Of course we hear about the old sentimental films and sometimes us youngens wonder if they are any good, or if they are just old and sentimental.
Well I got to watch Casablanca for the first time all the way through and I was moved by it. It’s a good film and I highly recommend it.
That’s it, no text for you today.
Andrew has posted an interesting post about how Mark has reported in a bug report that Ubuntu is not democratic, but is instead meritocratic. (only those with merit get to be involved)
What is interesting to me is that this is wonderful intent but this isn’t backed up by current reality of design in Ubuntu and while a lot of commentators in the above article agree with Mark’s sentiments, the people I know around the community have been describing to me their frustration with the design decisions being anything but based on merit and have instead been based upon being staff.
In the community we are trying to show that there is a whole raft of people who _do_ have design merit, who are good designers, good artists, they have a good eye and know how to do usability studies. That the process that leads to the final design of Ubuntu should be opened up to people _with_ merit and not just to employees.
Of course I think this is what Mark wants too, better integration, less need to hire every community designer. So I’m not suggesting that the intent need change, but there are some things we can’t know about which might be hindering this move to meritocracy. In the wording there is mooted that a lot of the design choices are in preparation for future direction, that these features or directions may somehow be covered by NDAs with Canonical’s partners and that unfortunately for us, we may not be able to interact with the design team fully. (take this as a pinch of salt, it’s hearsay)
The article is not in any way an attempt to change things, just voice my frustration at the ineptitude of poor design and poor community integration of the design team. I still hope that we can come together and do something to get everybody moving towards what we all want.
A meritocratic governance.
The human brain has to decode a lot of information and sometimes it just gets things wrong, especially when it comes to language. Songs are a big example, mishearing lyrics is a huge internet meme that’s worth exploring for a good laugh.
What I found amusing was what I keep on hearing in LeAnn Rimes’ “Right Kind of Wrong”:
I should try to run, but I just can’t seem to.
Every time I run, your the one I run to.
Can’t do without… what you do to me…
I don’t care if I’m into Debian!
Of course I think it’s suppose to be “I don’t care if I’m in too deep, yeah!” but the way it’s sung makes it sound like she’s into Debian and doesn’t care. Anything to get FOSS out there into the media I guess. 
We had a great meeting today to discuss the way forward for the Ubuntu Learning Project and we manage to reconcile a number of directions by making the generic and vague learning group into an umbrella social group for a number of different, but still heavily interacting, projects.
After the agreement to split up and autonomise the leadership of each project, we’d been working hard at changing all the wiki pages and launchpad pages to reflect this new organisation.
So what does this mean for course writing? Well course writing is now it’s own project, the “Ubuntu Learning Materials” project, which has a singular focus ont he construction on course material for teaching Ubuntu and related subjects. It’s not that concerned with how to publish the works, and will make do with published sets of pdf files and loose repositories. The development though will be very strong, with strict licenses for collaboration and a strong use of existing development tools to make sure writers are able to peer review, edit and writer without having their work lost in some custom media management site.
The other two projects under the umbrella is the Ubuntu Educators, who’s focus is on traditional education establishments and providing Ubuntu materials to them in a format they can consume (i.e. moodle). And the Ubuntu Learning/Classrooms project which is focused on taking materials and publishing and hosting classes for community consumption. Very much like what happens with developer/user weeks.
These separations should allow each project’s leadership to make good choices for the direction and goals of the project without having to be constantly tripping up over other considerations. The umbrella group though is still an important way to have all educational projects within Ubuntu talk to each other.
Thoughts?
My thanks goes out to MeNTaLGuY who has brought more material about distributism to my attention and as such reading Sanity by G. K. Chesterton. While I may not agree with his views on the idea that the constitution of socialism is an effective authoritarianism over the means of production, I’m still fascinated by the critique he has for both socialism and capitalism.
“Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.”
I got a request from ubuntu member Chris Johnston about a new look business card using the new style/branding and to give you all an example of what what would look like I give you this quickly put together design (it’s not that good I admit):
You can download the source svg from deviantArt and don’t forget to install the LMMathSymbols10 font in the texlive package for the name text.
Update: Chris and Ben have both done modified versions of the design which you might be interested in looking at.
One of my many jobs in the community is to bring you lovely Ubuntu planet readers some of the wonderful art works that are created using Ubuntu and the FOSS tools we have in the repositories, all these works come from the Ubuntu deviantArt group. These are my picks for the month of march:
If you or someone you know is a good artist and would like to show off their work in our featured gallery. Do join up at our deviantArt group’s front page and start submitting work to the favourites and the galleries.
Just an interesting image.
The Ubuntu Learning project has been quietly working away for the past six months, most of what we’ve been working on has been the technology to invite new contributors into the mix and get materials published, the plan for what we’re going to write and how to focus in on just a handful of topics so we can really get down to writing.
So you’ve probably read about the technology, GroundControl is a learning project tech. It’s built to allow writers to contribute their knowledge with minimum of fuss. The GroundControl project is suffering a little bit of a delay from changes in launchpad, but a lot of this is because the technology was before it’s time and launchpad and the ubuntu desktop need to be made more talkative before GroundControl and many other launchpad apps will really work nicely with launchpad.
The creation of the build functionality is all there, you just write a bunch of text files and hit go and it compiles your course into a nice book, with side book for lesson plan. There is more work that could be done on the GUI for hitting go, but that’s a nice to have.
The moodle website is pretty much functionally done and we can add classes when ever we like. There is a major need for a theme to be developed, something cleaner than the standard moodle installed theme with our own branding etc. But that’s on our todo list.
I’ve set up a physical systems administration class again for April onwards, this means I’ve taken control of the systems administration course and will be developing it further as the class proceeds. Nigel is still progressing with the teaching track and Elizabeth is collecting information on the Desktop track, hopefully there is plenty of room for collaboration with the Ubuntu Manual project there.
We’ve got a team meeting coming up on Monday 15th 23:00 UTC and we’re a year into our project here so we’ve going to be looking at a way to organise ourselves better. This might include some leadership reorganisation and it’s probably going to involve discussion in how we can get more people involved.
If you feel like learning materials and teaching FOSS topics is very important to the progress to world domination as we do; then please do join us at our meeting and tell us how you think learning materials should be produced and published. We’re looking forward to seeing everyone there.
