Late yesterday evening I arrived in Wiesbaden near Frankfurt am Main for the Ubuntu Developers’ Sprint. The sprint started this morning, and it is the big halfway point of the Edgy Eft release cycle. All of the Canonical-employed Ubuntu developers are gathered to recalibrate their efforts and coordinate the specifications that were approved in Paris.
The [...]
Posts under ‘Thesis Fieldwork’
Sprinting the development
Non-technical contributors in F/OSS projects
As a not-too-technical person, my experience with the Ubuntu community has been somewhat rocky. The few non-technical projects – Documentation, Marketing, Translation – do not get very much attention compared to the technical tasks, and those involved are nowhere as well organized as the technical teams. As fellow non-technical Ubuntu contributor Matthew Revell noted:
When trying [...]
No man is an island
While I was pondering the Ubuntu philosophy below, I remembered the following quote which also sums up the that philosophy, but from a different angle:
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe [...]
The Ubuntu Philosophy
One of the special elements of Ubuntu which seems to work to especially attract people who are coming to Linux for the first time, is the name and the implicit South African philosophy of shared humanity and common roots. The About Ubuntu page in the Ubuntu system menu says:
A rough translation of the principle of [...]
Karma in Launchpad
For some time, I have been curious about the karma system in Launchpad – the massive infrastructure being erected not only for Ubuntu, but for the F/OSS community in general.
The karma system gives “karma points” for actions which the system appreciates, like bug reporting, specification writing, bug fixing and so on. But so far, it [...]
Mail, Mail and more Mail
Since I came from Læsø [note the Wikipedia entry name in the address bar - not easy to recognize] late Tuesday evening, I have been catching up on my mail. And lots of it.
Doing fieldwork in an on-line community means that you’re reading lots and lots and lots of mail. From the various Ubuntu mailing-lists [...]
And the Survey Results are in..
For three weeks through May and June I ran a Web Survey directed at the active members of the Ubuntu community. I got more than 290 valid responses, and I’ve set up a page to share the results with the Ubuntu community.
Not having done any major statistical surveys before, this was quite a change of [...]
Back from the field
I arrived back in Copenhagen late last night on delayed flight from Barcelona and the 2006 version of the GUADEC conference. Actually, the conference took place in Vilanova i la Geltrú, 45 km south of Barcelona.
The GUADEC (GNOME Users and Developers European Conference) and GNOME, for the uninitiated is the acronym for “GNU Network Object [...]
At the Ubuntu Summit
Since Sunday afternoon, I’ve been at the Ubuntu Developers’ Summit at SAS Radisson hotel near the Charles De Gaulle airport outside of Paris.
Actually, the hotel is located in the small village Mesnil-Amelot which is even outside of the airport so that you have to take a shuttle bus to the airport, and then a train [...]
Off to Paris
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 [...]
I'm an anthropologist working as an 
