Tag Archives: Community Council

Linux

Ubuntu Ohio – Burning Circle: Burning Circle Episode 112

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This week’s episode talks about introspection and assessing where we stand in terms of participation. A rough transcript is included below.

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Welcome to the Burning Circle. For release on Monday, April 29th, this is episode 112.

Well, where do we start? We had the conference call aborted last week as nobody showed up. Yeah, the exercise proved successful for Erie Looking Productions to be ready for the event and to come online for it. Notwithstanding how low the friction level was for this, the event failed. This will be assessed. We do have the capability to try this again and it is merely a phone call away.

Yes, e-mails continue to happen and I do seem to send something out at least once per week. The current e-mail that has gone out is for members to check that they have in fact signed the Code of Conduct on Launchpad and to ensure they’re up to date. In response to that e-mail there have already been a couple membership deactivations in response.

Membership within this community gets interesting. We have many people who claim affiliation but quite a number of folks who are quite marginally attached. As a community, activity is hard to spur. When you look at it, how do you spur activity when people shut out the mailing list, don’t participate at the forums, may or may not listen to the podcast, may or may not be aware of the LoCo’s presence on social media, and more?

In terms of lurking, you at least have a passing notion of what is happening. You might see what the mailing list says or occasionally pop in on the IRC channel. What we have is a bit of anti-social membership where people declare geographic affiliation but do not want to be involved and do not want to be contacted at all. That’s not good for a community’s health.

Where are we going? I know there have been rumbles of discontent for a while. People have felt very disconnected from being able to participate in decision-making within the Ubuntu project. However I also note that a majority of people have not taken steps to become enfranchised to do so by gaining status as an Ubuntu Member let alone developer membership. I have voting rights on confirming the Community Council along with six other members of our community. That leaves 410 members of our community as of time of recording who

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

Linux

Jono Bacon: Recent Ubuntu Community Refinements

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Our community is at the heart of how we build Ubuntu. Recently there were some concerns expressed about some aspects of our community and I have been working with various community members and internally at Canonical to resolve some of these issues to make things smoother.

I just wanted to summarize some updates:

  • Regular, transparent planning – we want to improve how we plan the delivery of work items, and make that planning more nimble. While the major decisions are reserved for primary discussion at UDS, we want to regularly and transparently checkpoint progress on those projects, and ensure things are moving along. To do this the engineering managers at Canonical will perform this planning on a monthly basis with our community. An an example, with my team, we will decide at UDS what major projects we will work on and document the work items in those blueprints, and every month I will ask the team to commit to delivering an agreed set of work items that month and update the blueprints accordingly. This will make it easier to understand who is working on what, what needs to be done, and areas in which people can participate. This entire process will be completely open and transparent and I would like to encourage our wider community to use the same approach. As an example, this could be a useful technique for our LoCo community to use for planning their work too around advocacy campaigns. All of this work will continue to be tracked openly in status.ubuntu.com.
  • Training our engineers – our engineers at Canonical are expected to openly and transparently perform all work that is not considered customer/company confidential. While this expectation is clear, there are sometimes cases when this doesn’t happen (e.g. if someone joins Canonical without the experience of working in an open environment and isn’t really sure how to do this). I have prepared an internal slide deck with these expectations and workflows clearly laid out; my team will be working to ensure everyone gets the deck, reads it, and gets an answer to any of their questions.
  • Regular leadership problem solving meetings – one problem we have today is that we don’t have a regular problem solving meeting in our community in which our governing leaders are present at. Instead our different leadership boards (e.g. Community Council, Forums Council) tend to resolve issues pertinent to that specific board. We think it could be useful to have a meeting every two weeks that has representatives from our different governance boards and our community can join and raise topics for discussion. We are going to run the first one of these sessions tomorrow (Tue 19th March 2013) on Ubuntu On Air at 8pm UTC. We invite you to bring your topics there on IRC for discussion.
  • Online UDS refinements – as I blogged about last week we have released a survey to gather feedback about how to refine and improve UDS. We have already made some plans for some improvements but …read more
    Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu
Linux

Martin Albisetti: It’s time

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So, I’ve been around the Ubuntu community for a while. I installed 4.10 (Warty Warthog) as soon as it came out, I was fighting to keep my Debian installation usable at the time. I instantly fell in love and dove into the community, I wanted to do whatever I could to make the project succeed. It was exactly what I was looking for. At the time, Canonical was also shipping CDs to anyone who wanted them, which gave the project a much more professional feel to it.
And, the focus Mark set for the project turned out to be the right one, it very quickly converted thousands of open source enthusiasts to it and a solid, technically capable community started to be built around it. Soon enough, with the focus laser-sharp on making Ubuntu as usable as possible, non-technical folks started to show up, people who were Windows users but were tired of it and looking for something better. These people gave our project an awesome foundation for support (once they figured out how to make certain things work, they’d immediately help the next person who came along with this problem). Translations grew, since it was a great way for a non-technical person to help. documentation grew, advocacy grew, communication, marketing, you name it, it was growing.
As things moved forward, there were some tough decisions to be made. I remember when Compiz came around, it was very immature and almost guaranteed it would break your system, just have a quick read through the Slashdot comments! You could very easily replace the word “compiz” for “unity” when it was first introduced and you’d have most of the same comments that went on when that first happened.
But, it was the right choice. The hard and unpopular choice. We, the community at large, mostly wanted a stable system. Mark, Canonical, were pushing to mature the technology so be able to build awesome things on top of it. It was the same story for Pulseaudio, the same for binary drivers, we’ve been here before, over and over.Change is very hard, and a lot of it feels wasteful. Nobody wants to waste their free time, you want to make it count.

As for where we stand today, I first want to be clear that my initial reaction to the flood of changes being proposed upset me as well. A lot. I laid low for a while so I could clear my head and understand what was going on before reacting. When the Rolling Releases proposal came out, I read the email on ubuntu-devel (which, btw, is where I read about it, there was no internal Canonical “announcement”) and I was frustrated with how it was being presented. It felt like Canonical imposing whatever they wanted, bulldozing over the community. How could Rick do something like that? He’s a smart and well-intentioned person, this isn’t the smart thing to do. I started writing up an angry email to the Community Council, and as …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu