Community
Registration
Building LoCo Directory
- Discussing Mailing lists and ideas surrounding making it easier for new users to get involved with locos for Support, etc.
Discussing the value of a LoCo directory.
Building a LoCo Portal is essentially about building a database. This makes teams more searchable and more accurate.
- Can we solve these problems with existing resources?
LoCos need a one stop shopping place to get information on their teams mailing list, forums, Launchpad team, etc.
A popular idea is to put the LoCo data in a database and encourage people to make their own mash-ups of the data. Love it!
Listen in at: http://ur1.ca/02qi
- Decision to set up a database and use OpenID auth from LP to allow people to fill out the teams.
- Nixternal going to kick off the implementation of the database and simple front end.
Debian / Ubuntu Relations
- Some Ubuntu Developers are going upstream to become Debian developer.
- Write up documentation to aid triagers in determining if a bug should be forward to Debian-Upstream or Upstream-Upstream. Lower the noise.
- Relations improving between Ubuntu and Debian since two years ago.
- Mark Shuttleworth thinks there is a place for both Ubuntu and Debian, neither will supplant the other.
- Great example is the respective KDE teams: continued communication and collaboration.
- New contributors need to understand the relationship between Debian and Ubuntu.
- Why aren't Debian contributors on the Ubuntu Hall of Fame?
- Every Debian contributor is an Ubuntu Contributor"
- Respect between Ubuntu and Debian should be two way.
How do Debian contributors contact the Ubuntu project in general? --> debian@ubuntu.com
- Would a monthly meeting between Debian and Ubuntu be valuable? We think so, just make sure you do it on OFTC.
- Advisory board with a person from Debian on it would be a good idea.
- Need to make sure people are aware of wiki.ubuntu.com/Debian
Improving 5-A-Day
- 5-a-day improvements:
- The client needs to be automatically in Launchpad, some people forget to summit their work
- Automated reporting - not using the client
- All 5-a-day summits should be equal, comments or deb diffs.
- Sustained measurements - instead of number of bugs, the sustainability of bug work
- Ranks for number of bugs completed (like forums ranks)
- Count non 5-a-day people but when they are making great progress, an automated email mails a horsemen we email them to join
MOTU Processes
- Overview of repositories Main/Restricted vs Universe/Multiverse
- Gobby: motu-processes-jaunty
- Discussing the benefits of sponsorship during the beginning packaging experience
- We need to think of what to do with all of our bugs with patches attached.
Improving Participate Pages
- How do we streamline the first point of contact with Ubuntu
- We need to define people interests and give them the info they need to participate.
- Different people like different forms of communication. Sometimes cause us to divide our attentions.
- Make joining the community like choosing a Creative Commons license: 2-3 easy questions then point you towards the appropriate team/project.
- Think about a "survey" to automate to getting information on what areas they are interested.
- Questions like Where you from? What interests you? etc...
- We need to careful not to overload new users with too much information.
- Translate on the participate page should be important.
Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase
- Talking about the Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase
- Discussing adding the submissions to the repositories
Upstream Contacts
- We need to encouraging more people to have a foot in both Ubuntu and Upstream.
- A upstream person does not do this just for Ubuntu but for everyone
- Measure upstream bug vitality, pride in bug numbers, brainstorm like button to show rock stars in upstreams.
- Try to celebrate people who do good work in upstream.
- The upstream people will be the ambassadors for Ubuntu to the upstream projects.
- Some upstreams want all distribution bugs, some not so much.
- Have online bug days when bug build up on a project
- Work to figure out if bugs are Ubuntu bugs or upstream bugs.
- The upstream contact needs to be aware of the release schedule for a project.
- The upstream contact should be available to respond to queries, especially to security problems
- The upstream contact is not responsible for fixing ALL upstream bugs in Ubuntu
- The person should be affect change in both communities (Ubuntu and upstream).
Launchpad Registry -- People, teams and projects
- Viewing screen cast of new Launchpad features.
Making LoCo Teams Rock
What are best practices for LoCo Teams?
- We need more collaboration between teams
- We should use conferences as a meeting point between teams
- Would be good to get coordination between Canonical and local teams
- Canonical planned a release party and never posted to the ubuntu-uk list
- We would like to Use loco teams for things like UI testing and data gathering
- Coordination between Canonical and local teams
- There's no way to analyze the data by themselves, there needs to be a UI expert there to gather data
- There needs to be 2 people and they have to be UI experienced. And they need to be experienced in the UI feedback field, not just a UI design
LoCos can do usability testing.
- You can't just teach people to do this.
(Random arguing about which LoCo was first)
- Burn out is a problem, if we have a Packaging Jam we start over every time because of new users
Jams in LoCos always slammed with people who can't use GPG/launchpad.
- The team needs to be a team, it's up to them to grow as an organization
- Do we need a more centralized approach with best practice?
Packaging jams: Difficult given differing levels of expertise in the LoCo
- An Open Loco weekend in different languages.
- How do we encourage proper advocacy?
- (Rich) - burnout and frustration should be topics. (Everyone else) - don't be so pessimistic
FOSSCamp - like unconference for LoCo meetings and events
- Multi-language tracks
- How about day-to-day ways to rock instead of larger events and ideas
- People don't know what to do so they get frustrated. What can a loco do to rock on a day-to-day level.
- Giving out CDs, etc.
- People shouldn't take it too far. Regularity is important
- Public bulletin boards (real ones, not BBSes) are a good place to publicize stuff.
- Local businesses can be used to display Ubuntu CDs if ok with the owners
- ~20 local teams represented at UDS
We should fix a lot of this stuff if we did more team<->team collaboration.
- We have 2 things to do: 1) publicizing what teams are doing. 2) Why we're involved in Ubuntu - talk about it to inspire people.
Community Roundtable
- Burn Out causes: Poor leadership in OSS community, Dealing with venomous people, Ubuntu not being fun, The never ending journey to Open Source freedom. community people need to recognize burn out in each other. Have each others back. Be careful with communication method, maybe not , it can come off cross.
- Team Communications: Talk to group close to you (physically) Help with teams report or writing to central document
- We need processes and document, but don't let it control everything
Create help.kubuntu.org to mirror help.ubuntu.com
- What keeps Ubuntu fun? : People, technology, choice, tinkering, getting stuff done, Daviey, Helping others, the goal of fixing bug #1
- Inspiration for the community, Social events, The international culture
- Change up what teams you are on
- Helping other, getting feedback from our user. The feeling of helping others.
- Winning the good fight (Ubuntu vs Microsoft vs Apple), reaching critical mass
- What's not fun: bureaucracy, Lack of transparency, People who are negative and cause trouble
Governance Review
- Not enough non-Canonical people on the councils, would like to see more participation.
- Loco Council: LOCO council needs to meet more often, loco review and reapplication: poor response from LOCOs
More Effective Horsemen
- Jono, Daniel, Jorge want to know where they can improve
- Are the horsemen doing a decent job?
- nxvl: I always get a good response from them. They do what I expect them to do
- What kind of metrics do the horsemen use?
- Lots of graphs - they offer a piece of the puzzle, not the whole picture
- Should graphs be public? They could be, but on the other hand, they need alot of context.
Greg - more focus on LoCo teams
There's a roadmap with the distro, with LoCo's there'sno clear roadmap or direction.
- "Direction" might be a bit difficult
- Horsemen have three goals, jono manages the team, daniel on developer relations, jorge with upstreams
- Try to have jorge/daniel at 80% for their core role, the rest to do other community work.
- Daviey: Didn't know what the other 2 do
- Talking about response times - some people mailing jono, mike asks them to instead mail someone on the team that the are more familiar with
- Better job at communicating our travel schedule
Make an email alias like horsemen@ubuntu.com or something
Split out the email from horsemen@ubuntu.com in all 3 directions
- Managing expectations with going to conferences, logistical problems might end up being mistaken for something else
- Q: Do you guys trust us?
- Daviey, yeah, except the one time with a disagreement on the 5-a-day stats
- Some people might have the impression that there's an "old boy's club".
- "old boy's club" perception could be because of the social behavior - cliqueish
- Not a clique - we see each other 2 weeks a year
- All communities tend to have people cluster
- Perhaps having horsemen taking turns joining meetings or hanging out in another team for a bit.
Launchpad Translations
Community Roundtable
How do we write the recipe to produce the perfect LoCo team?
A Sprint for LoCos to write those best practices could encourage others to produce documentation in preparation.
- Communicate to all the loco teams to get a list of the areas which are the most in need of Best Practices documentation. A Bug List/Agenda.
We keep coming back to the idea of a LoCo Open Week
Canonical And The Community
- First Topic - perception. How do non employees perceive Canonical?
- Daviey - It's very open.
- Daviey - Is it just us who attend UDS or where the rubber meets the road? ie. do people outside the UDS attendees think Canonical is open?
- Andrew - what issues do you think Canonical has?
- Popey - I've heard people say that Canonical is unresponsive. Sysadmin help, marketing help, community help.
- People try the official way to contact canonical people, and then follow stuff up in other channels.
- RT ticket response - sysadmin team is busy, there's a time difference.
- Some departments in Canonical have little to no idea what the community does or that they even exist.
- These are non-engineering people usually, but things like the marketing and business teams that don't come from an OSS background.
- Jono - small companies are very open, and when they grow they turn into a black box, we need to ensure that we avoid this
- Popey - we know the back channels and how to get information.
- Canonical planned a release party in london and didn't check with ubuntu-uk
- Randy - I work for Canonical but didn't come through the community; we need a kind of "education" on the community
- Jono - traditionally I would brief new employees with a phone call or something
- It's different for things like Randy because he's not working on "Ubuntu the distro" like the engineers.
- Randy - the belief of being community focused is in the company, but the mechanics of doing that aren't so clear.
- Jono/Daniel/Jorge available to help internal employees understand community issues.
- Aaron - Sometimes information doesn't get out to the community, even though I spend alot of time with Jorge.
- Jono - sometimes we don't restrict by choice, we have deals with vendors, etc.
- Aaron - How did I not know about Landscape?
- Canonical blog is basically all we have, posting about Landscape on planet.ubuntu or something would not be well received
- Andrew - how do we manage outgoing communications in Canonical. Mark thinks constantly of the impact and contribution of the community.
- Andrew - it has influenced our communications policy within marketing. We should be a reputation leader in this area.
- Andrew - we try to keep the Canonical blog factual, we don't want it to be a propaganda machine.
- sil - Do internal ideas come out?
- Jono - Fine line between ideas and vaporware
- Popey - other teams in Canonical should look at what the Launchpad guys are doing because they seem to be doing it right.
- Martin - People are cognizant what voice they use, wether it's a personal voice on a personal blog, or a corporate blog.
- Customer service on the Canonical store not so good.
- Andrew - we spend time on the store to find high quality goods, recyclable, etc. in an ethical manner.
- We want to hear about problems on the store, Andrew to look into how effective the "Contact me" function works on the store.
- Jono - we should constantly review things like this at UDS.
- Randy - there is a high trust situation, both groups trust one another. We all play a big role in making the 2 way communication work.
- People are largely sponsored to UDS because they are community leaders, and we should take more responsibility to have feedback
Daviey - what resolutions were made after the French LoCo booth incident.
- Christophe - Nick Barcet has been a mentor for our group on planning. There's a real collaboration now
Christophe - After that day the LoCo, canonical now realize that they have to work things together.
- Jono - ok, let's get some goals written down
- Repeat this session everytime to get a feel for this every cycle.
- Community people don't know who alot of the new employees are.
- Daviey - "Millbank is irrelevant." *laughter* He means people in Millbank aren't as involved in everyday community work.
- Andrew - we want to be seen as an honest broker
- Christophe - Behind Ubuntu needs to be revived.
- Andrew - every senior manager who reports to Mark is here, we come here because we want to come to this kind of sessions.
- Non-tech people are here to understand what is going on
- Panel session with the management team? This session needs to be a plenary
Christophe - UDS should be part of the french LoCo release party.
Community Bugs
- Launchpad bugs
- @jorge: linking an upstream bug can be difficult, especially if you make a mistake when adding them in mass
- @beuno: will be made easier with less page loads
- Mark: identify bugs which were created in Ubuntu
- Hard to identify bugs in LP that are closed upstream as duplicate
nixternal: comments added to the upstream bugs should flow down to LaunchPad
- Plugins can be installed in upstream bugtrackers that will let the updates flow to Launchpad
- Adding ability to "mute" comments from valid bugs
- Working on making bugs "context-less"
- Searching on Launchpad is tough, fixing it also is difficult
- Some of the features seem half-complete, but that is being worked on
- Profile pictures can't be resized automatically when uploaded
Make Rosetta attractive for upstreams
Hall Of Fame
- Should there be a box for person who does great Loco work.
- A box for forums person (based on thanks) should so up soon.
- Question (Chris Cheney): Karma does not match on HOF does not match LP. Why?
- Community team will guarantee diversity of selection across community
New approved teams (LoCo)
- Brainstorm ideas box in HOF
- How to measure IRC "goodness" for HoF stats.
- Nominate people in IRC.
- Last 10 thanks, rotationing???
- Expand out to microblogging.
Making Jams Rock
- What people need to do at bug jams, reports and 5-a-day
- Train the trainer
- Packaging Jams
- People what to do their own pet project
Create a JamKit
Developer Role Expiration Reassessment
Community Roundtable
Spread Ubuntu: http://spreadubuntu.neomenlo.org/
- What direction should this website go, maybe translations?
- We need best practices for Ubuntu Advocacy
- Should be in *.ubuntu.com
Actions: Jorge to find out about Spread Ubuntu stuff in the LoCo directory
A bi-monthly gathering of LoCo coordinators with LoCo Council
- Addiction to Ubuntu, Are people addicted to Ubuntu?
- Is it doing to the need for Ubuntu to work with people almost all on-line
- People need time away from the computer to blow off stream.
- We need to be well-rounded to make Ubuntu rock.
- Gobby: community-roundtable-friday
- Get a professional to talk about this during open week.
- Instead of addiction, we should be thinking a better way for people to refreshing themselves.
- Add "What you do to relax" Meme on the planet.
Improving Contributor Quality
- Drive-by contributor: does one small project and moves on.
- Some people complain for the sake of complaining. Do not provide constructive criticism.
- Gobby: improving-contributor-quality
- If you have criticism in the project, have facts to back it up.
http://www.oreillynet.com/conferences/blog/2006/07/oscon_how_open_source_projects.html
- What to do the lack of quality from a specific contributor?
- Quicker action from the MOTU Council in the future.
Translations Community
- The "Ubuntu Developer Processes Review" session at 12:15 has been replaced by a session regarding the Ubuntu Fridge.
Session about making http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/ better
- Perhaps upstream projects don't realise that the code for brainstorm is open source, they could setup their own sites using the code.
Ubuntu Developer Processes Review
- Ubuntu Fridge
- No comments allowed in the fridge, tie comments to Launchpad
- Allow video posted to the Fridge
- Calendaring on the Fridge has issues currently
- Question: can Drupal could be upgraded to Drupal 6.0
- Fridge/bot don't handle repeating events in current system
- Fridge could switch to Google Calendar, there would be issues of openness.
Creation of a Ubuntu community jobs/tasks website
- Launchpad integration should be added.
- Allow linking to brainstorm, bugs, etc.
- Management should be done with a Launchpad project.
- Task timeouts to keep tasks fresh.
- Post-completion actual time reporting.
- Jorge to investigate various interfaces and propose something.
- Separate larger and smaller activities.
- Add the ability to indicate in which languages an activity may be completed
- Integration with other community resources.