Tag Archives: UDS

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Michael Hall: UDS 13.05: Ubuntu’s second online developer summit

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It’s official, UDS 13.05 is coming up next month, marking our second online Ubuntu Developer Summit, and coming only two months after the last one. While going virtual was part of our transition to make Ubuntu’s development more open and inclusive, the other side of that coin was to start holding them more often. The first we put into affect in March, and the second is coming in May. Read below for information about this UDS, and changes that have been made in response to feedback from the last one.

Scheduling

The dates for UDS 13.05 are May 14, 15 and 16, from 1400 UTC to 2000 UTC.  We will once again have 5 tracks: App Development, Community, Client, Server & Cloud and Foundations.  The track leads for these will be:

  • App Development: Alan Pope, David Planella & Michael Hall
  • Community: Daniel Holbach, Nick Skaggs & Jono Bacon
  • Client: Jason Warner & Sebastien Bacher
  • Server & Cloud: Dave Walker & Antonio Rosales
  • Foundations: Steve Langasek

Track leads will be in charge of approving Blueprints and getting them on the schedule.  If you are going to be responsible for running a session, please get with the track lead to make sure they have marked you as being required for that session. If you would like to get a session added for this UDS, you can do so either through registering a Blueprint or proposing a meeting through Summit itself.  Both approaches will require the approval of a Track Lead, so make sure you discuss it with them ahead of time.

Changes to…

Using feedback from attendees of the March UDS, we will be implementing a number of changes for UDS 13.05 to improve the experience.

Hangouts

Google+ Hangouts have a limit of 15 active participants (if started with a Canonical user account, it’s 10 if you don’t have a Google Apps domain), but in practice we rarely had that many people join in the last UDS.  This time around we’re going to encourage more people to join the video, especially community participants, so please check your webcams and microphones ahead of time to be ready.  If you want to join, just ask one of the session leaders on IRC for the hangout URL. We are also investigating ways to embed the IRC conversations in the Hangout window, to make it easier for those on the video to keep track of the conversation happening there.

The Plenaries

Most people agreed that the mid-day plenaries didn’t work as well online as they do in person.  There was also a desire to have a mid-day break to allow people to eat, stretch, or hold a sidebar conversation with somebody.  So we are replacing the mid-day plenaries with a “lunch” slot, giving you an hour break to do whatever you need to do. We will be keeping the introductory plenary on the morning of the first day, because that helps set the tone, goals and information needed for the rest of the week.  In addition to that, we have added back a closing plenary at the end of …read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

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Jono Bacon: More Regular, Open, and Transparent Planning

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Continuing with the work to refine and improve how we build Ubuntu in an open, transparent, and collaborative way, I want to take a few minutes to discuss some work going on to improve the regularity of our planning and the benefits this brings.

Traditionally planning for Ubuntu has worked like this.

  • We ship a release.
  • Shortly before a release we rapidly prepare blueprints for the next Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS). Everyone is welcome to participate.
  • We discuss topics at the UDS and jot down work items into blueprints.
  • We then execute on those work items over the course of the six month period.
  • We track this work on status.ubuntu.com and use burndown charts to visualize this progress.

While this has served us well, there are a few problems with this approach. The most notable issue is that we work in software, and a lot changes in software in a six month period. This means we define a set of work items, prepare the burndown, and then if requirements or direction changes it can be difficult to reflect those changes across our community and we have to go and postpone a bunch of work items and re-build our burndowns. This means that even though the changes are made to open blueprints, it can cause folks across our community to be out of sync. It also presents the misconception that everything at UDS is locked in for the duration of the six month cycle. If something changes in our strategy or a new opportunity opens up, it can be difficult to change coarse with everyone on the same page.

Solving this is part of our theme of making Ubuntu engineering as transparent and agile as possible.

One approach we are experimenting with in the Ubuntu Engineering Management team at Canonical is to increase the regularity and transparency of how we plan. Instead of locking in every six months we will do it like this:

  • We host the virtual UDS (vUDS) every three months and use the event as a means to plan out the next three months of work. All discussions are open, everyone is welcome to participate.
  • Blueprints will be used to track that work and work items will be divided up into monthly milestones.
  • On the last week of every month we will review the work performed in the last month to see how well it was completed and then plan the forthcoming month’s work. This provides an open opportunity to identify blockers, define new goals, and change coarse if needed.
  • A new burndown chart will be generated on status.ubuntu.com and we will host a Google+ Hangout presenting the goals for the next month to ensure that everyone is fully up to speed on what is going on.

Now, to set expectations clearly: this is just an idea for how to improve this workflow, and we are doing it for the first time this week, but the idea is that it will dramatically increase the transparency of which teams are working on what, making it easier for others to (a) know …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

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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
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Scott Kitterman: Kubuntu vUDS

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Kubuntu held it’s own mid-release cycle virtual meeting today.  The primary technical output was an agreed community position on the latest release management proposal.  Rather than quote the whole thing here, I’ll provide a link to the message I sent on behalf of Kubuntu to the Ubuntu Technical Board.  The bottom line is that this is a pretty good proposal from our point of view.

It’s also worth (I think) mentioning that we did this with Free Software using Mumble (it is, however, possible that some restricted wifi drivers were in use, I’m not sure).  One of the real disadvantages to the online format for UDS is that it removes the incentive for project wide, contemporaneous focus on what comes next.

…read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

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Michael Hall: Coming Soon: Unity 7

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I’m happy to announce that today I filed for a Feature Freeze Exception to get the latest Unity stack into Ubuntu Raring.  It’s a lot of new code, but it should all be available in a PPA in the next day or so, and it’ll be available there for about two weeks for people to test and provide feedback before it lands.  I won’t go into all of the fixes, performance work and other technical changes, but if you’re interested in what this means for you as a user, keep reading.

Smart Scopes

Discussed during a UDS-style Ubuntu On-Air hangout back in January, Smart Scopes use an intelligent server-side service to decide when they should be used to search.  This allows a single process (the Dash Home) to run a query through only a sub-set of your installed scopes.  It also allows the scopes processes to be terminated when you close the dash, and only re-start those that are likely to produce a relevant result.  As defined by the spec, this service will learn as more people use it, providing more relevant results, so you don’t get unwanted Amazon product results when it should be obvious you’re looking for an application.  It also means fewer running processes on your local machine, and therefore less memory usage overall.

100 Scopes

While there won’t be quite 100 in this release, there will be more scopes installed on the client than in previous releases, and even more that we will be able to implement on the server-side.  Thanks to the Smart Scope Service, these additional local scopes won’t be using up a lot of your system resources, because they’ll only be run when needed, then immediately terminated.  You will be able to install 3rd party scopes, just as before, even ones that the Smart Scope Service doesn’t know about yet.  Plus we will be able to add more server-side scopes during the lifetime of a stable release.  So while we’re not at 100 yet, there is still a large and growing number of scopes available.

Privacy

Now I know I couldn’t get away with talking about changes to the Dash, especially ones that put more of it’s functionality online, without talking about privacy concerns.  With these changes we’ve tried to strike a balance between control and convenience, privacy and productivity.  So while we’re providing more fine-grained controls over what scopes to enable, and whether or not to use the Smart Scope service, the default will still be to enable the services that we believe provides the best user experience on Ubuntu.  In addition, 13.04 has already added more notice to users that their the Dash will search online sources as well as local.

…read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

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Thoughts and worries about the proposed new Ubuntu processes

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Today began in a virtual UDS session (Google Hangout) with the Xubuntu team. The video can be seen here: http://summit.ubuntu.com/uds-1303/meeting/21666/community-xubuntu-contingencies/ . Xubuntu devels stopped by #kubuntu-devel and asked us to bring our list of concerns to share. The list we developed:

  • The new system will do away with releases for each upstream KDE release, which is a prominent feature of Kubuntu. One idea is to do releases of LTS+PPA with latest KDE but that’s against policy and needs technical changes to make happen. Or will there be a way to create ISOs from PPAs?

  • Mir is a worry since KWin will clash with it (a compositing manager inside a compositing manager). How good will continued Wayland and X support be?

  • Where to put Beta releases of software? Testing is a huge part of quality. So while a PPA seems the obvious suggestion, but they’ll get less testing there. Now we use a beta ppa only for backports. Consistent quality would require staging major changes somewhere else.

  • How will library transitions be handled outside of cadence?

  • Launchpad breakdowns. We are trying to automate more of our building tasks, but often the scripts must be run repeatedly because of Launchpad timeouts.

  • Weakness of unit & hardware testing. This is crucial for a successful rolling release.

  • Security updates – who gets them? When, and how often? (LTS will get them as usual, but for rolling it seems the monthly snapshots don’t get any? you need to use rolling)

<span style="background-color: transparent;color: black;font-family: Arial;font-size: 15px;font-style: normal;font-variant: normal;font-weight: normal;text-decoration: none;vertical-align: …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet KDE

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Stephen Michael Kellat: Ever Onward

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To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace. — Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 (King James Version)

Well, UDS-1303 is now over. It appears that some folks in the community have been overtaken by the number of changes that have been proposed recently. That much is understandable. During sessions I participated in during UDS-1303, I kinda was a broken record talking about the need for change management.

For many this has been a time to speak. Indeed, there was much discussion during the summit. There were also many announcements of community members departing.

It is unfortunate that community members are departing. I hope they find success in their new endeavors. With the state of the technology world as of late, departures need not necessarily be permanent as paths may well cross again in the future. With new synergies erupting in the most unexpected of places it is inevitable that we may perhaps meet again.

The bumper sticker sized key to UDS-1303 is that discussion happened in a format very different from an e-mail list. For the proposals that were initially made by e-mail, this pretty much had to happen as slinging decontextualized text back and forth in that communications paradigm can be limiting. After concerns, proposals, counter-proposals, technical nightmares, fears, anticipations, hopes, and potential excitements more were expressed I look forward to seeing a more fleshed out proposal for rolling releases.

The problem is that at the broadest level it is easy to talk about rolling releases. When you get down to the nuts and bolts of it is when it gets pretty complicated and can at times resemble a Gordian Knot. As evidenced at UDS-1303, there are many possible methodologies and risk is unavoidable.

As initially proposed, I did not favor the proposal due to uncertainties and a lack of nuts & bolts details. After the discussions that have ensued, I’m ready to wait for the full proposal to be released by Rick Spencer that is fleshed out so that I can consider this further. I heard many interesting potential approaches to the nuts & bolts of doing this during UDS-1303 and eagerly await what is settled on …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

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Ubuntu Ohio – Burning Circle: Burning Circle Episode 104

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Tonight’s episode provides a follow-up to UDS-1303. Normal episode release cadence will resume on March 11, 2013.

Download here (MP3) (ogg) (FLAC), or subscribe to the podcast (MP3) to have episodes delivered to your media player. We suggest subscribing by way of a service like gpodder.net. Materials to support the work of the Air Staff of Erie Looking Productions can be purchased via their Amazon wish list.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/.

For the avoidance of uncertainty, this is a rough transcription:

Welcome to the Burning Circle. For release on Wednesday, March 6th,
this is episode 104.

This has been an exciting week full of announcements and thought to
be full of change. Now that the March virtual developer summit has
concluded it appears that actually no change has happened at all. I
must point out to our earnest listeners that until the Technical
Board says otherwise, Feature Freeze is still taking place on March
7th and the Raring Ringtail release cycle is continuing as it is. I
repeat, the Raring Ringtail release cycle is continuing as it is
until the Technical Board says otherwise.

There was quite a bit of discussion during all the video streaming
sessions. Quite a bit of it kept coming back to feeling a lack of
readiness for rolling releases. Implementation was a key sticking
point as multiple methodologies were batted around with no resolution
in sight. Technical nightmares were identified, grievances were
aired, ideas were proposed, and ultimately time was used for
discussion.

What does this mean for Ubuntu Ohio? At this point, we keep going.
As a community we need to keep testing the development release. We
need to celebrate wins and strengthen software when we can. We need
to help increase the number of officially recognized Ubuntu Members
and Kubuntu Members within our state so that we know we have a solid
core to help our team grow. Raring Ringtail enters the Feature
Freeze stage of the cycle Thursday so we can look ahead to
celebrating release in April perhaps.

Sometimes a radical proposal needs some softening and leavening.
This virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit was an attempt at that. Go back
and watch the videos. If you want to see me leading a virtual
session at this summit, look for “Consider General Contingencies for
Xubuntu” on YouTube, which Producer Gloria wound up helping me with.
Maybe this may inspire you to …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

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Howard Chan: Some thoughts about Canonical and the community

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Yesterday I had a chat with Jono Bacon and Michael Hall from the Canonical Ubuntu Community Team. I first asked them why aren’t they doing at least one physical UDS per year, and they clearly seemed opposing my argument. Then I asked how about per post-LTS and such, and they still don’t see the need for it. Then I saw Pasi Lallinaho’s post about UDS and Canonical away from community, and I agreed.

The problem we have here is this:

Community finds it difficult to adopt

For example, we are now just near Ubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail) Feature Freeze, and now suddenly Canonical’s Technical Lead Rick Spencer wants to step in and say “let’s cancel it for good”. It clearly destroys all the original plans for 13.04, especially for flavours. For example, Ubuntu Studio originally has some plans made for 13.04. Now it’s even unsure would these not be released to the public on April this year.

Update: Jonathan Riddell saved it for good, but fhe future of 13.10 and 14.10 is unknown.

UDS destroys comunity friendship

Canonical is happy that they don’t need to sponsor anyone now, but then this really breaks the Ubuntu community, especially teams of flavours, which now doesn’t have much chance to meet each other……..

People are leaving

From Planet Ubuntu + Google+ at least 4 community members have left the Ubuntu community because of Canonical’s decisions. Most of them even gave up Ubuntu membership. Is this what we want? Canonical being “Big Brother” in the Ubuntu community?

Summary

Canonical has been annoucing decisions that threatens the Ubuntu community. I really hope that the relations can be repaired.

Leave comments if you wish:-)

…read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

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Charles Profitt: Ubuntu: Time to Take the Shot

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Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes
It has been an eventful week in the world of Ubuntu. It started with a move to an online format for UDS, progressed through a discussion about the possibility of rolling releases and the announcement of Mir as a replacement for X windowing. That is a lot of change. I have waited until now to write about these changes because I wanted to take my time to reflect on each of them and Ubuntu as a project.

Today the Ubuntu Community Council had a discussion about these events with Mark Shuttleworth. There was one consistent theme; we all want Ubuntu to be successful. One thing Mark expressed is that for Ubuntu to be successful it must succeed with lots of people across all the platforms they use. I agree with him; I would not consider Ubuntu a success if it ends up being no more than the most popular linux distribution for desktops and laptops.

It is my opinion that the emergence of phones and tablets as personal computing devices presents an amazing opportunity for Ubuntu. The two major players, Android and iOS, are tablet and phone operating systems only. Apple has OS X and Google has chrome, and there is no doubt in my mind that they are working towards a convergence as well. The time for Ubuntu to take the lead is now. This would be a dramatic change for Linux in general and Ubuntu specifically. I have no doubt that the incredibly talented people at Canonical and in the Ubuntu Community have a real shot at taking the lead and getting their first. I imagine this process will involve periods of chaos and moments of pain that will require decisive and difficult decisions.

Technology moves rapidly so this opportunity needs to be seized quickly and will require the community and Canonical to be agile. With this in mind one can begin to understand the recent changes and announcements.

UDS Goes Online:
The first thing that has to be acknowledged is that this decision was poorly timed for members of the community. Many people, including myself, are not going to be able to attend sessions due to being at work. With less than a weeks notice there was simply not enough time to take time off from work. While my initial thoughts were focused on the lack of in-person time and the informal conversations that happen outside the sessions I realized today, after attending one session, that there were many things that would be better. Todays remote experience was a far better than my previous remote sessions. I was able to clearly understand what was being said by the people in the hangout compared to poor audio from the fish bowls of the past. I saw more people contributing to the pad and more attention paid to the IRC channel. When I attended sessions remotely in the past I felt like a person that got bad …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

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Brendan Donegan: Thoughts on hosting a good UDS session

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The inaugural online UDS (or vUDS as it’s becoming known) is underway. This brings with it a number of new challenges in terms of running a good session. Having sat in on a few sessions yesterday and been the session lead for several sessions at physical UDS’s going back nearly two years now, I thought I’d jot down a few tips on how to run a good session.

Prepare

Regardless of whether the session is physical or virtual, it’s always important to prepare. The purpose of a UDS session is to get feedback on some proposed plan of work (even if it is extremely nebulous at the time of the session). Past experience shows that sessions are always more productive where most of the plan is already fleshed out prior to the session and the session basically functions as a review/comments meeting. This depends on your particular case though, since the thing you are planning may not be possible to flesh out in a lot of detail without feedback. I personally find this is rarely the case though.

Be punctual

UDS runs on a tight schedule, at least in the physical version, although I don’t see any good reason why this should change for vUDS. Punctuality is therefore important not as good manners but from a practical point of view. You need to time to compose yourself, find notes and make sure everything is set up. For a physical UDS this would have been to check microphones are working and projectors are projecting. For a vUDS, in my brief experience, this means making sure everyone who needs to be is invited into the hangout and that the etherpad is up and the video feed is working on the session page.

Delegate

As the session lead it is your responsibility to run a good session, however it will be impossible for you to perform all the tasks required to achieve this on your own. Someone needs to be making notes on the Etherpad and someone needs to be monitoring IRC. You should also be looking out for questions yourself but since you may be concentrating on conveying information and answering other questions, you do need help with this.

Avoid going off track

Time is limited in a UDS session and you may have a lot of points to get through. Be wary of getting distracted from the point of the session and discussing things that may not be entirely relevant. Don’t be afraid to cut people short – if the question is important to them then you can follow up offline later.

Manage threads of communication

This one is quite vUDS specific, but especially now that audiovisual participation is limited, it is important that all of the conversation take place in one spot. Particularly for people who are catching up with the video streams later on. Don’t allow a parallel conversation to develop on IRC if possible. If someone asks a question in IRC, repeat it to the video audience and answer it in the hangout, not on …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

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Joel Pickett: UDS-1303, Day One

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Now UDS-1303 Tuesday is through, I’d like to recap on a couple of the sessions I watched on Google+ Hangouts.

Rolling Release discussion (+1 maintenance beyond April)

Interesting discussion which included some of the System76 folks that basically said that the Ubuntu release schedule works fine for their clients. They ship the latest LTS, 12.04, and the current stable release, 12.10. They pointed out that each release of Ubuntu has been a clear improvement over the previous release (phew!), and were looking forward to the upcoming Raring Ringtail. Very compelling to hear straight from the OEM vendors – they have been shipping Ubuntu for the past fifteen (yes, that’s 15!) releases.

Rick Spencer outlined the idea to keep LTS releases and focus on daily quality with monthly pulses. I think this is an interesting concept in relation where Ubuntu is as a platform. If this idea had been discussed around the days that I started as an Ubuntu user (Intrepid Ibex era), the daily quality was just not there. It was more of a sentiment to encourage users not to use the development build until the later alpha snapshots, or even beta releases.

These days I’ve been using the Quantal and Raring dailies with minimal disruption, essentially my desktop and laptops feel like a normal (release) install. It’s just that updates are much more frequent and I’m using the latest available version of the software.

Loco discussion (LoCo community – what’s next?)

Another interesting discussion was the concept of approved and unapproved LoCo teams. I’m a member of the Australian LoCo, which is currently approved. As Jono stated in the session, I think there’s less of a need for approved LoCo teams now. The main benefit of being an approved LoCo is that, historically, LoCos would be sent CD’s/DVD’s, stickers and other Ubuntu merchandise around releases and conferences. This isn’t particularly sustainable to send a pack to all approved LoCos each release, and arguably more people are using other media like USBs to install Ubuntu.

The other concern was the labelling and divide of LoCo teams. It should be noted that being an unapproved team doesn’t make you any less important than an approved LoCo. At the end of the day, LoCos will be recognised for the work that they do, supported by Planet Ubuntu blog posts, pictures of events (release parties, conference talks, Ubuntu Hours, Ubuntu Global Jam sessions) and team reports.

Thoughts on the first online UDS

On the whole, I think it went quite fine. I think if the LTS release structure is continued, I think a physical week-long UDS would be appropriate at least once through the LTS cycle. It’s also a positive bonus that everything is logged and the sessions are available once the session ends for people that have missed the session. These short UDS place a focus on detailed discussion, though if anything is missed, we’ll be able to revisit it again at the next UDS in a few months or on ubuntu-devel.

It would have been nice for Mark Shuttleworth to comment …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

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13.04 to go Ahead

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Of all the nutty things Canonical has done in the last week wanting to drop 13.04 four months into development and two months before release is one of the more anti-social to the community who have been working on it. Fortunately at the “UDS” session today I poked enough and we seem to have consensus that it’ll go ahead on the schedule we agreed at UDS last October. Feature freeze on Thursday my friends, two days to go.

…read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet KDE

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Kaj Ailomaa: Future Ubuntu Studio changes

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The first UDS (Ubuntu Developer Summit) of the year has just started. It’s now an online event, held every three months, where Ubuntu developers and contributors meet and discuss future development goals.

UDS used to be a physical event, held every 6 months, just after a new release of Ubuntu. Traditionally participants is a mix of Canonical employees, sponsored participants, and volunteers. It’s free and open for anyone to attend. Usually at least the project lead of each of the official Ubuntu flavors would attend. In October I attended when it was held in Copenhagen, and the year before, in US, Scott Lavender, the project lead of Ubuntu Studio attended.

Many things are being discussed during UDS that might radically change how Ubuntu Studio, and other community Ubuntu flavors will be developed and supported in the future.

Moving Towards Rolling Release?

One of the major topics for this UDS is the discussion on whether or not Ubuntu should start using the rolling release model. The LTS(Long Term Release) will still continue, as Canonicals clients value that,  while the interim release is proposed to be dropped.

Many ideas are floating around how to make this work. So far, northing’s conclusive, but it seem sto me, reading mail lists and such, that many people want it to happen, even if this does cause quite a bit of disturbance among flavor developers, who have been planning for a release in April for the last six months.

X Window to be replaced by MIR

Many things were announced at the same time, and while the rolling release is still up for discussion, it seems that the move towards replacing the X window system with MIR is already decided. Of course, at this point nothing is for sure, since MIR still needs to be developed, and the change will not come instantly. The goal is for a full change by the release of 14.04 LTS.

This will be a huge change for the community, as it means either all of the desktop systems on Ubuntu will need to support MIR, or the current X window system will need to be fully supported by the community developerst, since Unity – the Ubuntu desktop system will not be using X, and thus, they will not be supporting it.

What will this mean for Ubuntu Studio?

Right now, we don’t really know. In many ways, Ubuntu Studio itself is quite flexible, as we do not actually depend on any specific windowing or desktop system (as long as our applications are able to run on it, though we prefer to stay with XFCE), and our main concern about the rolling release is really just will it be stable enough for users? Some of our users don’t need anything but a LTS, but that is a minority of our users. A potential rolling release will be our main release, and it needs to be good and usable.

…read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

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Andrea Grandi: UDS happening online only: pros and cons

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When last week Canonical announced the usual UDS was not going to happen I was a bit shocked and disappointed: starting from the next UDS (that is going to happen tomorrow!) the event will be online only and every 3 months. During these days I’ve been thinking a lot about this move and I will tell you what are the pros and cons, in my opinion, followed by some final thoughts.

Pros

Having 4 UDS every year, instead of 2, is surely a better thing. I’m a big fan of Scrum methodology, so I think that iterating more often is better than iterating less. If there are any mistakes you can correct them and iterating again before releasing the final product.

Potentially more people can partecipate to the event (even the opposite is true and I will explain why). People won’t need to move from home, travel, pay any expense etc… they just need a computer and a good Internet connection.

It’s cheaper for everyone: I can just imagine how expensive could be for Canonical to organize a similar event. Booking a big hotel, paying travel and expenses to near one houndred of community people. People who didn’t get any sponsorization had to pay all the travel expenses to attend the event.

Cons

Potentially less people can partecipate to the event. Yes, like I said before even this sentence is true and I will explain why. First of all, using Google+ there are at least three countries that will be cut out: China, Thailand and Vietnam. Google+ is not available in those countries.

Are you sure that special people will be able to follow the event? For example blind people won’t be able to chat or to ask question in the chat.

Only 10 people will be able to talk. In normal UDS sessions more people could raise the hand and ask a question or interact with the track leaders. Who will choose the 10 people with audio+video streaming rights?

We will completly miss the social aspect of the UDS. If you think this was only a secondary part, please go on. I felt more committed to work and collaborate with people I met in person than with someone I’ve never met before.

Announcing an event, even if online, just one week before it happens. Really? Some people had already taken vacation from work, booked flights etc… not counting many people that can’t take 2 days off from work just with 1 week notice period. It’s also almost impossible that community members have the time to schedule a blueprint and be able to discuss about a subject.

Final thoughts

From a cutting costs point of view I really can’t say anything. Organizing UDS was surely very expensive for Canonical and nobody can blame them if they decided to spend those money in a different way.

What really concerns me: is UDS still useful? My opinion is that at least since latest 2 or 3 UDS the presence of the Community was not so relevant, because I had the clear sensation that the …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

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Jono Bacon: Getting Started With The First Online Ubuntu Developer Summit

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Tomorrow we will be running our very first online Ubuntu Developer Summit. The event will take place over two days and span a range of different tracks: Community, Client, Cloud & Server, App Developers, and Foundations. We have never run an event like this before, but we have prepared extensively to deliver the best online UDS experience we can. When UDS is complete we will then review any rough edges and fix those up for the next event in May.

With this being a new event, I wanted to share some key tips about how to get participate.

For Everyone

UDS takes place on Tues 5th – Wed 6th March 2013 from 2pm UTC. Please note: the original time was 4pm UTC, but we brought the event forward by two hours.

The full event is taking place online and everyone is welcome to join, irrespective of whether you are an active contributor to the community, a partner, a business, an enthusiast, or anyone else. We will be using Google+ Hangouts On Air to stream video from the active participants in the session, and we also provide quick embedded access to IRC, note-taking, and more.

The event will kick off on Tuesday at 2pm UTC with a keynote session. There will then be two hours of sessions, then an hour of plenaries, and then another two hours of sessions. On the Wednesday we will kick off into sessions at 2pm, and have lightning talks in the normal plenary slot. Jorge Castro is taking care of the plenary talks and lightning talks; reach out to him if you want to run a lightning talk.

There are five tracks, with each (apart from Foundations) having two video streams. Each track has two track leads:

  • Client – Jason Warner, Sebastien Bacher
  • Server and Cloud – Antonio Rosales, Daviey Walker
  • Community – Jono Bacon, Daniel Holbach
  • App Developers – Alan Pope, David Planella
  • Foundations – Steve Langasek

You can find all sessions listed at summit.ubuntu.com. Just visit the session you are interested in at the time of the session to view it; everything is included on the session page. You don’t need anything other than a web browser to view sessions but you will need a Google+ account to actively participate in a hangout.

For Track Leads

You should have all received an email from me about how to schedule sessions and how to start and stop the video streams.

Remember to ensure your Google+ is verified (Michael Hall should have checked this with you).

You and your co-track lead should pick one of the two tracks you have for your track and take care of setting up those streams.

Five minutes before a session (e.g. 1.55pm) is due to begin you should start the video stream and update the session in summit.ubuntu.com with the hangout and broadcast URLS. Likewise, 55 minutes into a session (e.g. 2.55pm), be sure to stop the hangout. We need to start and stop the video streams to ensure the recordings are broken up into the different hour long chunks. Required participants will automatically see a …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

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Pasi Lallinaho: Is UDS no longer UDS?

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This week Jono Bacon announced that Ubuntu Developer Summits will become a series of online events. Having thought about it a few days, I’m now ready to input my own opinion to the discussion.

In the announcement Jono lists openness, transparency and accessibility as the major goals of the Ubuntu Developer Summits (UDS). The decision to move to an online event is supposed to improve these.

In this article I will explain why I don’t think it will, and why the new format looks just another Canonical team sprint. I’ll also cover some of my concerns over the accessibility and equality of the new format and important things I think the online events will lack, but shouldn’t. I will also discuss some of my opinions on how this changes the nature of UDS and the meaningfulness to flavors as well as how this change affects the Canonical-community relations.

Openness, transparency and accessibility

I value openness and transparency very much. However, I’m not sure if the new online format will increase them in any way. Canonical is already making many decisions that affect the community in-house, behind closed doors. Unfortunately, these decisions and their results don’t always roll out as expected.

Until now the community has had at least some voice in the discussion, or at least have been able to react to changes, if they have been discussed in UDS. It’s a pessimistic view, but I can’t see why Canonical employees would start discussing and working more closely now with the community on decisions that have already been made. Now that the event is online, it’s much easier to have more discreet, even hidden meetings about things where community input would be largely unwanted or at least ignored à la the in-house pre-UDS sessions.

While it’s evident that a physical event has limitations when it comes to accessibility, so does an online event. One of the main reasons that made the Canonical-community communication so effective in UDS was that everybody got together, in the same place and at the same time. This means everybody participating in person is (ideally) always available and 100% focused on the sessions.

Now that the event takes place online, people will not be as committed to participating a session in every slot. Even when they are participating, the session might not get their full attention, because there are more distractions when working online.

When people aren’t participating in a session, they most probably won’t be available, which means there won’t be any substitution to the off-session discussions. This is sad, because this used to be one of the most powerful features of UDS for officially recognized flavors (such as Xubuntu) and I believe for numerous other teams as well. Even if people did have these off-session discussions, they are just as useful as contacting anybody via IRC or email any time, so there’s no real benefit of the centralized time. As a matter of fact, people might be even busier than usually during the online events, making it even harder to …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

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Thierry Carrez: UDS is dead, long live ODS

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Back from a (almost) entirely-offline week vacation, a lot of news were waiting for me. A full book was written. OpenStack projects graduated. An Ubuntu rolling release model was considered. But what grabbed my attention was the announcement of UDS moving to a virtual event. And every 3 months. And over two days. And next week.

As someone who attended all UDSes (but one) since Prague in May 2008, as a Canonical employee then as an upstream developer, that was quite a shock. We all have fond memories and anecdotes of stuff that happened during those Ubuntu developer summits.

What those summits do

For those who never attended one, UDS (and the OpenStack Design Summits that were modeled after them) achieve a lot of goals for a community of open source developers:

  1. Celebrate recent release, motivate all your developer community for the next 6 months
  2. Brainstorm early ideas on complex topics, identify key stakeholders to include in further design discussion
  3. Present an implementation plan for a proposed feature and get feedback from the rest of the community before starting to work on it
  4. Reduce duplication of effort by getting everyone working on the same type of issues in the same room and around the same beers for a few days
  5. Meet in informal settings people you usually only interact with online, to get to know them and reduce friction that can build up after too many heated threads

This all sounds very valuable. So why did Canonical decide to suppress UDSes as we knew them, while they were arguably part of their successful community development model ?

Who killed UDS

The reason is that UDS is a very costly event, and it was becoming more and more useless. A lot of Ubuntu development happens within Canonical those days, and UDS sessions gradually shifted from being brainstorming sessions between equal community members to being a formal communication of upcoming features/plans to gather immediate feedback (point [3] above). There were not so many brainstorming design sessions anymore (point [2] above, very difficult to do in a virtual setting), with design happening more and more behind Canonical curtains. There is less need to reduce duplication of effort (point [4] above), with less non-Canonical people starting to implement new things.

Therefore it makes sense to replace it with a less-costly, purely-virtual communication exercise that still perfectly fills point [3], with the added benefits of running it more often (updating everyone else on status more often), and improving accessibility for remote participants. If you add to the mix a move to rolling releases, it almost makes perfect sense. The problem is, they also get rid of points [1] and [5]. This will result in a even less motivated developer community, with more tension between Canonical employees and non-Canonical community members.

I’m not convinced that’s the right move. I for one will certainly regret them. But I think I understand the move in light of Canonical’s recent strategy.

What about OpenStack Design Summits ?

Some people have been asking me if …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

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Chris Johnston: vUDS

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Most people are probably aware by now that this Tuesday, 5 March starts the first of the new virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit events. In order to handle the changes nicely, we have made some changes to the Summit Scheduler. The changes that we made allows a meeting and/or a summit to be set as ‘virtual.’ When a meeting is set as virtual, the meeting page will render with a new virtual layout. This layout includes the Google Hangout broadcast, the IRC channel via the webchat client, and the Etherpad, all embedded on in the page. The required participants for a meeting will also be given a link to participate in the hangout. Both the embedded broadcast and the hangout link have to manually be added by the track lead prior to each meeting. If the hangout broadcast isn’t available when you visit the page, please be patient and wait for the data to be added. Once the information is added to Summit, the meeting page should automatically load the hangout broadcast.

Please don’t forget to test using hangouts prior to UDS starting so that we can minimize the number of issues we have with the hangouts. A “best practices” guide has been created for use during the Ubuntu On Air events. Please take the time to look at these practices before Tuesday.

…read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

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Joel Pickett: UDS-1303 Summaries and Lightning Talks

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“Steam”, “Ubuntu TV”, “Ubuntu Phone”, “Ubuntu Tablet”, “Ubuntu for Android”.

12 months ago these keywords were merely ideas, possibilities that were seemingly unclear. Skip forward to today and we have a totally different perspective. Steam is on Ubuntu. Developer previews have been released for the phone and tablet. Unity is mature on the desktop. Fast, functional, easy-to-use and visually appealing.

With the increased use of Google+ Hangouts, ala Ubuntu OnAir, I think it’s certainly worth trying to use the technology to host more frequent sprints and community-wide discussion.

Unfortunately, for the dubbed UDS-1303, the sessions are being held between 1am-7am local time. In effect, I’ll be able to participate (read: watch) the summaries and lightning talk sessions.

Hopefully the next UDS-(1305?) will be scattered along different time zones.

…read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu