Name: Andreas Lloyd
Location: Copenhagen, Denmark
Contact
Blog & Homepage: http://eskar.dk/andreas/blog/
Email:lloydinho {at} gmail {dot} com
Launchpad: https://launchpad.net/people/lloydinho
IRC: lloydinho on network irc.freenode.net
Ubuntu teams and projects
Primarily my anthropological fieldwork in the Ubuntu community, the primary focus of which is the way software developers encode the computer and the software they write with their own social and cultural values and ideas especially with regards to the interplay between developers and users in the community. This will result in a full Master's Thesis on the Ubuntu community in mid-2007.
As part of my fieldwork I have done a census survey of the Ubuntu developers' community, the results of which can be found here.
DocumentationTeam - I am maintaining a new document on how to get involved with Ubuntu that is to be shipped with the other documentation as part of Ubuntu. The goal is to make a one-stop reference for new or would-be community members to help them get involved. It is an expanded and restructured version of the Participate page on the Ubuntu.com website, which seeks to make a good reference and contact list to the individual teams.
Part of this project is also to reorganize the Team pages to make them as easy to access as possible. I have created a TeamPageTemplate which I hope all of the teams will adopt to make it easy to compare the processes and functions of the various teams. So far I have adopted the DocumentationTeam wiki page to this template.
MarketingTeam - I've been helping out on the marketing team, mostly with regards to the drafting of the user case studies spec. I have also contributed to various discussions there.
- Danish Translation Team - I've done some translation work there, and help people to get involved on the ubuntu-dk mailing-list.
I've developed the UsabilityTesting wiki page and hope that at one point the time will be ripe to initiate a full Ubuntu Usability team to organize usability testing in the community.
About me
I am an anthropology graduate student in my final year at the University of Copenhagen.
I have studied both anthropology and comparative literature, and I have sought to combine the markedly different approaches to cultural questions that these two disciplines offer. In my graduate studies, I have taken courses at the University of Manchester http://www.manchester.ac.uk/ and the IT University of Copenhagen http://www1.itu.dk/sw5211.asp. It is in this interdisciplinary field between cultural studies, technology studies and computer science that I wish to explore with my fieldwork and the subsequent master's thesis.
I've been using Ubuntu since November 2004, but I'm no hacker or computer expert as such. I have worked for 3 years as a computer support guy in a university department (using macs, primarily) so I do know a fair bit about the end-user end of deal. I hope that my fieldwork will allow me to learn more about the developing end.
Why Ubuntu?
I was first attracted to Ubuntu when I became aware of the Free Software philosophy and the continuing worries about Intellectual Property. I found that I wanted to support such initiative and I when I bought a new computer in the autumn of 2004, I made sure to buy a laptop with no OS pre-installed, to avoid paying for Windows which I didn't want to use anymore. Instead, I began to look around for a Linux Distribution that would fit my needs. As chance would have it, Ubuntu's Warty Warthog was released just at that time, and I managed to get my hands on a copy. Once I had it installed, I never thought about going back.
Ubuntu in the future
Having a young community with many adopters who are new to Linux puts Ubuntu in a good position to bring Open Source into the public consciousness. And to bring with it the fundamental paradigm shift of changing the role of the user from a consumer to a co-contributor. Being able to directly affect and shape the path of the products you use, and understanding how those products are created and brought to you is something that is sorely lacking in many aspects of our modern and commercialised lives. I hope to help Ubuntu become an example of open community-based collaboration and sharing that may reach out beyond the world of software - this will in particular require opening the project to people with non-technical backgrounds.