UDS Day Five: Vudu

Vudu
This morning at UDS I attended a session that was about making life easier for users by leveraging community knowledge about completing tasks. Scott Lavender and I spoke about his idea last night and it gained enough traction to become a session by the next day. For an example if a user wanted to correct a photo that was ‘too dark’ they would have a suggested set of actions come up in hud that would complete the task. System problems, such as wireless driver problems, were also discussed. The idea there is the system could automatically attempt to fix the problem.

As names were being thrown out someone threw out Voodoo and it seemed like the name was well received. I suggested a slight change to fit with Juju; Vudu would keep the ‘sound’ of the name, but match the name construction of the Juju. I even mocked up a very rough logo.

quick draft vudu logo

Intents
As we were talking about Vudu I started to wonder about leveraging user intents both inside and outside of applications. When a user selects a file they would have the options based on possible intents; publish to twitter or Google+, edit with the GIMP or Inkscape, etc.

Both of these ideas would be an incredible leap in usability for Ubuntu users. I look forward to working with Scott Lavender and others to see if these ideas can be implemented; perhaps by 13.04.

UDS Day Five: Sunset Begins

Today is day five of five at UDS; the sun has started its downward path towards the edge of the horizon. This week has been inspiring, motivating and energizing; incredible things happen when passionate, intelligent and driven people get together for a week. Each and every UDS I have been at has resulted in the same feeling for me; the experience is unbelievably awesome!

Oakland Sunset

The reality though is that those of us at UDS are really watching the sunrise on Quantal Quetzal (pronounced: /ˈkɛtsəl/). At UDS we set tasks for this cycle… not just for Ubuntu the operating system, but Ubuntu the community. A rich vibrant community that embraces and thrives on the energy and diversity of its members. There are many, many hundreds of work items that will begin next week and even if you were not at UDS you can get involved by looking at the various sessions on the event calendar. Simply subscribe to the blueprints that interest you and contact the person who is assigned that blueprint.

Oakland Sunrise

Steve Bird – http://www.birdseekers.co.uk

UDS Day Four: Code of Conduct Review

I felt it was important to capture the emotional response from this meeting instead of waiting until the end of the day. The Community Council met with the community at UDS to discuss the current revision of the code of conduct. There was one amazing and inspiring commonality in evidence; everyone deeply cared about the health of Ubuntu. This was especially evident in comments made by Allison Randall and Mark Shuttleworth. The original code of conduct was created in Oxford and was derived by a desire to avoid the pitfalls that other open source projects had fallen to. The current process of revising the code of conduct is reflective of that same desire, but based on several years of experience.

One thing in particular was to eliminate ad-hominem attacks and attacks on community members… these types of behaviors do terrible damage to a community, because it will cause people to curtail their involvement in Ubuntu. In short what is really being said is ‘be excellent’ to one another even when a person holds an opinion that you do not agree with. An even more succinct statement is “assume the best in others.”

If you are interested you can view the pad here.

UDS Day Three: Building a Juju Charm and Ubuntu Accomplishments

Juju Charm Contest Workshop
I have wanted to understand Juju charms for a while now, but had not dedicated the time to it until last night and this morning. What I thought Juju was is a cross between Judo (Martial Arts) and Walt Disney (magic); it turns out that it is close to that. There is one exception; it is easy to write a Juju charm. Basically a charm is composed of a ‘charms’ folder, a release folder (ie., precise), and a group of folders for the charms. Inside each charm folder is a ‘hooks’ folder, a metadata.yaml file and a revision file. In the case of my charm my hooks folder included an install and start file; both were made executable. There were some ‘gotchas’ that I had to learn:

• How to use a local ‘repository’ for my charm
• Building the first LXC container takes quite a while – don’t panic and abort
• any setup process steps should likely be in install
• debugging your charm can be a long process, but it is fairly easy when you use ‘juju log’ well

In the end my charm worked, but the deployed software did not. While I was not able to complete the charm in time to submit it for the contest to win one of the three Dell XPS13 laptops I still learned an amazing amount about charms. The tl;dr on charms is that they are well worth learning if you are a dev/op. They will make your life a lot easier. Many thanks to all the Juju Master Charmers who helped me learn about charms!

Juju Workshop

The EA Plenary
This was the session many were waiting for. What I learned is that EA is publishing some browser based games as a means of determining the market that Ubuntu represents. How much support is required, what are the expectations of Ubuntu users, etc. They are clearly interested in Ubuntu, but not just as a gaming platform. There is a strong belief that walled gardens, like Apple’s environment, are not the path to success. They firmly believe that their customers want to play their games across all the platforms they own and believe that Ubuntu has a role in fulfilling that vision.

Growing Ubuntu Community Accomplishments Collection
If you have played an MMO and been drawn in to playing for hours on end then you know the powerful draw of loot. Ubuntu accomplishments are the ‘loot’ of getting to know your Ubuntu system and the Ubuntu community. Get a ‘reward’ for sending your first email, filing your first bug and becoming the member of a loco team. The desire is to increase the ‘trophies’ to include every area of the Ubuntu experience. I learned the basics of making a charm in this session and hope to add several charms this cycle.

Today was a productive hands-on day for me. It was amazing fun to dig a little deeper in to the fun gritty dirt of how to get things done with Juju and how to contribute to Ubuntu accomplishments.

How did Jono know I was taking a picture?

UDS Day Three: Preview

Today is the day many people were excited about as UDS approached. EA will be presenting at the second plenary session today. It will be interesting to hear how much deeper their commitment to exploring Ubuntu as a gaming platform is. While this is exciting for Linux gamers Intel’s presentation featuring Vin Sharma, Enterprise Open Source Software Strategist, Intel Corporation. He will be talking about turtles, data centers, open source and industry standards. If you are interested make sure you get the audio feed.

Breakfast
I have to let everyone know that the hotel here in Oakland is fantastic. It is close to many, many things to explore. There is ample public transport. Last, but not least, the breakfast fare is fantastic featuring fresh fruit including berries and made to order omelets. It is absolutely amazing and healthy. I thanked my chef this morning for the great job he has done making my delicious omelets he made for me each of the last three mornings.

made to order omelets

UDS Day Two

Day two of the Ubuntu Developer Summit started out strong with a community round table that set the agenda and format of the Leadership Summit for Tuesday and Thursday afternoon.

Tues:

• Intros and Housekeeping (15 mins)
• Finding New Leaders (45 mins)
• Focus on putting people in positions at a natural part of the community
• Stop people taking leadership positions for purely power hungry reasons
• Unspoken problem, especially in loco teams
• Emphasize that leadership isn’t about having a leadership title
• Providing great mentoring
• Being an effective listener, not just a teacher
• Finding opportunities to delegate
• Surgery Session (1 hour)
• Governance Review (1 hour)

 Thu:

• Lightning Talks: (1 hour)
• Daniel H (Developer Advisory Team + Trello)
• Jorge + Marco (building support + governance)
• Jono (team planning and organization)
• Laura (getting things done)
• Charles (team formation or empowering a team)
• Pen (dealing with crisis)
• Popey (podcast)
• Horsepeople Q+A (1 hour)
• Leader Q+A (1 hour)

One of the things that I noticed in the discussion was mostly focused on the positive with the exception of two bullet points.

• Stop people taking leadership positions for purely power hungry reasons
• Unspoken problem, especially in loco teams

Both of these items could have been better expressed in positive terms. In my opinion it is also a function of the community nurturing future leaders. In a community of doers, effort must be taken to identify people who show the ability to naturally make the transition from doing to leading; where listening, delegating and mentoring become the key skills. People who are great doers sometimes lack the the natural ability to become a leader. I feel it is important to help potential future leaders make that transition by giving them opportunities to learn how to lead. This involves delegating leadership of projects that require others to contribute to project completion. In my management career the most difficult part of the transition was letting go of having total control of tasks and allowing others to complete them in their own way. They may not do it the way I would, but that did not make the method or approach wrong; just different. I am excited about the upcoming session on Thursday. I think the lightning talks and Leader Q+A will help community members to step up and provide leadership in the future.

Ubuntu Accomplishments Development Planning
Ubuntu Accomplishments was the product that has made amazing progress in the last cycle and I am excited about the plans for the future that were shared in the session today. There are accomplishments that are verified externally and tasks that are ‘local’ to the person’s computers. A verified accomplishment example is ‘filing your first bug’. Clearing a level in a game is an example of a ‘local computer’ accomplishment.  The ‘reveal’ for me was the plan to have ‘kudos’ accomplishments which will allow a person to give a ‘kudos accomplishment’ to another community member. This would allow loco team leads to recognize their loco members for organizing an event or providing significant contributions to the success of an event.

Transition help.ubuntu.com to SUMO
This session was a community evaluation of potentially migrating help.ubuntu.com/community to the system that Mozilla uses to provide a help site for their users. There was a lot of attention paid to not injecting unnecessary bureaucracy to the process of community documentation. It was clear that this would not be an intended result and all efforts would be taken to ensure that not happen. There are many features that would make this a significant upgrade to the wiki for the end user seeking help.

•  Better search capabilities
• The ability to mark a how-to as ‘helpful’
• Comment thread based on how-to articles
• Language translations built-in

These are important improvements. The plan is also to migrate current content on the wiki, but there is a desire to review the current documentation to eliminate outdated articles before the migration. If you are interested in helping with that task please feel free to send me an email.

JuJu Charm Writing
The afternoon involved my attempting to learn how to write a JuJu charm. Despite having no previous background with JuJu charms I was able to easily grasp the concepts by looking at current JuJu charms. I am currently up to testing my JuJu charm. I was amazed at just how easy it was; trust me… if I can do it, you can too. If I am successful I hope the JuJu charm will help others make their environment more secure by making it easy to deploy OpenVAS.

Google Circus Party

Google hosted an amazing circus themed event. I have to give big kudos to the clowns who really made it a fun interactive experience for everyone. The Blue Bunny, Marionette and Bunny really stood out. This was not an ‘event’ that allowed people to hide in the back because the clowns went out and pulled people up on stage. Amazing fun, but I will allow the pictures to speak for themselves.

blue bunny man and me

circus photo opportunity

bunny the clown and me

the incomparable accordion girl

UDS Day One

The Ubuntu Developer Summit is always an exciting event, but this cycle their appears to be a greater energy in the air. HP, Intel and EA are present. As the week unfolds the community will learn what these companies bring to Ubuntu. It is critical to understand that OEM/ODM relationships add a great value to Ubuntu. Working with manufacturers in Tawain and China ensure that devices will work with Ubuntu on launch, not weeks or months after the hardware releases.

uds-quantal plenary day one

Another key to the success of Ubuntu is the app developers. There is no question that Ubuntu is a great platform, but its continued growth will be influenced greatly by how easy it is for app developers to publish their applications on Ubuntu. It was great to see the Canonical design team holding ‘design studio’ to help application developers make great design decisions for their applications. There is also a desire to make packaging easier.

uds-quantal design studio session

Bdale Garbee also spoke about how Ubuntu is playing a key role in achieving goals in project Moonshot which seeks to massively re-envision the data center. The numbers are astounding.

project moonshot slide

Even more amazing is this is just a ‘start’. It is a big thing to have the worlds largest IT company involved with Ubuntu and present at UDS. This is just day one… I am excited about the rest of the week and the cycle. This is shaping up to be a momentous cycle.