DIGG!!

Jono Bacon has announced the second Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase, this time for the Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope release!

The Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase is an opportunity to bring the best of two great worlds together by showing off high quality Free Culture content in Ubuntu. At the heart of Ubuntu’s ethos is a belief in showcasing Free Software and Free Culture, and with each development cycle we present the opportunity for any Free Culture artist to put their work in front of millions of Ubuntu users around the world. Although the space restrictions are tight, and we are limited to how much content we can include, the Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase is an excellent opportunity for artists everywhere.

The winning submissions will be made available on the shipped CDs and download images of the Ubuntu 9.04 release. Every user will be able to find the content in the Examples/ folder in a home directory.

With this competition we are now not only accepting submissions for audio and video, but also graphic/photo submissions. This opens up the competition to all of you budding photographers and artists. We have a winner to find for each category, and the competition closes on 6th February 2009.

Entering the showcase is simple:

• Your submission must be one of the following:
  • Audio Entries – no larger than 1MB in size – made available in Ogg Vorbis format.
  • Video Entries – no larger than 2.5MB in size – made available in Ogg Theora format.
  • Photo/Graphic Entries – no larger than 0.5MB in size – made available in PNG or JPG formats.
• All entries must be licensed and distributable under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license.
• Upload your submission somewhere online (there are lots of free hosting solutions available such as archive.org). Do not email any of the organisers or judges with your submissions.
• Add your entry to one of the submission tables at http://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuFreeCultureShowcase.
• When the deadline for submissions closes, our panel of judges will pick a shortlist, and the Community Council will then pick the final winners from the shortlist.

The deadline is 6th February 2009 and you can read more about it at http://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuFreeCultureShowcase.

With Ubuntu 8.10 out the door, LoCos all over the world have been celebrating the release. We catch up with the relatively new Zimbabwean team and the fast growing Iranian team, who both hosted release parties earlier this month.

Ubuntu Zimbabwe

On 1 November, the Zimbabwean Team held its first ever release party. People came from as far as 300km to attend the event. The IT manager of parliament, who is also a member of the LoCo, was present as well. Neil Coetzer says:

“The month of November left us with a great sense of achievement and satisfaction. In light of the political tension, violence and collapsed economy in our country, it was refreshing to see that Zimbabweans still have an active interest in Ubuntu and open source in general.”

Ubuntu Iran

The Iranian Team have shown good growth with their launch parties, roughly doubling their attendance figures every launch party since the 7.04 release. Mehdi Hassanpour says:

“The Iranian Team started their public work with Ubuntu 6.10 release and soon became a big mature Open Source promoter team in the area and now with more than 3000 users in forums and ~80 posts per day is a very fast growing comunity.”