DoctorMo's Blog

A comment to yesterday’s marketing entry lead me to Seth’s blog, a marketer who rather neatly describes various mechanisms and ideas.

One of his entries caught my eye was this:

The challenge is in figuring out which kind of critic is worth paying attention to as you create your product or service. In a business to business setting, pleasing the gatekeeper and the bill payer is essential. On the other hand, pleasing an angry blogger might not matter at all.

In our desire to please everyone, it’s very easy to end up being invisible or mediocre. Far better to please the right people.

This caught my eye because recently a long with all the excellent work going on for the 100 paper cuts are some real doozies. Bugs which should never have been filed, or shouldn’t have been acted upon. Things like the renaming of Archives to “Compressed Files” which has now regressed the clarity and understanding of what all that functionality does.

Content with listening to the first to post critics and ignoring or dismissing later concerns simply because “That’s the way we’ve decided to do it and our mind is made up” made me want to distance myself from the papercuts project because I didn’t think it worth my time to post if only the first to post are taken into account.

But of course it’s worth listening to everyone? is it worth listening to those who have good standing in the community or is it worth spending time doing field studies and publishing the design of those so other groups can replicate the findings? Well it’s up to us, how much time we want to commit and those who are self interested will most likely commit the time.

For now I’m just going to try and better myself, maybe not listen to some criticism, but listen to other criticism more. Difficult.

I’ve just got home from a nice little Chinese/bar where I was unwinding and I got to chatting with someone and the conversation came to jobs and then to Ubuntu. I was attempting to explain that there are more choices than just Mac and Windows, but it seemed to just blow his mind that there could be anything more or better than windows xp or vista.

What we have in Ubuntu 9.04 and what we will have with Ubuntu 9.10 is more than good enough. It’s awesome and the general population who already use Ubuntu keep on telling us “why don’t more people know about this”. And that is also fustrating to them, they want to know where the problems are, and they assume Ubuntu has problems because no one knows about it yet.

The problem boiled down to advertising, no one I talk to has ever, ever seen so much as a sniff of tv, news paper, website, billboard or any other form of media marketing for Ubuntu. It makes the trust question very hard to answer and the only way people will listen is if you explain that it’s grass roots and not something used by huge businesses and millions and million of people all over the world.

We really need to start just getting the brand out there. Nothing spectacular. Just something that says “Ubuntu. For your Mac and IBM PC” and that it’s awesome. There isn’t a need right now to prove ourselves or over sell or use gimmicks, just getting the logo and the name in front of people and that it is a valid choice for computer use would be enough.

If we can’t have a corporate sponsor such as Canonical, IBM, Intel, Google, Linux Foundation paying for adverts, then perhaps it’s time we started doing something as a community. I’m not talking about the nascar 500 debarkle, but more of the firefox in the paper, full page spread kind of marketing. This kind of marketing would take real organisation though, lots of research and a lot of time to pull together all the people interested in making it happen. That’s probably why it’s not been done before.

Are there no community leaders interested in heading up marketing?

This class comes with introductions into basic users and groups, file permissions and ownership as well as moving on to more advanced topics such as PAM modules, ACLs, Kerberos and OpenLDAP.

Go here for the source files, or below for each of the PDFs.

• Lesson Plan for teachers
• Presentation Slides (Not done)
• Overview Sheet
• Practical Sheet
• Example OpenLDAP Directory File

A good friend of mine has suggested that to combat the negative flow of funds while I work full time in the Ubuntu community, that I offer on my blog a donations links, so that people who wish to support my efforts in local community, programming, art and branding or the recent Ubuntu learning courses work, can help me keep going as long as I can with the work that I love doing.

I want to bring it up to the community because I’m not so sure. Has there ever been an ubuntu community member who was ever able to make reasonable amounts of money this way? Where is the self interest? Would people who want to learn pay for course creation? would some other form of random support donation model work better?

The other option is to apply for grants. Get some people involved who have a pot of cash available and would like to invest in learning materials for Ubuntu and computer learning in general. Educational grants mean it wouldn’t be just limited to the computer field.

The whole reason for thinking of these things is because it’s not currently possible to earn money doing FOSS development. Not unless your in a large company and there isn’t a way for us to support the economics of the vast majority of people who would want to work on Ubuntu either. But despite knowing these thigns I can’t personally continue on forever on the earnings I’m getting from the odd Ubuntu computer repair and odd commission work. If I was to spend time advertising and doing those things seriously, I wouldn’t be able to work on the Ubuntu community anyway. So half of one, two quarters of the other.

Your Thoughts?

Watch it here on Youtube

What do you do when the society you’re a member of supports arbitrary rents on items or knowledge that you need to progress? It may seem like I’m asking the question just to frame a rant against all kinds of rents (anything from shareholding, landlording to copyrights and patents) but I’m honestly questioning a unforeseen mechanism of our current legal system.

During recession everyone is going to have less, the economic output is going to further decrease and the best we can hope for is maintaining our current position. While laws maintaining rents of excludable properties still make sense to some degree; I wish to question the enforcement of non-excludable rents for instance the copyrights on each school book.

Some time in the future all these books are going to be electronic, this may not seem important now but electronic knowledge can be duplicated and copied to every person. The companies behind them are going to want to delete the books each year under restrictive licensing and it’s possible that this will cause regression in society.

We need to teach so that our economy of tomorrow won’t be worse than the one we’re currently living in. It’s a fundamental part of maintaining the level of economic output and also making sure that all people in society have a fair chance at being able to deal with the system.

But from what I know about the way schools are often treated by educational materials suppliers, I’m often disgusted. During times of needs and scarce resources, the costs of these materials go up and there aren’t very many options. Are teachers perhaps told to use Wikipedia instead? or the breadth of the internet?

Perhaps.

I’m also concerned with the problem that gaining money while doing no work (rents) can’t be very good for the economy as a whole anyway. It seems to breed laziness and greed in most who take up these models of business. Instead of earning from their work honestly, they seem to earn constantly from the work that they have done in the past. Society rarely advances under such a scheme and the economy suffers.

If I were patrician, I would investigate the following in relation to public sourced materials:

• That no materials be licensed under restrictive terms
• That work to create be well paid for during good times
• That copying, modification and distribution be terms of purchase of that work
• That the work be opened to small enterprise

In short I would mandate that all materials be creative commons, share-alike, attribution.

I mistakenly put the wrong star trek movies on my netflix queue. I meant to add the even ones (the ones people say are good) but I ended up with all the odd ones.

So far I’ve watched I and III and I can’t say I didn’t like them. Sure they’re not master pieces, and the first film could do with someone taking a hearty axe to cut out most of the “gliding around space with pompous music” scenes. Once you’ve gotten over the self deluded grandeur which seems interestingly fractal between the film’s outer structures and kirks inner child, you can begin to enjoy both films as something to much along to and kill a few hours watching.

Am I crazy? Quite possibly. I’m not a big star wars fan because I last saw it when I was 6 and can hardly remember it. And I thought re-watching these films has given me an interesting idea of how much more tolerant I am towards bad script writing and scene chewing actors and bad “2001 space odyssey” editing.

Thoughts?

I got this fascinating blog comment yesterday from Matt (Regala), I’ve never interacted with him in the community before and he’s never posted to my blog before. It was in response to the blog post about community education and I wanted to have space to go through the ideas and share with everyone by rebuke:

You see, people are people. And a set of rules 3 Ubuntu members agreed upon, will never change the fact that asses are asses and carebears are carebears

Are people static fixed entities when it comes to interactions with other people? I don’t believe so. I believe people are one quart their mood of the minute, one quart a reflection of the person they’re talking to and one quart the person they would wish themselves to be. Since all three are constantly changing values you have to conclude that most interactions are wild and unstable feedback systems. I like to refer to this system as the “Carebare Ass” of human interaction.

My point: trying to force out good behaviours of anyone is not the job of Ubuntu, and even if the message it carries is about brotherhood, solidarity, the main message is about freedom. The GPL never forbade any user to act as an ass.

I call this the “Wouldn’t it be awesome if everyone invented their own differing http protocol!” argument.

Are we trying to force good behaviours out of our members? Well this needs a little bit of unpacking: what we are talking about when we talk about “Good Behaviour” is a stable and productive human to human API/protocol. Each person has developed their own slightly different API based on a mixture of their culture and sociability factors; but despite these differences there are some core set of signals which are considered universal for making or breaking relationship interactions.

Breaking the Ubuntu Code of Conduct and complaints against bad behaviour with others can be considered API errors. Enough errors in the social network and the culture and mood of the community will start to break down. From my perspective I think it’s vital to have a clear set of standards which everyone should follow. Of course people are still free to be asses, just like other people are free to ban those asses from irc channels and forums.

Of course, if you think computers are the only thing that need clear standards…

when I read “good community members”, I feel sick. There’s no “good” community members, people can have their bad days of bitching everyone. And people already have a good idea (unless they’re still children) of what is good or bad. If I want to bitch an Ubuntu developer because he made an horrible mistake that broke my (but only mine in my particular setup) , you don’t have the right to call on me I am not a “good” community member, because I bitched the incompetent.

Is it ok to bitch and moan? Well, I consider complaints to be a vital communication of end user problems and community fault finding; but it’s most important for me to keep in mind the manner and behaviour of how I conduct complaints towards others and other groups.

If you break the code of conduct, then just as much as your complaint to the developers is merited in some way, the complain against your behaviour is just as merited. It is a bug report, attempting to correct your broken interactive API. Otherwise why would anyone bother replying at all? if the responders really didn’t care about you being an ass, you’d never know it.

Do you see, where I wanna go ? It is not a lost cause, it’s just the kind carebears would embrace. And definitly some ideas associated with it are nauseous (”good” community members) -

I understand what your saying, what I’m saying is that after much consideration of sociology implications: I disagree. We don’t have to go round hugging and kissing everyone we meet. Nor should it be acceptable to punch people in the face for introducing a kernel regression (no matter how tempting). Good communities are made from good community members who understand how to interact productively and tolerantly with one another.

As we’ve been talking about recently about Ubuntu Learning, The official community of educators who believe in education of community members and the public as a means to helping us move forwards with what we are trying to do as a community.

There are various sections and one which need some love and attention, this is for the Community Course. This is where we want to make classes to teach people how to be effective community leaders, community members, contributing members, advocates, marketers, how to get on with others, how to inspire, lead, all those lovely topics.

What I need is a set of Jono Bacon followers to help out and start fleshing out and making good the topics page: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Learning/AdvocateTopics, I’d have asked Jono Bacon himself to get involved since he’s written a book about this exact subject, but the guy is fairly busy so I’m going to call on the entire community to define what will be helpful to teaching people all aspects of being good community members.

We also want to make sure the name is appropriate and that it covers the scope we want it to. There is a plan to have lots of different classes in this course. So if Spreading Ubuntu or Advocate Classes is too restrictive, we want to know if it should be simply “Community Classes” “Communing with Ubuntu”.

If your interested in writing the classes for this topic, the post of Publisher/Organiser for this topic is open and we’re looking for people to come and man the pumps. Come to the IRC channel #ubuntu-learning on freenode where I have been teaching “how to create classes” and I can help you get started.

Mentioning available.

OK this weeks course! Processes, Services and Daemons with Apache2 is a course for teaching the concepts of processes under gnu/linux based operating systems such as Ubuntu. It’s only at revision one, so be critical and keep your eyes peeled for errors and omissions.

Go here for the source files, or below for each of the PDFs.

• Lesson Plan for teachers
• Presentation Slides (Not done)
• Overview Sheet
• Practical Sheet
• Example Apache2 Website Config
• Deployable Website