Xubuntu Project Lead approved

By pleia2 | Published: 2011-01-27

In a Xubuntu Community Meeting attended by nine people, a vote was taken to confirm Charlie Kravetz as Xubuntu Project Lead. This was the culmination of many months of Xubuntu operating with an interim leader. The vote has confirmed Charlie Kravetz as the Xubuntu Project Lead.

Thanks to all of the attendees and to the Xubuntu Project. I will do my best to make this a great distribution.

The full meeting minutes and logs are available. For those interested, the minutes of the meeting pertaining to the vote for Project Lead are also available.

Originally sent by Charlie Kravetz to the xubuntu-devel mailing list on Thu Jan 27 22:06:35 UTC 2011

Becoming an Ubuntu Developer: a short guide

By nhandler | Published: 2011-01-27

I’ve heard and/or read a number of complaints over the past while about how the process of becoming an Ubuntu Developer is difficult, so I thought I’d write up a short guide to one of the many paths to becoming a developer. I send this to the Ubuntu Developers list for maximum distribution, although I realise that many of you are already developers, so won’t find this as useful: please skip past it, or pass it on to those you know that are currently interested in becoming Ubuntu Developers (or extending the set of packages to which they have been granted upload rights).

Step 1: Membership
While it’s not required to be an Ubuntu Member before applying to be a developer, it is required that the criteria of Membership be met to be approved as a developer. In short, this means being actively involved with and contributing to Ubuntu for some time (usually about a development cycle, although it can be shorter for those with very strong contributions). Spend time interacting with other members of the community, and learn as much about how Ubuntu works and how it is created as possible. Those with a specific interest in development may find that the Masters of the Unseeded or the Bug Squad are good places to start, if there is no other team with whom they have a natural affinity. Those of more general involvement may obtain membership through any number of other sorts of contributions. More information on the requirements for Membership are available on the wiki at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Membership

Step 2: Start working in the area for which you want upload rights
We have an increasing number of packagesets, each targeting a specific area of development, and the negative space of all packagesets, where we tend to focus mostly on archive quality. Find an area that interests you, and get to know the developers actively working in that area. Start working on things that fit within your area of interest, building both expertise with the work you have selected and close relationships with others working in the same area. For example, if you wish to be a server developer, start working to fix bugs in packages in the server packageset, working closely with the Ubuntu Server team. Alternately, if you wish to be a core developer, start working to fix bugs in packages in the core packageset, working closely with other core developers. Your goal in this step is to become a peer to the other members of the relevant team. You may find it useful to review https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuDevelopers to see some of the descriptions of the various sorts of developers.

Step 3: Prepare an application
Follow https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DeveloperMembershipBoard/ApplicationProcess to create your application. Clearly document your work in the areas of interest. Be especially sure to provide links to work done upstream (including in Debian) on packages in the target area, and any work where you were one of several contributing to a single uploaded revision, as the automated upload tracker in launchpad only reports those packages for which you have sole changelog credit. Documenting a few different types of work, or work in different parts of the release cycle (where different choices were required) can help show a broader understanding. The more specific you can be in every section of your application, the better: for example, a future plan to ensure Ubuntu provides the best possible turnkey PBX solution for the next LTS will often receive more credence than a short listing of "more of the same" for someone previously working on the VoIP stack, especially if it includes some details. If you are working on blueprints, listing your outstanding blueprint-related tasks here (with links) is a great way to provide detail. When seeking endorsements for your application, a good strategy is to ask anyone who suggests you should apply to endorse your application, and ask anyone sponsoring your work to endorse you (best to ask at the time they are sponsoring it). If someone says they haven’t seen enough of your work to endorse you, ask them for a task or two: helping folk with their work is nearly guaranteed to get you good endorsements.

Step 4: Apply
Check https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DeveloperMembershipBoard for upcoming meeting dates and times, and send a notification of your application to the mailing list at least a week before the meeting you wish to attend. Be prepared to answer a few questions: these are usually related to your prior work, other information on your application, or Ubuntu development policies and procedures. If your application is deferred for some reason, contact the DMB members who were not yet convinced, and ask them to help you develop a plan to meet their expectations: many current Ubuntu Developers were deferred at first pass, but it is a rare case that someone actively involved was unable to complete the expectations within a few months, and for some it is possible to address the outstanding issues in time for the following meeting.

Good luck. If you’re feeling stuck along the way, feel free to ask other developers with whom you work regularly for guidance or suggestions. Failing that, ask generally in #ubuntu-devel at freenode, or contact a member of the DMB.

Originally sent by Emmet Hikory to the ubuntu-devel mailing list on Thu Jan 27 05:01:01 UTC 2011

User Days January 29-30 Schedule

By pleia2 | Published: 2011-01-24

On the weekend of January 29-30th we will be hosting our 3rd Ubuntu User Days event in #ubuntu-classroom on irc.freenode.net (#ubuntu-classroom-chat for questions).

All times in the timetable are in UTC, click the time to find out your local time.

Saturday, January 29th

Time (UTC) Subject Presenter
08:30 Introduction to User Day nigelb, pleia2, nhandler
09:00 Software Installation shrini
10:00 Networking and sharing files in Ubuntu dnivra
11:00 Cloud for users Daviey
12:00 Ubuntu One ralsina
13:00 Finding Help in Ubuntu starcraftman
14:00 How to fix a broken machine popey
15:00 Switching from OS X aveilleux
16:00 Tips and tricks for multi-booters Cheri703
17:00 Inkscape Introduction doctormo
18:00 Command Line Email Clients for Ubuntu _marx_
19:00 Using IRC IdleOne
20:00 Accessibility apps Pendulum
21:00 Desktop Environments: Gnome, KDE, XFCE maco and pleia2
22:00 Command Line Basics imbrandon
23:00 Asking questions on Launchpad and Reporting bugs on Launchpad charlie-tca

Sunday, January 30th

Time (UTC) Subject Presenter
00:00 Switching from Windows cprofitt
01:00 Entertaining and educating kids using Ubuntu MichelleQ
02:00 Linux Security Myth maco
03:00 Unity jcastro and Dbo
04:00 What’s cooking in Ubuntu jcastro

For more information about User Days, including any last-minute adjustments to our schedule, please see our wiki page:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UserDays

Originally posted by Elizabeth Krumbach here on January 24, 2011 at 17:52

Free Culture Showcase

By pleia2 | Published: 2011-01-22

For the 11.04 Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase we (the attendees at the UDS session) thought it would be really good to set a theme. The decision was made in order to encourage people to create content with wider artistic merit.

The Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase is designed to help all of us show off the beauty of our creative work. We want the brief to inspire people to explore and celebrate their interpretation of Freedom.

The Brief: To create photography, illustration, music and video which express Freedom.

We are looking for beautiful, engaging and optimistic work that will serve to delight millions of people all over the world.

All submissions must be original work. Should you be combining content (for example using music to accompany a video), we must insist that all components are creative commons licensed (CC-BY-SA).

Videos can be animation or live action.

The creative brief is deliberately open but all submissions must follow the Ubuntu Code of Conduct (that means no nudity, swearing or anything that would upset your Mum or Dad!).

Judging criteria: contributions will be judged for production quality as well as creative merit.

Beta Freeze is March 24th so winners will be announced 18th March. All contributions that wish to be considered must be submitted by the 1st March 2011.

More details about where to put your submissions can be found on the free culture showcase wiki page on the Ubuntu wiki.

At UDS we also agreed that selecting judges from within the professional creative community would give us an opportunity to showcase our work to a broader audience. I am delighted to announce that the following people have agreed to sit on our judging panel:

André Durand: Artist
Anthony Melder: Creative Director, Iris
Peter Kirn: Create Digital Music
Peter Grundy: Grundini

Get creative!

Originally posted by Ivanka Majic here on January 20, 2011

Making Ubuntu More Personal: Identify Contributions To Engage More Personally

By akgraner | Published: 2011-01-22

A few weeks back I wrote about my desire to make Ubuntu feel more personal for new and existing contributors. The goal here is to help community members to have a fulfilling experience in which there is a very personal sense of engagement (i.e. people care about your specific contributions and experience with Ubuntu).

I wanted to share some work that we have been doing along these lines to not only show you kind of focus we are trying to take, but to also hopefully inspire some of you to take a similar interest in achieving the same kind of personal experience.

This project started when Daniel Holbach and I were discussing how to reach out to prospective developers better to give them a helping hand. One thing that struck us was that we didn’t have particularly good visibility on the timeline of someone’s contribution as a developer. Sure, we knew folks who would reach out to us for help and assistance, we knew people who would come to UDS, and we knew active contributors in #ubuntu-devel, but we suspected these folks were only part of the picture. Many people contribute to Ubuntu and we often don’t know some of them, let alone have an idea of their work so far.

Part of the goal here is to have better visibility on what someone has done so we can reach out and guide folks through their Ubuntu development adventure. The concept of a significant and sustained contributions has always been at the heart of how we assess our contributors for membership and upload access to our repositories, but it is often difficult to get a real feel for the sustained part. Daniel and I were keen to resolve this and get a better overview of people going through our developer programme and how much work they have performed.

To this end, we fleshed out a plan to programmatically generate a series of graphs for everyone who who was using the Ubuntu Sponsorship Queue to get their work in Ubuntu (in other words, prospective developers asking current developers to review their work and upload it), and then use this graph as a means to see the commonality of their contributions and how sustained they are.

Daniel put together these graphs by parsing upload emails and and the graph looks like this:

This is how it works:

  • Each individual graph shows a different contributor who is currently using the sponsorship queue to get their work in Ubuntu.
  • Each graph has the same start and end date (19th Sep 2008 – 23rd Dec 2010).
  • Each spike shows the number of accepted uploads made to the archive (i.e they had an upload successfully sponsored by a developer). Please note: unlike the X axis in the graph, the Y axis does not share the same scale (e.g. the top graph ranges from 0 – 7.5 contributions and the bottom is 0 – 6).

So what do these graphs tell us? Well, they give us a reasonable indication of those people who are actively contributing to Ubuntu in a significant and sustained way. This page gives us an opportunity to instantly look at all the people currently engaging with the sponsorship queue and see their contribution history. This enables us to do a number of things:

  • Reach out to those people who have been clearly performing significant and sustained contributions and ask them if there is anything we can do to help, give them encourage and respect, and otherwise make their experience more pleasant and encouraging.
  • It can sometimes be difficult for a prospective developer to know when they should apply to be a MOTU or core-dev. This provides us with a useful resource to see significant and sustained contributions and recommend those developers to apply for developer approval.
  • It gives us a chance to see commonalities of spikes of activity and dips in activity and to see what those causes are.

When the graph was in place and looked over it, I asked Daniel to start reaching out to different people to offer this help and guidance and already we have seen some wonderful results. These folks seem genuinely happy that we have reached out to them, and here are two examples of their feedback:

“Thanks for getting in touch, much appreciated and shows how Canonical cares about its community.”

“I appreciate your direct correspondence, this kind of stuff is what sets Ubuntu apart.”

This is exactly the kind of sense of personal care that I am keen for us to grow in the project. I want to say a huge thankyou to Daniel for his efforts on this, and I am looking forward to suggestions for other areas in which we can build a more personal and human Ubuntu experience.

Originally posted by Jono Bacon here on January 21, 2011