Going to San Francisco!

After some deliberation, I decided to blow all of my remaining grant money plus a little extra to buy a ticket to the Ubuntu Developers’ Summit at the Google HQ in early November.

This is quite a big step, since I only just came back from three weeks of fieldwork in Ireland, England and Scotland and I will barely have time to reorganise my notes and get everything settled before I jet off again. Going to the summit will also mark the end of my fieldwork in the Ubuntu community, and when I get back from the US, it will time to enter a state of intense thesis-writing.

For the Ubuntu Summit in Paris, I had added a couple of specifications on my own proposed research which didn’t really attract that much attention. This time, I’ve tried to write specifications on some of the issues I’ve come across in my time in the Ubuntu community, so as to be a bit more constructive. I’ve written a couple which I would love to get some feedback on:

Improving the Ubuntu.com participate page and team pages

Scaling the community governance

Documentation reorganization for topic-based help

.. I actually had a few others, including an idea for an Ubuntu usability team to coordinate between the KDE and GNOME usability upstreams and the Ubuntu and Kubuntu desktop teams and all of the various usability wishlist bugs that come in. I don’t know how useful such a team actually would be, but it does seem that there is a gap there at the moment.

Oh, and finally. Coming to San Francisco and Mountainview, I have no idea where I can stay for the summit. Any locals who would care to give me some hints?