 31 LoCo Teams participating across 22 countries. Be sure to find an event near you!

Much of the fun of an Ubuntu Global Jam event is keeping up to date with what is going on around the world and knowing things that you can do at your event to help Ubuntu.

With this in mind we have put together a handy little dashboard:

Access the dashboard at http://loco.ubuntu.com/events/globaljam/dashboard/

The dashboard has a number of cool features:

• A list of fun tasks you can work on to help Ubuntu 12.04. This covers a range of different topics and there is something for everyone!
• A built in chat window so you can chat to other Ubuntu community fans all over the world and see what is going on at their jams.
• A Twitter/identi.ca stream that shows the latest tweets and dents with the #ubuntu hashtag. Be sure to tweet and dent throughout the weekend about what you are doing.
• A regularly updating collection of photos from flickr, picasa, and pix.ie that are tagged with #ubuntu. Be sure to take plenty of pictures, put them online and tag them!

Thanks to Michael Hall and daker for their efforts on the dashboard, and thanks to Charles Profitt, Randal Ross, Laura Czajkowski, Benjamin Kerensa, Daniel Holbach, David Planella, Jorge Castro, and many others for helping to promote and raise aware of the Ubuntu Global Jam. Have an awesome weekend, folks, and thanks for contributing to Ubuntu!

Nick has a call open for manual tests that we can include with the Ubuntu 12.04 Beta 1 testing that will kick off on Thursday. We really want to throw open the doors to a wide testing campaign to ensure quality for 12.04 but we need your help writing manual tests for:

• firefox
• rythmnbox
• empathy
• thunderbird
• nautilus
• libreoffice
• software-center
• system-settings
• deja-dup
• totem
• evince
• file-roller
• gedit
• eog
• gwibber
• seahorse
• ubuntuone
• update-manager
• shotwell

If you have never written a manual test for Checkbox before, fortunately it is simple and Nick has all the guidance you need.

See his blog post here for how to get started and please get involved ASAP; Beta 1 is this Thursday so we want to get a good set of tests created ASAP. Thanks, everyone!

Recently I have been working on the Ubuntu Accomplishments system and at the heart of the system is the ability to be able to detect if someone has successfully completed various tasks in the community. We can also provide guidance and recommendations for how to get started with new tasks in the community; this will help people be able to explore our community more easily.

I have brainstormed a list of potential accomplishments we could write scripts to detect on this wiki page but I wanted to ask if any launchpadlib expertt can contributed some guidance for how I would get started writing these scripts.

I have also included other accomplishments outside of Launchpad (e.g. loco.ubuntu.com and summit.ubuntu.com related topics), so if those of you familiar with sites could offer any guidance, that would be great. Thanks!

Here is the wiki page gathering this advice.

Ubuntu 12.04 is going to be an awesome release, but we are asking our community to download the current daily development release, test it out, and file bugs to let us know where the defects are. This will then help our developers to resolve the problems ready for the final release.

Fortunately, filing a bug is dead simple. Below is a quick tutorial video that I put together to explain how:

Can’t see it? See the video here!.

I would like to encourage you all to test Ubuntu 12.04 (you can run it from a USB stick and boot into if you don’t want to install on your computer), and be sure to file bugs for any problems that you see. Let’s all come together as a community to test, and this is a great thing to do next weekend at the Ubuntu Global Jam!

Any questions? Feel free to ask in the comments!

Just a quick reminder that in the next 30 mins I will be running a video Q+A session to explain how you can organize an Ubuntu Global Jam event next weekend.

My videocast will be at:

• 11am Pacific / 2pm Europe / 7pm UTC/UK / 8pm CET – watch live here!

Be sure to bring your questions! If you want to ask a question, you will need to register on ustream.tv first; this is free and simple to do though.

Another great place to ask questions is Ask Ubuntu!

For more information on the Ubuntu Global Jam, see the video:

Can’t see it? See it here!

Find out more on the Ubuntu Global Jam website!

Are you in the San Francisco Bay Area? Would you like to meet some fun Ubuntu folks and hang out with them on a Friday in sunny, beautiful Walnut Creek?

Ditto.

This is why you should come and hangout with us fun Ubuntu folks in sunny, beautiful, Walnut Creek on Fri 2nd March 2012 at Caffe La Scala in Walnut Creek.

What will we be doing? Hanging out, working on Ubuntu, sharing tips, tricks and other ideas, and helping to make Ubuntu 12.04 even better. Everyone is welcome, everyone can help (no matter what your experience, technical knowledge, or familiarity with Ubuntu), and everyone can have a fun time meeting new folks and enjoying Ubuntu…all within this really rather awesome little coffee shop.

It is easy to get to from BArt (Walnut Creek station), plenty of parking nearby, and great coffee.

All the details can be found right here.

Not near Walnut Creek? No worries, find an Ubuntu Global Event near you or why not organize one?

I would like to open up Ubuntu Accomplishments to a little wider testing. Please note a few caveats:

• You need to be running Ubuntu 12.04 to test this.
• This is still a work in progress; there will be bugs.

Please follow the instructions at here for how to install. If you have questions feel free to ping me on IRC (I am jono and I am around in #ubuntu-community-team most of the time).

If you find a bug (and you probably will!), the bug will either be in software itself or one of the accomplishments. Please file bugs using the following links:

• Bugs in the daemon and app – file bugs here
• Bugs in the Ubuntu Accomplishments set – file bugs here

If you are unsure, just file bugs here.

There is a lot of work going on each day on this, so please be sure to update your branches each day (until we start releasing packages). You can do this with:

cd ubuntu-accomplishments-system
bzr pull

cd ubuntu-community-accomplishments
bzr pull

Thanks!

Writing Accomplishments – Volunteers Needed!

There are only a few accomplishments available in the system right now. The goal here is that accomplishments should be about new experiences. I would like to avoid things such as “50 posts to a bug report” or “500 posts to a forum“; those could be achieved by repeating meaningless content to get the numbers up. I would rather focus on new experiences such as “I have become an Ubuntu Member“, or “I got my first uploaded accepted“.

Writing accomplishments just requires a little knowledge of launchpadlib and Python for Ubuntu Accomplishments, or you can write accomplishments for other projects where you can query a web service.

If you are interested in writing some accomplishments to plug into the system, please see this page and the video tutorial at here.

Thanks!

OK, fun little meme time. Simple question:

Which songs remind you of Ubuntu?

Think about the music…the vibe…the rhythm…what it makes you feel when you listen to the song. Which ones make you think of our goals of bringing Free Software to the world with Ubuntu?

Reply using your blog, Google+, Facebook, Twitter or wherever else (use the #musicofubuntu hashtag) and lets see what music gets our Ubuntu blood flowing.

I have a few I want to present via the wonderful medium of embedded YouTube videos. What are yours?!

Queen: Don’t Stop Me Now

Can’t see it? Watch it here!

Twisted Sister: We’re Not Gonna Take It

Can’t see it? Watch it here!

AC/DC: Shoot To Thrill

Can’t see it? Watch it here!

Airbourne: Runnin’ Wild

Can’t see it? Watch it here!

Rush: Virtuality

Can’t see it? Watch it here!

Grave Digger: Rebellion (The Clans Are Marching)

Can’t see it? Watch it here!

Rage Against the Machine: Renegades of Funk

Can’t see it? Watch it here!

Bomfunk MC’s: Freestyler

Can’t see it? Watch it here!

Recently I have been blogging about a project I have been hacking on called Ubuntu Accomplishments.

This is an accomplishments system that can be used to identify when people have accomplished various things in the Ubuntu project and reward them with trophies. The plan also makes additional skills and accomplishments more discoverable and provides better help for people to get started. While designed for Ubuntu, the system can be used for other projects and also for local applications (e.g. completing Level 1 on a game). Accomplishments in community projects are verified for their integrity so people can’t fake their trophies.

I wanted to present a video demo of the system working so far:

Can’t see it? See the video here!

You can find out more about the project here and the code is available in the following branches:

• lp:ubuntuaccomplishments – contains the main trophy viewer app, the daemon, and the libaccomplishments Python module.
• lp:~jonobacon/ubuntuaccomplishments/ubuntu-community – a collection of Ubuntu accomplishments for different things you can accomplish in the Ubuntu project. There are only two accomplishments right now – can you help write more?.
• lp:~jonobacon/ubuntuaccomplishments/validation-service – the server-side verification service that runs on an Ubuntu One headless machine.

Now, this is really early in the stages of development. If you grab the code you will find various bits that are not yet implemented, but the core idea works.

Things we need to do next:

• Generate the user’s trophy directory and share it with Ubuntu One. I have the code written to do this, I just need to merge it in.
• Add a Getting Started page which asks the user if they want to use verified trophies that use Ubuntu One.
• Fix support for machine-verifiable trophies that are dependent on others.
• Actually sign the trophies.
• Implement the categories filter in the My Trophies view.

I plan on writing a longer blog entry about how the system works later for those who are interested in contributing.

Today I had a call with another team at Canonical who were wanting to ask for guidance on (a) how to write good blog entries that people want to read and (b) how to regularly get into the habit of blogging and get more eyeballs on your posts.

I thought this could be of general interest to the community, so I figured I would write these things down into a blog entry. So meta.

Some tips:

• Keep it concise – your blog should get the point and talk through the topic you are presenting. Now…seasoned readers of my own work will know I tend to ramble from time to time, so I myself always need to try and keep this in check. Few people will want to commit to a huge block of text, so keep it concise.
• Format it – the web has many wonderful things, and this includes formatting such as italic, bold, code, different heading sizes and more. Use them to help add emphasis to your posts.
• Make it visual – pictures say a thousand words, and so do videos. Break up your content with images illustrating what you are discussing, or just amusing images to make a joke (example). If you want to display images, I recommend you upload them to Flickr and then link directly to the images. For videos you can usually embed them directly from YouTube or other video sharing sites, but aggregators such as Planet Ubuntu often strip out the embedded videos, so be sure to provide a direct link underneathe the embedded video (example).
• Link to interesting things – if you are discussing something online, always provide a link to it. This helps the user get access to the information quickly and easy.
• Be professional – always keep your posts professional and thorough. Ensure your writing is clear and that you have spell and grammar checked it.
• Be fun – being professional doesn’t mean you can’t be fun. Writing in a fun and amusing way is a great way to keep your readers interested.
• Invite discussion – if your blog has a comments feature, always end your posts and ask for input and opinions from your readers. This provides a wonderful way to trigger some discussion around your post.

In terms of blogging more and getting more eyeballs on your posts, here are some tips:

• Get into the habit – to become a regular blogger you need to get into the habit of thinking “this is cool, I should blog about this“. This can take a while to get used to. If you are in a team, it is helpful to suggest to others when they should blog about something; this keeps us all regularly posting. If you are struggling with getting into the habit, put a reminder in your calendar to remind you.
• Ensure you are aggregated – if you are an Ubuntu Member, be sure to add your post to Planet Ubuntu. Add your post to other appropriate aggregators (e.g. Canonical staff should add their blogs to voices.canonical.com).
• Use social media – post a link to your post on Twitter, Google+, Facebook and other social media accounts.

I am sure there are plenty of other suggestions from you folks; please add them to the comments!

Ubuntu Global Jam: Call For Events!

From 2nd – 4th March 2012 we will be running the Ubuntu Global Jam. This is a global event in which we ask Ubuntu users and contributors to organize events in their local areas to meet other Ubuntu people and help contribute to Ubuntu.

The Ubuntu Global Jam is a fun event, and a great way to meet other Ubuntu and Free Software folks. It is also really easy to organize an event if there is not one near you.

To explain more, tonight I created a video explaining what the Ubuntu Global Jam is, and how to organize an event:

Can’t see it? Click here!

We are going to be encouraging you good folks to start organizing your events. You can find out more about the events here at loco.ubuntu.com and more information on the wiki.

Please feel free to ask whatever questions you like about how to organize an event in the comments here. Do let me know if you organize an event!

Mike is also working on some website updates on loco.ubuntu.com that will make the event a little more interested both before and when the event is running.

Today (1st Feb 2012) I will be doing my live Ubuntu Q+A session at 12pm Pacific / 3pm Eastern / 8pm UK / 9pm Europe. You can join the videocast here (anyone can view, but if you want to ask a question you should register an account with ustream.tv first).

All questions are welcome!

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 12.10 release.

The next UDS takes place at The Oakland Marriott City Center, Oakland, California, USA from the 7th – 11th May 2012. 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 Wed 22nd February 2012 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 Oakland!