DoctorMo's Blog

There will be no blog entry today as I’m in flight to England.

We’ve been having some very interesting conversations in the Ubuntu Learning project, part of what we’re still working out is some of the structures we’ll be writing our courses to.

The problem is that the Ubuntu Learning project has an ambitious goal of being a well grounded and at the same time serving a couple of different output forums for different kinds of lessons.

Part of the material will be used to codify and help the IRC teaching sessions that go on in #ubuntu-classroom, both during special events like ubuntu open weeks or during the normal course of the year (people do set up classes ad-hoc). With this target we need materials which are perhaps separated enough to give guidance on each section to the teacher, maybe some sections and images which can be shown via Jono Bacon’s new classroom app.

On the other hand, we’ll also be serving physical classroom needs in real schools or community centers, as well as people who just want to download a course through moodle and be self driven, not requiring any sort of teacher.

There are best practices for how you present information for student self study programs and how you present it for teacher lead classrooms, the kind of language used, the kinds of compression you can use on the language. Is the result going to be a reference for the student or is it going to need to be more substantial?

We might end up needing to have a couple of pieces to each class paragraph, pieces that perhaps build upon each other to produce the different outputs with different verbosities. But in order to model some technical structure around which all our volunteers can write course material, we need more input from real teachers and course writers.

We have the good fortune of having Belinda from Canonical be able to lend us her wisdom, and we also have a couple of other people who have experience in the field. If you think you can add some interesting discussion, we’d love to hear from you either on the mailing list or the IRC channel (#ubuntu-learning).

I’ll be a little quiet on my blog, since I’ll be flying to England to get back to my own culture for the first time in three years.

With all the packing, sorting things out, getting things washed and tidied (you don’t want to come back to a mess do you), it’s been a bit busy.

Plus I wanted to experience a couple more American cultural items before I leave, after all I’m be gone for a month and a half (over Christmas and New Years).

See you on the other side!

Today I have some excellent news, Chapter 03 was released in Japanese by Seotch and we have now begun the task of translating, transcribing and editing that will produce our English versions.

Stay tuned to learn how our protagonists will fair when they search the Ubuntu forums and IRC channels for help!

I also quickly put together a new ubunchu website to show all the chapters, wallpapers and other various goings on.

In related news, today I did a nice interview with the BBC Radio Five program “Pods and Blogs“, they’ll let me know when it’ll be aired and I’ll of course let all you guys know so you can listen to me explaining what Ubuntu is and what Ubunchu is and why there is a manga of a software project, we also talked about the Boston Anime event that we still need your help funding.

It’s Thanks Giving day here in the USA and what better day than to ask a question about consumerism: Is the direction of Ubuntu gearing it’s self for simple consumer grade computing?

Disclosure: I’ve always held out hope of getting inkscape included by default in Ubuntu.

A clue is in the recent planned removal of Gimp from the Lucid CD, if you look at the size of gimp and all it’s dependencies on the CD, you find lots of fat, so it’s not a surprise that it’s under pressure to be removed. Although devels explaining the removal with hand waving that F-Spot is to be the replacement was surely a bad political misstep, even if it’s probably a reasonable technical move.

The problem for me is a lack of regard for what I like to call: “The involved user”, people who are not just consuming data from their computers but are involved and get the feeling that their involvement is welcomed by default. This has always been something that distinguished FreeDesktops like Ubuntu, they contained not just programs for viewing interesting things, but all the tools required to also make a great deal of them.

This is what Walter Bender of Sugar labs would call “Making the mountains of learning available and visible to clime for everyone, even if only a few end up doing so”. That’s why we bother to make careful selections on what goes on the CD, those applications are the chosen few that will shape and mould the users understanding of the capabilities and user expectations of the system.

The mountain that is the drawing arts was just painted pink and a Someone Else’s Problem field was set up, rendering the entire artistic field invisible to new users. How do new users discover that they can make artworks with their computers? No solutions have yet been devised to solve this discovery problem. I’d like to point out that even windows has MS Paint, people who want to paint have a clear simple method for doing so on their computers and then they figure out that there must be better tools and are motivated to find them.

I think this simplified direction stems from a perception that Ubuntu should not be “for human beings”, but for the lowest common human possible (“Linux for Neanderthals” anyone?). This is at best a caricature that the devels have set up in their minds, imaginary people that we convince ourselves must be served in order to fix bug #1. These are the common people who only ever retouch the red eye in their photographs and never do anything creative like stick the head of their aunt onto the body of an donkey as an April Fools joke. These are the people who are not and will never be interested in a computer more functional than a television, and more fool those that present these users with any sort of creative outlet.

What makes this journey down to common denominator interesting is that this simple user case is and will be solved by other products. ChromeOS, Android and iPhone and is already looking to take the market of all those people who just want to go online and never want to do anything useful, and they’ll probably be doing it better than Ubuntu. Does Ubuntu really want to strip anything interesting and unique away from it’s default selection, so the only thing we’re left with is a rather bland bare bones base that we will always have to install extra programs on top of?

Surely the art of the computer is not just to provide a google-box for the sofa generation, but to furnish people with the tools and just as importantly the visibility that these tools exist and are available to everyone. Perhaps the problem I have with the direction being taken is not anything technical, but is a lot more to do with the myopia that surrounds a certain expectation about what the council estate users will want from their computers.

Perhaps in the end, if we can’t have tools like Inkscape, Audacity, Gimp and OpenOffice installed by default, then perhaps we should have a good mechanism that clearly shows their availability and install them through it, it was talked about at the session that we should have the software center provide this featured app list, perhaps that will work. And for poorly connected nations such as those in Africa, perhaps we should master a second CD to send to them. One that contains all the debs that complete their systems and give them creative tools as well, instead of struggling to decide what to include on a single CD and causing headaches for anyone not on the list of designated target consumers.

While at UDS a mention was made about a new policy for the Ubuntu trademark which will seek to protect the Ubuntu trade dress as well as the mark (logo and name). This change it’s hoped will protect the Ubuntu logo and style from misuse and unfortunately trademarks are one of those legal measures where if you don’t protect them, you loose them.

So, some parts of the Ubuntu OS /style/ will fall under the trademark policy.

I’m going to be keeping an eye open for our unofficial, unblessed derivatives community, because they will have to make sure of not just removing the Ubuntu trademark, but also any of the styles used, such as the white blury logo at boot or some of the other designs.

There is also a focus in design methodology to limit the amount of customisation that can be done to various new components. There is one singular vision and anyone with a different style or aesthetic ideal may not be allowed to contribute to the project. I’m going to blog about this in a few days, because the rationale is basically to keep bike shed painting to a minimum, but is going little too far.

The unintended consequence is that taken together these two facets may conflict for unofficial derivatives, forcing them to take packages out of their distribution or do a lot of work to fork the project to restyle it. It may be that the trade dress protections don’t scale all the way to gdm2 or osd-notify, I certainly hope so, but I can’t really find a good definition of what it covers.

It’s very unlikely that anything will come out of this problem, but it’s one of those interesting dialectical conflicts that I figure the rest of the community may be interested in knowing about.

Hey guys, as you’ve probably read in DPic’s blog post, the Ubuntu Massachusetts LoCo will be getting together with the Linux Fund to run an advocacy project at the up and coming Anime Boston. This event I feel is big enough and will have just the right kind of people, to make a push with Ubuntu demonstrations and CDs really worth it.

We’ll have the Ubunchu Manga to give away and some flyers/guides explaining how people can use Free Software to create artworks or replace their current programs. The idea is to reach out to Anime lovers and show them that they can watch all their anime on Ubuntu just as well as they can on any other kind of machine.

I’ll be there myself to help out with handing out things and I’m really looking forward to being able to participate with other MA LoCo people. But here is where we need the help of the community, these events are pretty pricey and that’s where the Linux Fund comes in to help us cover costs by getting the Ubuntu community to join us in support of the event.

Funding will be done in stages, so we have a minimum goal to reach which sets us up with a booth, then we have other stages that allow us to make the manga, flyers etc. CDs we hope can be brought in from Canonical’s Shipit (these will be Karmic CDs as the event is only a week or so before the new Lucid)

Press Release: On Website
DPic’s Blog: More Details

When you go to UDS a couple of times, it strikes you how even though Canonical are a private business and are being battered about by the tides of economic necessity, they really are serious about the community. And I believe not just in a “Free Labour” kind of way, but in a more inclusive, “We can’t do this without each other” kind of way.

Just look at how many sessions we had on the community and how much more organised the community tracks are getting with each release.

Respect.

Photo taken by Benjamin Rubin, CC-BY-SA, Gallery is here

Working with a nautilus extension and with bazaar is interesting, you can’t just open up the process of a bzr branch or pull and expect everything to be rosy. It’ll lock out the GUI and then you’ll be stuck without progress reports.

So I’m happy to report that I figured out how to make it work by using examples set forth in the qbzr project (QT-Bzr) so a lil bit of rewriting and a quick re-tooling using threading.Thread and we’re ready to start making sure all the dialogues and displays don’t lock up and deliver useful progress reports of the work they’re doing.

You can get the code branch I’m working on from lp:nautilus-lp

In unrelated news, I just got the results back from an x-ray, turns out I chipped one of the bones in my foot. So I’ve been walking around UDS for the last four days with a serious injury. You won’t believe the ear full I got off the doctor for assuming all that was rong was a simple sprain.

This is a quick mention of the items I’ll be doing for the lucid cycle:

* Production and design for the loco directory item page
* Some graphics for a “How to ask Smart Questions” guide
* Guide the online status blueprint to see if we can move forwards with it.
* Continue development of Ubuntu Learning project tools
* Work with Quickly devs to get nautilus-lp cleaned up and packaged for use with Quickly
* Start up an Ubuntu Hour in Massachusetts, simple, social, local
* Teach some users how to contribute their courses to Learning.