Czajkowski

Up early and down for breakfast and chats and the day begins well.  Breakfast is just as important not only to set you up for the day but also sitting with new people and talking to them.  UDS is more than just working on Ubuntu it’s about meeting more people and getting to know who is involved where and does what. It’ll help you and them in the future.

I predominately stay in the community track so the first morning for me is a Round Table discussion. We had some ideas from Monday but mainly the focus of todays disucsion was broken down into topics in and around Community and Canonical. Firstly,  Design in which we discussed the design and discussion about them infamous  buttons .  What it really boiled down to was this, the decision and thought process for the change was not communicated well. I think by now everyone is in agreement with this, so we need to move on, build a bridge and get over it and look at how we can change this for future decisions.

In future we need to increase blogging about the process, possibly explain from the start, these are issues we are considering changing, this is the reason why and possibly along the way here is versions 1, 2, 3 etc until we get the final result, rather than just showing us the final version, it’s hard to see how the logic was achieved and gotten there in the end without seeing previous attempts.

Next we moved onto the perception of  peopling thinking of - Canonical forcing stuff into Ubuntu .  Rightly or wrongly people jump to conclusions based on the facts they see even when they may not know the full picture, this just comes down to lack of communication.  We used to be better at communication, we really need to get back on track with this and increase the information from from Canonical to the Ubuntu Community.

This seemed to happen towards the end of the last cycle due to a few issues all of which from what I can gather people have nodded and accepted and want to make sure don’t happen again.  This was brought about flagrant disregard for UI freeze – stuff changed after the freeze, which rather upset folks a lot. Equally, it also teaches people the misunderstanding of freezes – people freaked out, and seemed very unwilling to learn more about “what a freeze is”.

Also just to note and many don’t seem to know this, and to be honest I was one of these people and it wasn’t till I listened to Matt Zimmerman recently on a talk saying this did I know that just because you’re Canonical employee it doesn’t give you access rights. You need to earn them just like everyone else does.   Also did you know that  not all canonical folks are ubuntu members.

The morning wasn’t over and I moved onto the NGO session, here we reviewed the work we did during the last cycle and tried to highlight more areas where we can work on getting more information on NGOs and how we can promote organisations using Ubuntu. Following this session I’ve a few to do items which I’m looking forward to working on with the team.

[czajkowski] more regular meetings – once a month:TODO
[czajkowski] Paolo  come up with specific questions for interviews: TODO
[czajkowski] Jussi to work on stats/interviews from the interviews  – find out what works very well – tools they’ve built on their own
[czajkowski]  See if NGOs would consider document their work – best practice

I attended a very interesting discussion session presented by Andrew from the British Consulate on Learning how Ubuntu can help support the UN’s millennium goal. The discussion for this session was about how best we could use an drive the use of Ubuntu and Open Source within the British Consulate community.  What would be needed and desired to get this up and running. What were the requirements needed to see this happen and using available networks already out there.

Tools – Global Network
1  Networking – embed social network
2 Collaboration – Incorporate an office suite, survey result, whiteboard/Diary/Meeting
3 An Information Store – Public face of what the network is creating, a window in, learning resource
4 A resource for participants – Place for CVs , Database of  Funding bodies, WIKI Definitions/Discussions
5 Training Materials, Use these to facilitate a global forum especially links to the British Consulate Community.

Encourage the Use and RE Use of material
We need to start from where people are already comfortable, sometimes that’s the first battle – If this is Facebook, Twitter, or Identi.ca use this and reuse these as people are in their comfort zone.
Where do they upload their work for collaboration. Give them an identity. – If you log into Launchpad and see your user id and click on the profile you can see the teams a person belongs to and what areas they are interested in.
Online tools to work with the community work very well for a large audience, for people attending and also for remote participation, at UDS we are rather spoilt and it works very well. We use IRC to keep in touch, use social media and track # tags. We create blueprints which are linked to wiki pages and the blueprints can be linked to a team or an individual.  It works very well.

A session I was interested in hearing more about was the Open Week/Developer Week feedback session. I ran a LoCo Council session to help spread the word on what we do and how we can help.  We have more and more specalised weeks happening and we need to make sure people know about them so they can take part. One issue highlighted was that we’re advertising on Ubuntu sites,lists and forums, we really should be looking outside the box as we want new people to come to these sessions. We discussed how we can better advertise it all better and the  pitfalls of the weeks. Lenrid is a great tool, and while I appreciate people wanting to use it, I don’t think it should be forced upon people as being the only tool, which for me is my only criticism. I like IRC and it’s a good tool, for me I find it distracting to see slides, but that’s just me and if I’m conducting a session I won’t be using them.

In the afternoon I attended the Create a localized help.ubuntu.com as I’m on the doc mailing list and have been following all of the mails. How we can create a unified approx for localised approach – from the loco side and not to fragment the way you can access the resources.  Should part of a site be translated or not at all.  I must say I was rather disappointed in this session. David did a great job in keeping the session on tack from the translations point of view, however I just felt it was the manual team and documentation team at locker heads so found it frustrating to be in as it just seemed liked digs were being made at the teams.

I’m really enjoying the design track at UDS this time and glad to see they are holding some great sessions ,Meeting Ubuntu for the first time your impressions. This was a jam packed session full of lots of great ideas. If you buy an OEM install from say Dell what is your first impression. Well firstly there are two types of people who are going to buy these machines, people who know and use Ubuntu a lot and know what they want, and secondly others who’ve just switched over or heard a little about it.

So some of the issues highlighted were what do you see on your first boot up, what do you read, see or look at.  How can we make it better, more informative and make the user experience more enjoyable.

- use a video of someone providing an awesome introduction of ubuntu to find out what sequence they introduce things
- first use wizard? introducing the desktop just like a person would do.
- Reduce About options to 1
- http://wiki.ubuntu.com/AboutUbuntu
• http://wiki.ubuntu.com/AboutUbuntuRevisited

Software center – it gives you all these free things – should there be a guide a direction and build up to explain what this is all about , cool, ubuntu apps, needs better marketing
applications. Group of apps that can help you depending on your area listed out and easy to access.

First boot only – something to help the user, where is it to go, and what should it have
Dell give support requirements – make a video of this to help ? Dell get asked support questions, it would be great to see the questions they get asked and do up a presentation answering these in a FAQ style format.

It was a long and very productive day and a few of us headed to Waterloo for dinner. Yummy dinner at l’Amusoir Great meal good value and excellent service!

Back for chin wagging and disucsions on the days events over beers, great way to spend an evening.