Ubuntu Website and the Community Link

There has been much teeth gnashing about the removal of the ‘Community’ link from the top of the ubuntu.com site. As a member of the Ubuntu Community Council I have tried to gather my thoughts before blogging about this. Recently, I read an article that got me rather upset.

The Community Link:
First I want to layout my thoughts on the primary issue of the ‘Community’ link being moved to the footer. It is my opinion that the importance of the change is elevated by the recent mis-communications between Canonical and the community. Some have pointed out that promises have been made, but not kept. I can categorically state that I, as a member of the Community Council, have seen an improved effort from Canonical to inform the Community Council. As an example we were informed prior to the public discussion of the suggestion ‘click packages’. From my perspective ‘click packages’ are much more likely to have an impact on Ubuntu than the placement of the ‘Community’ link.

There is a UDS session scheduled to discuss this and if you are interested I would suggest you attend. In that blueprint I made a suggestion that some data on page views should be looked at. Peter has posted the following:

AFTER Apr 15, 2013-May 9, 2013 compare to BEFORE Mar 21, 2013-Apr 14, 2013

Pageviews
-32.69%
90,700 vs 134,740

Unique Pageviews
-31.54%
76,853 vs 112,261

Avg. Time on Page
33.75%
00:01:24 vs 00:01:03

Entrances
2.68%
52,548 vs 51,174

Bounce Rate %
-1.04%
60.54% vs 61.17%

it appears to be a 1/3 drop-off in page views, with a 1/3 equal increase in time on page.

With this data it would appear that there is a drop off and the traffic to the page has decreased. There is a session at UDS to discuss this and if it is important to you I would attend the session and subscribe to the blueprint.

The Community Response:
I want to clearly indicate that this IS NOT aimed at the broad community, but those that historically over-react in a dramatic negative fashion. There have been multiple instances of community members invoking the Hitler meme in regards to Mark Shuttleworth and the Nazi party in regards to Canonical. I can not fathom any rational person invoking this imagery in regards to Mark or Canonical. In all my dealings with Mark he has been respectful, thoughtful and compassionate. When I analyze what Mark values it is the success of Ubuntu. He understands that difficult decisions will need to be made for that to happen. When the Code of Conduct was revised it was to help ensure that the pitfalls other open source projects have been derailed by can be avoided by the Ubuntu project. I will echo that I have yet to work with a Canonical employee who has not been willing to listen to feedback or been disrespectful.

As a community member I find such attacks a violation of the Code of Conduct and as a person I find the comparison to be completely unacceptable. It is one thing to disagree respectfully, but making comparison’s to Hitler or the Nazi party is not acceptable.

Ubuntu Teams: Approval and Boundaries Discussion.

Yesterday in the Ubuntu Community Roundtable session and idea was put forth by Jono Bacon to remove the term ‘approved’ from the loco team lexicon. It was further suggested to remove the boundary restrictions currently in place. These ideas have been floating around in the community since, my first UDS, UDS-N in Orlando Florida.

For me one of the first things that I notice is that there are already exceptions to the ‘rules’. For example, there are city teams (Chicago and Dallas), but new city based teams are not allowed. I am in New York State so I might be a bit biased, but I would personally think having an Ubuntu New York City team would be good thing. New York City is the 8th largest city (population) in the world. It is also 342 mile from where I live so there is little chance that people from my area would travel there or vice-versa. In my city we actually have two Linux user groups; one at a prestigious technical university and one for the general community. The technical university focuses more on development, and the general community group on specific implementations of applications and general use. Two different groups with two different needs. Both groups exist and thrive separately as well as cooperate when interests overlap.

I want to be clear; I do not think this should be forced, nor do I think it should be something that requires approval.

It is my personal opinion that the challenges that face teams are each unique; they will vary based on culture, language, geographic distance, population density and other variables. Ubuntu users should be able to choose how to organize themselves without artificial organizational boundaries placed on them.

From my understanding the original structure was put in place to control the flow of resources like CDs, conference packs, etc. There will still be a need for some control in regards to resources, and this is an issue that must be discussed and worked out. I feel strongly that this need should not inhibit the freedom of Ubuntu users to organize and grow in a way that best suits the needs of their area or group.

If you are interested in having input on this discussion please attend the UDS session this Thursday and subscribe to the blueprint.

Freedom and Community

I have read a great many posts about the events of the past ten days in the world of Canonical. Each has an opinion and I, as a rule, understand that people have their own unique opinions. I will not call them wrong or incorrect even though I may disagree with them. Why? It is because I know everyone has a different lens to view the events from; they may see things I do not and vice versa. What follows is a sample of these comments and my opinion.

Canonical started making the relationship unequal, though. They have their reasons and they make sense to them. But they are hurtful to me and I can’t be true to myself and live under them at the same time.

Their true side starts to show itself in those heated moments when you wonder what is really going through  their head.

 Greg Grossmeier (full text)

The first part quote from Greg’s post is spot on. Greg no longer ‘agrees’ with the decisions and direction of the community. Everyone has a right to have an opinion and a belief. What troubles me is the the second quote from the post; it implies that Canonical has been dishonest. If you read the rest of the post Greg clearly states that Canonical has been lying to him. I will admit that I am not fully aware of the relationship between Greg and Canonical, but I do believe there could be another explanation. An explanation that does not require one of the partners to be vilified. Is it possible that both Greg and Canonical shared the same vision and dream in the beginning, but things have changed? Is it possible that Greg and Canonical had similar visions and dreams, but that Greg missed slight differences?

When Ubuntu launched I doubt many thought smart phones would run full blown OSes and be capable of replacing laptops. It took the iPad in 2010 to make people believers in tablets as computing devices for the masses. The slogan was Linux for Human Beings. At launch that meant desktops, laptops and servers, not tablets and phones. I do not view the push to go to tablets and phones as a deviation from that original slogan. The computing world is changing and that is driving changes to how things need to get done in order for Ubuntu to be Linux for Human Beings.

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?

Howard Chan (full text)

It is true that people are leaving the community. People were leaving the community before these announcements. People are also joining the community after these announcements. Here again there is an assertion that Canonical is being bad when the image of George Orwell’s 1984 is invoked by calling Canonical “Big Brother”. I need to be honest; this type of allegation bothers me greatly. In the past I have seen Canonical compared to the Nazi party as well. These comparisons are so far off the mark it would be funny if it was not so insulting and insensitive for someone to invoke them. Canonical has not declared war, taken innocent people prisoner nor have they tried to brainwash people.

Jono,

You were warned plenty. It’s not your fault. You had to deliver decisions against the best interests of the Ubuntu peer community and in favour of the Canonical community. Driving so hard towards product nirvana that peer relationships were driven into the ground. I’m sure you disagree that the community is dead, but eventually those scales will fall or the fake smile will stop. I don’t know what kind of Community you want, but it sure isn’t the peer community I signed up for.

Council,

Unless you can see a way forwards to rebuild this broken dream, disband. Focus your great skills on Debian. I’m sorry we couldn’t make it work, we were overpowered.

Martin Owens (full text)

The component of Martin’s complaint that expresses that the community has changed and is not the one he signed up is accurate. Going to the point of asserting that Jono has been forced to deliver decisions and that he is presenting a fake smile is going too far. The second part to the Community Council also goes to far because it makes the assumption that there was a shared dream. Martin also tries to instruct the Community Council what to do. Is that not what Martin is accusing Canonical of doing?

In all of these posts I see a bit of a double standard. From my viewpoint Canonical has said “This is what we are doing”. They have not coerced or forced the community to follow. They have not implied that the community members that have chosen to leave the community are in some way bad or evil. Clearly Martin, Greg and Howard want to do something different. I want a community that allows for freedom; freedom for Canonical employees, Canonical as a company and every individual. I would never dream of trying to force Martin, Greg or Howard to work on something they did not believe in. I also would not try to force Canonical to work on or fund something that they did not believe in. While it is painful to see people leave that I have become friends with, that have inspired me and that I have great respect for I refuse to lash out with accusations. I respect these people and their opinions even when they differ from mine.

In closing I would like to share some quotes about Freedom.

“Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Freedom lies in being bold.”
― Robert Frost

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
― S.G. Tallentyre

“Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.”
― Abraham Lincoln

Ubuntu: Time to Take the Shot

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 seats to a sporting event. Today I felt I had an excellent seat. I saw several familiar nicks, but I saw several nicks I had not seen in the past and that was exciting. People who could not attend UDS involving travel issues will now have the chance to attend.

With UDS happening every three months this will also allow Ubuntu to be more agile and will help us take advantage of the amazing opportunity while the window of opportunity is still open.

The Potential for Rolling Release:
I would like to stress that this is one possibility. While there is a definite need to be agile, a rolling release is just one way of meeting that need. From a non-developer point of view I like the idea of a rolling release, but I also understand that a great number of items would be impacted and the idea must be discussed to fully understand what that impact would mean. In short, while I like the idea I am not sure it is the right answer.

The Community Council was approached on February 14th and made aware that Rick Spencer had asked his team to come up with a straw man plan for a rolling release so that the the idea could be discussed. Rick wanted to take the idea to the community and we were asked what we felt the best way to do that was. I replied to this with a suggestion that the idea be presented to the community and that we use Google+ to have Rick explain the plan and take questions from the community. If anyone took issue with the Google+ hangout please blame me, and not Rick or his team. Here is the closing note from Rick’s post to the ubuntu-devel mailing list

Such a change needs to be discussed in the Ubuntu community. Therefore, Iasked my team to put together a strawman proposal for how such moving to amonthly cadence with rolling release might work. I will be discussing arough outline of  this proposal on Friday 27th Feb at 6pm UTC / 10amPacific / 1pm EST at http://www.ubuntuonair.com<http://www.ubuntuoneair.com&gt;.Then we can talk specifics next week at UDS. (full text)

If you have thoughts  about these changes please make them heard. Participate in UDS, blog and discuss the changes with the teams you are a part of.

Wireframe Options

Recently I became involved in Ubuntu Friendly and one of the tools I wanted was a wireframe application so I could make quick mockups moving forward. I learned about several options:

• Pencil – Pencil is built for the purpose of providing a free and open-source GUI prototyping tool that people can easily install and use to create mockups in popular desktop platforms.
• Wireframe Sketcher – WireframeSketcher is a wireframing tool that helps designers, developers and product managers quickly create wireframes, mockups and prototypes for desktop, web and mobile applications. It’s a desktop app and a plug-in for any Eclipse IDE.
• Balsamiq – Using Mockups feels like drawing, but because it’s digital, you can tweak and rearrange easily. Teams can come up with a design and iterate over it in real-time in the course of a meeting.

I eliminated Balsamiq because it requires Adobe Air (which is no longer being developed for Linux).

Pencil:
I found working with Pencil very easy to create the mockup of Ubuntu Friendly. Pencil included resources for Windows, Android, iOS and Web Applications. The drawing produced is very clear and does not simulate being drawn by hand. I had one rather important issue with Pencil; it would not export the mockup as a .png. The dialog box would come up and you would take the steps to save a file, but no file was actually saved. When making a .pdf file the table resource was not rendered.

Wireframe Sketcher:
Working with Wireframe Sketcher was not quite as easy as Pencil, nor were there as many built-in resources. The program had no tool to create a table. The resulting sketches simulate being drawn by hand and the program was able to export .png files. This software is also not free and will cost roughly $100.

In the end Wireframe Sketcher is the winner as it is able to create functional mockups without requiring Adobe Air or Java and was able to successfully save .png versions. An added feature, that I will not make use of, is that it works with Ecplipse IDE as well. If you are comfortable with Eclipse, or even Visual Studio, the application will be comfortable immediately.

The IDE style allows you to build an application with multiple screens and even have the screens be interactive. All the other mockup programs I tried lacked this depth. The program even allows for custom made svg images to be used as additional shapes or icons.

If you are an Ubuntu User like I am you can find it in the Ubuntu Software Center.

Friendly Needs You!

A little while ago I blogged about Ubuntu Friendly project and this post is an update in regards to some of the specifics of how you can help the project. The team is in the process of getting everything rolling and we need a little rock for the community. The initial meeting will be held on:

• Wednesday February 6th at 01:00 UTC on irc chat.freenode.net #ubuntu-meeting

Topics will include:

• hexr
• improving the submission process
• ubuntu friendly website

The great thing about Ubuntu Friendly is that you can help contribute to the community no matter what your level of technical comfort is. There is always a need to have more submissions of laptops and desktops to build the database of equipment that works well with Ubuntu. In the initial meeting we need input from people who would like to give us feedback on the submission process as well as from people who have ideas on improving the usability of friendly.ubuntu.com itself. Come help build Ubuntu Friendly!

Ubuntu: That was friendly!

When I first started using Ubuntu the difficulty with using it on a laptop was centered around wireless issues. Today wireless issues are much less common, but Linux laptop compatibility is still plagued with problems due to ‘optimus’ graphics and poor bios decisions from many vendors. As an IT professional I know enough to avoid certain hardware, but for people without my IT background trying to find a laptop that works well might seem an impossible task.

Option 1:
A consumer willing to purchase a laptop on-line might order a laptop with Ubuntu pre-installed from a vendor like System76 or Dell.  For many of people they would prefer to order from HP, Lenovo, or a local store like Best Buy.

System76 Lemur Ultra

System76 offers excellent laptops for a broad range of users including power-hungry gamers (with Steam being on Ubuntu graphics power is likely to be much more sought after). Dell offers a fantastic ultra-book with Ubuntu pre-installed that is aimed at Developers.

Dell XPS 13

These options still amount to a very small selection of laptops and many people would like to get specific features in their hardware that are not offered on models with Ubuntu pre-installed. In the past when people got a laptop and then installed Ubuntu themselves it has resulted in experiences like the following:

After 3 days of solid searching, installs, compiles, theories, interfaces config, supplicant creation, and “this is what worked for me”- I’m once again at the end of my rope.

I’ve been having a real hard time staying with linux because of my laptop. it doesn’t have the worst combination of hardware, but the ATI card is really close to the worst thing.

Having a hell of a time installing ndiswrapper and wpa-supplement to get my wireless working. Again. ndiswrapper did come with Ubuntu, but wpa-supplement didn’t. I had it on a flash drive though, so I attempted to go compile it. Except it took about 50 tries before I realized Ubuntu must not have installed any dev tools. Got Make installed and tried to compile this stuff, now I can’t figure out why it keeps choking on some stupid error. I’m sure I’m doing something stupid that a Linux pro would a laugh at, but I’m so frustrated at this point I may give up.

All of the above issues could be avoided by knowing what hardware will work before a purchase is made. Around May of 2011 Ara Pulido and a small team from Canonical started Ubuntu Friendly to address this concern. Ubuntu friendly differs from the ‘Certified Program’ in that it is driven by community submissions. Ubuntu Friendly is a brilliant idea and will help as more and more people want to use Ubuntu.

Ubuntu Friendly

There is a need to transfer this project from the Canonical employees to a community team. Nicholas Skaggs and I had a discussion on IRC last night and we both hope to get this process rolling in the next few weeks. There is a need to ensure the information on the wiki page is accurate and up-to-date as well as get familiar with the current process. I am sure that the needs will include web development, database work, testing application work and documentation. As the details are worked out I will blog more about the specific team needs, but if you are interested in helping out please contact me or join the discussion on #ubuntu-quality of irc.freenode.net. This is a fantastic opportunity to contribute to the growth and success of the Ubuntu Community.