Czajkowski

It’s a sad day, it’s the last day, and I’m still running around like a headless chicken trying to get to meet people I’ve not seen or need to resolve some issues which have come up during the week with the people that are there and in hands reach! Today was the day we confirmed and finalised action items, a day to say goodbye to old and new friends I’ve gotten to know this week.  It’s been great!

The final day kicked off with hanging out in the folks in the community round table. During this final round table  we got around to summarising  many of the topics that we will aim to focus during the Precise cycle and these are the areas we will focus on and get behind and work on.

• Create and  share opportunities for all levels of skills to help everyone make Ubuntu great.
• Support , motivate and encourage our leaders and governors to be successful to deliver leadership that furthers the community.
• Create a better environment of gratitude and appreciation towards our community and Canonical
• Have a constructive critical environment, where you protect it against anti-social and unconstructive behaviour.
• Make sure our community are approachable to help our community to contribute and be successful, he us to help others.

Can’t believe the week is almost past, it’s been great fun, really intense at times at sessions, exhausting and brilliant all in one go. People don’t seem to understand you’re in sessions from 9am – 6pm, you start talking and interacting with people from breakfast through lunch and then hang out in the evening.  It can be mentally draining, but it’s a fantastic opportunity for which I am grateful to be here to experience.

This morning at the  round table we started discussing and choosing the  subjects for the Leadership Mini-Summit later on so as to make it more productive. We then spent the rest of the session talk about the BuildingCommunity pages. For me I see them as a collection of pages linking to the main page which is translated, landing on this page it is not currently translated which cuts off a large chunk of the community.  Another concern raised was were they being maintained and how up to date the information realy was. There were some thoughts on could we see if we could find out the stats for those wiki pages and see how often they are used, or change the wiki in some way to allow button type responses. Not entirely sure how this would work.

Next session for me was a hallway session, I was able to catch up with Matthew Garret who I had not properly spoken to since SkyCon back in 2007 so that was rather nice to be able to do.

It was great to be able to have a 2nd LoCo Council session at UDS as it was needed to sit down with people and finalise the last two topics we needed to discuss that have been mentioned on IRC for the last 6 months on 1-1 basis and I really wanted them aired and discussed in public to get a community solution one way or another.  One of the main discussions in this session was the discussion of language-based (locale) teams in the LoCo Team Portal (Locale V LoCo). These teams are translation teams and  don’t have a physically shared location as they could be anywhere in the world they also don’t come under the governance of the LoCo Council.

We all agreed that they will remain in the LTP in spite of not being a LoCo team  with the possibility of  adding a new section on the teams page under this heading to avoid confusion. The second topic which has been on my mind for some time as I’m trying to think past the 6 month goal and plan for the future of LoCo teams and put in measures now to help them in the future so being proactive rather than reactive to the growth of teams.  The  proposal to review some of the larger countries and allow more localised LoCo teams like the United States  which has teams based on states, they all still fall under the parent team. I’m really happy everyone thought this was a good way to proceed I do appreciate people will wonder what is happening.  The idea is to use a teams geographic state/province boundaries and create teams in those areas, and if like USA there is nobody there then no team will be created, however it could be and will be as can be see from USA the driving power behind some new LoCo team blood being created which is good for everyone.

Final session before lunch was Community Participation in user experience this session was talking about the Design team and community involvement. This session followed the one earlier in the week about developing a User Experience that a community team could focus on, so they will be blogging about it more and those features will be on multiple places to read such as the  Ubuntu Fridge and Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter.  There was also a great idea to identify some people who would be willing to help with this community team.

The afternoon was the Leadership summit and having already pre defined the topics made it more productive, but I did find some of the sessions weren’t as focused as others and didn’t stick to the timings which made it difficult at times, so I think having a strong driving person keeping people on track is really necessary.

We discussed the following items and I found it personally interesting hearing the different views on theses areas from people in the room coming from different backgrounds, some in governance and some not and others using work life as an examples leads for lot for food for thought.

• Growing Motivation
• Canonical <-> Community Leadership Connection
• Role of the Canonical Community Team
• Role of the Community Council
• Leadership Futures with a growing community
• How do we grow leaders

The week is flying by and it’s been great to meet new people  I’m really trying to make an effort to sit with new people at breakfast so I can talk about new topics where possible and I do think it’s important to mix it up and meet new people.

I do like having the continuity of having the Community round table sessions each morning and we’re getting some topics discussed that don’t necessarily need a full session, or we are taking the time to plan future sessions later in the week which does help make them more productive.  We have spent a long time discussing the Community Survey results and looking at the feedback which was sent which is worth reading and also to note that this was the Ubuntu members thoughts on the project who are currently active and replied.

The next session for me was talking to Ubuntu attendees and seeing how they are doing and learning what they are planning for the coming cycle which is interesting for me as I’m probably not going to attend a Server or a start up boot session so me talking to them so hall session for me which is good as it’s nice to put the face to the name that I’m interacting with via bugs or on IRC. Today I met Curtis Horvey from the Launchpad team about a bug I’m having issues with and he and I and Mat Revell were able to bouce ideas off one another and possibly come up with a plan B.

Next sit down session for me was the LoCo Team Portal (LTP ) formally the LoCo Directory(LD), was a really  a what you want to see in the LTP that can be possibly developed given the current shortage of developers. Some ideas that were thrown out were replacing Google Maps with OSM, creating a page of where to send people so they can get started on development as the lads are doing a great job but clearly if people want more features but we don’t have enough folks helping them, so if you’re a Python developer please come and help, join #ubuntu-website and volunteer.

The Design and Community round table has been one of my favorite sessions so far.  As far as I can see the design team have a bad name which in my opinion is really unjust.  People really need to realise that design != unity there is a lot more work they do.  I really appreciated them reaching out and wanting to listen to the feedback from community people. So kudos to them!  They have a fantastic detailed blog covering lots of different ideas on their blog and it’s really worth reading.  One great thing that came from that session was creating a channel and mailing list that better describes the design team, so instead of Ayatana you would have ubuntu-design or ubuntu-design-discuss on mailing list and getting the message across that Ayatana is not just unity but there is the design team there.

Reducing Community Bickering is session that came about as a result of the Ubuntu Community Survey (here) began with discussing how to deal with the demotivating nonconstructive criticism on blogs. Me personally while I find the blog comments bad, I find the mailing lists worse from high up people in the Ubuntu community, I find that far more demotivating and frustrating.  When is a good time to step in and diffuse the situation as sometimes coming in too soon can not help also depending on steps in will or won’t resolve issues.

Penelope Stowe is doing a great job with the a11y team and it’s interesting to learn the difficulties people face when simple changes happen or how one new feature can really break a system when a11y issues are not considered.  The Accessibility Team are doing a great job and if you want to join in and help, they’d love people to help with packaging if you can.

Final session for the day was the Leadership Team Session, which I mostly went to sit in but did find extremely frustating, annoying and in the end I ended up having to bite my tongue as I felt I wasn’t being listened to. Which is not a good way to start.  I was under the impression it wasn’t a team more of a focus group, now it seems really formal, not really including the actual governing bodies, and most of the documentation is now on a Google doc being sent off to a locoteam to write, when surely if locoteams issues are being written would it not make more sense to ask the loco council to write that as they deal with it 24/7. My only saving grace is I’m not the only one in the boat who is thinking this way from the session and feeling frustrated.  google documents are great but not what we use in the community use to collaborate on, I wish it was coming from the councils down first.  Also calling it a team in itself was not what I thought it was all about so now they are talking about changing the name. who knows we shall see and keep following the progress of it all.

It’s been really great to meet people so far that I’ve been talking to via IRC or mailing lists and get to know them. Putting the faces to the names helps communication in the future.

The day kicked off again with the Community round table session, we discussed the results of the Community Survey that Jono conducted in October, these were sent out to Ubuntu Member.    You can see from the results people don’t like bickering in the Community, we  wanted to see which  people were experiencing some, any, all type and and if we can fix this issue. In this session we went through the  responses to the leadership questions which is very interesting to read and see the diverse answers  and we looked at where people were empowered and motivated to join the leadership teams within the community.

For the next session the LoCo Council members Chris, Christoph and myself got together and worked on a summary of the work we had done for the last cycle as it’s important to know what a council has being doing for a cycle and let everyone know so they can if they want learn more about what the team does.  The  final cycle  post is here.

It’s amazing and great to be able to sit face to face with the lads and get things done and discuss the issues face to face and really get on top of things. Being able to work on some of this stuff this week is really good, and we also sent a mail to UDS folks if they are here to come meet us and talk to us about your LoCo Team.  So far we’ve had 2 members from teams come to us which is great.

We also worked on some outstanding bug issues for us as the team.  I spoke to IS about getting some statistic from them regarding Loco. Ubuntu.com and seeing how many teams are using it.  Finally we got to work on our action items so far and scheduled another session for Thursday here at UDS to discuss Locale V LoCo on the LTP (LoCo Team Portal), we are also going to discuss the benefits to breaking up some of the larger countries into state/provinces like other locos already.

Next on the list was cloud .ubuntu.com development and where it is going this cycle, Jorge Castro is the new lead on this project and its always great watching him in a session he really drives to get things done and I can see already from the blueprint there are lots of cool action items coming, from making it more easier to navigate by adding new sections, explaining what JuJu is all about to getting more activity on twitter and more blog posts each month to encourage more interaction within the community.

Lunch time post plenaries the LoCo council are about this week to meet members from teams if you have issues/ideas want to know more come talk to us.

The after sessions was a mini Leadership summit. This session was 3 hours long and the first of a 2 day session, so we split this session into topics we picked from  the outline on the wiki

• Limiting Council membership terms or number of councils an individual can be on at once
• Best Practices for individuals participating on councils, boards and general leadership positions
• Canonical-Community Interaction

These areas were discussed at length and a lot of discussion was aired to define what the challenges are within our growing community and coming up with ideas on how we can  address them in ways which would work now and could scale in future cycles.

A great idea came about as a roll check, or a health check for team councils to pop in to the Community Council meeting and give a heads up to them to let them know the team is ok, what things they are working on and a general head count to make sure things are running smoothly.  Also we looked at possibly reenforcing the Leadership Code of Conduct and how best we can do this.

It was an intense session and really interesting to see the comments coming from people on the councils both past and present and those who wish to elected to them, I’d be interested to see their opinions if they were elected and wondered would their views change on such matters.

It was a great day and ended up with me in bed at pm and not well and asleep till am today, wow so that’s what sleep feels like!

Right as rain and day 1 begins literally lashing out of the heavens with rain. Early start 4am and wide awake so the day kicks off with a blog post to Ubuntu IE and UK and post about remote participation as I do think it’s essential for people to realise that although they may not be present their comments and thoughts about processes are welcomed and encouraged.

Catching up with folks at breakfast time and before UDS sessions kicks off and there is an amazing buzz going around, many people waving hands and roaring as they’ve not seen one another reminds me how close a knit family we really are.

The sessions kick off with Jono Bacon discussing what UDS is about what we’ve looked at in the previous cycle and reminding people to eat healthy, drink lots of water and sleep, and it’s true or you will be exhausted and sick and not able to take part. Mark Shuttleworth gave an interesting keynote in so far as there were no massive shocks being announced more of a plan for the next 2 years which is good to see. He did mention that in the coming months that there is a future with Ubuntu on TVs, smart phones and tablets.   Mark discussed the fact that we now have Lens with larger integration so for example  the Music Lens, where ARM is going and the fact that in 2 years time we will see it in the data centers and servers.  What I find interesting and I am really happy to learn is that LTS will now be a 5 year maintenance which comes down to the fact there is now a larger audience and we need to cater for this.  Finally a highlight for me he mentioned was juju a language for talking about services.

I thought I’d talk about some of the sessions I attended today and how I feel they went and what kind of progress is being planned.  Up first was one of the most organised and productive community round table discussion sessions.  Here we came away on day one with action items. What we thought of the survey results, what did we think about the fact there were no shockers in Marks keynote and general feelings of the Ubuntu community.

Next up for me was Better Recognising Community Contribution  I for one have an interesting one which I’m going to be working with locoteams with.  Each month I am going to blog about a person in a locoteam who has contributed to Ubuntu in some way shape or form.  The idea behind this is put the face to the name to someone in the community, but also some Kudos or say  thank you or cheers for the help, some people referred to this as giving thanks but I  think that sounds too biblical in terms and doesn’t really sum up the way I blog, so I’ll be writing a Kudos to locoteam members once a month. Bring on the action items!

Before lunch and now I’m starving and in need of a chocolate fix was Designing and creating Ubuntu experience, how best the community can help here, but also the fact that sometimes on mailing lists numerous ideas will come out but nothing will ever be completed I thought Alison Randall really has some great ideas and really open minded on how to get more team intergration with the community which I think will help in getting items accomplished. Todays session was one of 3 Alison has planned to run on this topic so stay tuned and follow the etherpad. 1) ”Designing and creating Ubuntu Experiences” 2)  ”Meet with the Ubuntu Desktop Designers” 3) ”Community Participation in User Experience”.

Lunch wasn’t just lunch I got to hang out with the awesome team that is launchpad and do some usability issue testing, very odd being watched how you do something and talking about your logic for way of doing it, and interesting to get feedback.

The Afternoon sessions kicked off with Ubuntu Women session.  It’s interesting to see how this team has changed in two years and one area I wanted to ask what was planned was longer than 6 months, the future for the team  and where do we see ourselves in 2 years time and we needed to have longer long  term plans rather than 6 monthly. So for me I don’t use the Ubuntu women irc channels any more nor do I take part in the meetings. 2 years ago I was elected to the LC last year the EMEA and most recently the CC I think women can see we have women in many divverse areas in the community and for me I think we’ve succeed in that area.

Finally the LoCo Council session.  We reviewed what we the LoCo Council had done in the last cycle, discussed the idea of twinning teams which are approved with teams that are unapproved .  Should teams be broken up in to smaller sub teams was vetoed but there is a plan to break up larger countries into provinces/states possibly. Standardisation of the DISPLAY team name on the LoCo team portal was also discussed and finally language locale v loco team on the portal.

So what was agreed from this session was the LoCo council would pick a selection of teams this cycle to twin with unapproved teams and help them get on their feet more a budding up type system.  A way of helping smaller younger teams learn how teams do things for their community, give them tips and ideas so we can get more teams approved.  We will be contacting teams in the coming weeks to set this up .  The idea of splitting teams up into a city sub loco was vetoed by many as it didn’t seem appropriate, what will happen instead is on the LoCo Team Portal (formally the LoCo Directory) will have an area on the team page to add city contacts, we would also encourage teams to have this information on their website.   Regarding Standerdisation of team names it was agreed that the DISPLAY name on the LTP would be done but no other change to the teams name would be.  We are also hoping to schedule another loco council session for later in the week.

For the rest of the sessions the LoCo Council sat and worked with a loco team with some Q&A and helped them better understand the options that are available to them.

A great day was had and much catching up with people was done. Day 1 is over and it’s only just begun….. clearly I need sleep that was cheesy!