It didn’t take long for my specification on community governance best practices to be superseded by an avalanche of community and governance-related topics that are already approved for the upcoming Ubuntu Summit. Clearly, it is something the governing bodies have been meaning to put on the agenda for some time. And basically, it looks like [...]
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 [...]
One of the frustrations with being on the road doing my fieldwork is that I can’t be on-line often enough to keep a solid presence in the Ubuntu community or even on my blog. The birthday consumption of my bottle of Danish herb snaps on my last night at the aKademy resulted in seven KDE [...]
I have arrived safely in Dublin’s fair city, and have found it harder than expected to find decent lodgings, due to the huge crowds drawn to some sporting event taking place outside of town. But I’ve found a modest hostel dorm bed, and are now waiting for the registration to begin for the aKademy conference [...]
In the current influx of new Ubuntu Members on getting their blogs on Ubuntu Planet, I thought I’d join in as well. I’m fairly new in the world of Free Software, first getting really involved with Ubuntu at the Paris Ubuntu Developers’ Summit in June. While in Paris, I came across this surprise: Of course, [...]
Yesterday, I was approved for Ubuntu membership and am now an official member of the Ubuntu community. Becoming a member is just about the most formal procedure in the Ubuntu community, and it is still very, very relaxed. New member candidates are approved at the Ubuntu Community Council meetings which are held every two weeks [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]