Well, I’m finally heading out into the field. The real field, not the virtual one but out to meet real flesh-and-blood informants. I’m very excited, if you couldn’t tell.
The plan is like this: First I’m off to Paris for the Ubuntu Developers’ Summit where all of the core Ubuntu developers will gather to spend a week planning and discussing the next Ubuntu release, deftly codenamed the Edgy Eft.
I’ll be participating in the discussions, and I will be presenting the results of the Census Survey of the Ubuntu community which I have been conducting. I’ve received nearly 300 hundred valid responses and the questionnaire is still open for the curious – though any late responses won’t make it into my analysis.
After what I hope will be a great time in Paris (I’ll also have time to visit some old friends from Manchester), I’ll fly to Barcelona for the GUADEC conference. That is the “GNOME User And Developer European Conference” which is a rather snappy acronym. GNOME is the desktop environment that Ubuntu uses, and several of the Ubuntu developers are also GNOME developers and have strong ties to this project.
The GUADEC is another week of conference but in a somewhat different climate: Where the Ubuntu Developers’ Summit will be an intense work session, the GUADEC looks to be a bit more relaxed and easy-going. There will even be a GNOME football championships during the week. The differences will be interesting to note, too.
Also, very appropriately I stumbled across a song just yesterday by Swedish ragga outfit Helt Off. It’s called “Det brinner i Paris” [.mp3 file from Helt Off’s record label] and it’s about the riots in Paris last autumn where groups of young unemployed suburbanites lit cars on fire in the night. You can find the (Swedish) lyrics here.
Did I mention that it is damn funky?
