DoctorMo's Blog

Thanks to seven translators who were able to write po based translations and some new heavily artillery svg building scripts to manage it all, I’m pleased to blog about the French, Czech, Serbian and Thai language translations of the short “How to Ask Smart Questions” guide.

Update: Added German, Polish and Hebrew.

This should open it up to more readers. More translations are welcome, but only if you can edit po text file, if you’d like to learn then please do get in touch.

Translators get in touch!

I’ve you’ve ever struggled to get the support answers you need from the Ubuntu community, this guide may help you, it’s a pdf download, don’t forget to favourite if you can:

Revision 05, 2010-07-23: Download Directly

I’m an Ubuntu and FOSS kinda guy, I’m not happy with software that isn’t FOSS and I don’t find any sense in proprietisation of code. Having said that there are times when I must be a little more considered and not simply shun an entire site because it’s not foss.

Heaven known that deviantArt is one of the most proprietary, confused and messed up places I know. Bad copyright advice, no public domain option, admins that consistently ignore open formats like png and svg. FOSS Software isn’t promoted at all in any way. So why in Slartibartfast’s fjords would I want to hang my coat over there?

Well no matter what I do there _will_ be artists over there who use Ubuntu, people who may need help with wacom tablets, upgrades or finding help. There will be people who use Windows or Mac but don’t have FOSS tools yet or perhaps wouldn’t do better with Ubuntu instead. There are artists who’d love to get involved with the wider community but for what ever reason are disconnected by social chance.

One of my personal victories is bringing to the winder community the translation of the Ubunchu manga. I even got interviewed on the BBC Blogs Radio show about it. It wouldn’t have been possible if I hadn’t have been keeping an eye on other social circles, if I hadn’t have seen Seotch-san’s original cover on deviantArt.

So I fully support the motion to open a StackExchange Ubuntu location, we need people who are willing to use and support the site. I guess there are about 2,000 people who view the planet during the week and yet there are only 500 people needed for the motion to carry.

If your not there yet, go here and add yourself. The more social circles that have Ubuntu representation the better.

Continuing at a tangent from yesterday’s blog post about design I wanted to quickly address a problem with non-material contributions (i.e. vocal and political contributions) as opposed to programming, design, support, education or any of the other thousands of material contributions in the community ecosystem.

The default seems to be that between weakly relational members of the community we organise ourselves with three tactics: knowing the best people, shouting the loudest and have the most convincing argument.

If your voice isn’t being heard then perhaps it’s because we have far to many rambling personalities posting huge emails to mailing lists or huge posts using complex words like ‘polemic’ several times.

But if all your trying to do is communicate what you want from the computer, what you really aspire to have in the design of the software then it’s best to keep it short and sweet. I don’t think we always need to rationalise our desires and make essays out of them.

Some people do this: “I’d like to see the window buttons on the right again because it would make my life easier.”

Your aspirations?

Something of an unknown change in the way Canonical does design is the new design.canonical.com site for the Canonical design team to blog about and start the conversation about design decisions that are made and discussed. this goes along with the Ayatana irc room and mailing lists.

I’ve been very pleased with the blog posts on the new design team and I think they’re learning to have a constructive conversation where people can have their say, so long as the conversation is constructive and it doesn’t devolve into flame wars.

There has been mistakes made and I’ve been one people complaining and trying to work out what went wrong with the way the process worked. Button and branding changes just days before the UI freeze with very limited prior involvement from the community certainly is a way to fan the flames of resistance to changes.

What are your thoughts?

Recently I learned that an event we’d tentatively been expecting to attend as a group, didn’t happen. But all was quiet and as leader I’d assumed that the organisers has decided that the event couldn’t be run properly so had dropped the idea. but the problem was that we didn’t know.

The problem it turned out was a series of private emails between the two principle organisers who had managed to cross wires and misunderstand each other. Add in complexities of personal histories and the fact that they’ve never met in person and we ended up will a killed event.

So my thoughts were, should the organisation communication have been held in public, on the mailing list? Should that be a standard part of the procedure?

At least if it’s going on in the light of the list’s mailing list we can identify potential conflicts and attempt to defuse problems. If things do explode, then we’d be on hand to help pick up the pieces and salave what we could.

Thoughts?

Recently a number of well known people in the Ubuntu community got an interesting email from Ross Peoples, I’ve seen Ross comment on my blog before and I asked him if I could blog about his email and he agreed. In order to do this I have to show you the email:

Hello, my name is Ross Peoples and I have been using Ubuntu for about 4 years now, on and off. I love it and I am really hoping that it will begin to take off more in the mainstream. I am a very technical person and I usually can solve most problems myself, but every once in a while, I need a helping hand. Before I continue, I want you to know that I don’t usually send out cries for help, but I feel this topic deserves some attention.

I know of several resources that are provided for support of Ubuntu, such as the forums, the IRC channels, Launchpad, as well the
documentation. These resources are invaluable for your average user that needs some help getting their documents to open or their laptop to connect to a wireless network. In fact, I think that new users are well cared for, as there are other new users that had similar problems and are willing to help. My concern is not for new users, but existing users, such as myself. The questions I ask in the forums usually go unanswered, as do my IRC questions, and even my Launchpad bug reports can go years without being addressed.

To give an example, last week, I ran into a critical problem which I posted in the forums. In the week that has passed, I have gotten only a single response from someone who, I believe, genuinely wants to help, but cannot because he or she is not an advanced user, a developer, or a support member. This is generally my experience whenever I ask for help with Ubuntu. I feel that once you have
advanced beyond the status of a new, inexperienced user that you are truly on your own. There don’t appear to be any support options for someone like me, unless I just happen to know someone who is a Linux/Ubuntu guru.

I understand that the experts don’t want to be bothered by simple questions that could easily be solved by a quick Google search or
reading the documentation. I am a Systems Administrator by day, so if anyone understands the frustration of dealing with lazy users on a daily basis, it’s me. I like to think of the above mentioned support resources as Level 1 support. So my question is, “Where is the Level 2 support?” Where can I go to ask the Ubuntu experts for help? I am always looking for ways to help support the community and I do a fair share of helping new users when I can.

I would be more than willing to help set up an effort for a Level 2 type of support for Ubuntu to help those like myself, but I do not
have the expertise to answer the questions myself. I am also web developer, and could offer my limited coding skills to developing a
site for Level 2 support. If nothing else, I could provide the hosting and a domain name for such an effort. I am willing to devote the
resources to this effort, but I need help from experts such as yourselves.

So. Does the community need a better second line support? That’s the question.

The help I’ve gotten on the most advanced topics has predominantly come from programmers, if helps if your a programmer so you can decipher some of the programmer-speek as well as have some detailed understanding of the program your trying to work with.

A few times I’ve managed to get an advanced systems admin to give answers, but not as often. They are busy people after all.

The missing second tier support is probably just a mechanic of the people we’re dealing with. Good programmers and admins are much less likely to hang about in the ubuntu forums or in the #ubuntu channel. So the standard support channels don’t help, it’s true. I can’t remember the last time I went to the forums or #ubuntu and I’m community, more likely to help when asked.

Some have suggested that this is where paid for support comes in, to pay the geniuses and rock stars to give us the advanced support we need. That at the moment is certainly too expensive for most.

I suggest that we could do with educating more people. The user days and programmer days are great, do we need some advanced admin/user days too? Should we have more classes focused on giving members of the community the tools and knowledge to find out how to fix very complex problems? I think that’ll help, it’ll certainly help bring more people up to be able to answer higher level questions in the community.

Your thoughts?

I decided that we should have a deviant art group for creative commons too, So I’ve done that:

http://creative-commons.deviantart.com/

But I’m not going to be as hands on with that group, I just want to see what kind of attention it will attract naturally.

If any of you were having problems joining the new deviantArt group, I should have fixed the issues now. What I’ve done is made sure that everyone who joins is automatically approved as a Contributor. So you should be able to post art, favourites and blog entries to the group without asking or voting.

Lets try and attract typical and atypical people to join, anyone who is involved in art or design and uses or is interested in Ubuntu. I’d also like some volunteers who could go through searches for Ubuntu and start adding historical works to the favourites and galleries. I’d like the favourites to contain works made using Ubuntu, and the galleries to contain things that were made for Ubuntu (wallpapers, ui mockups, tans, fan art etc).

Go here to join: http://ubuntu-artists.deviantart.com/

There is something that really gets up my nose, it’s not people who love and support proprietary software, it’s not idealogical capitalists, it’s not even the religious far right; it’s people who avoid conflict.

What do I mean by this? Well first lets separate out conflict from a flaming row. An emotional display of bickering, personal attacks and inflammatory chest beating is not what I mean when I say conflict. What I mean is the dialectic philosophy that there are ideas and by extension ideals which naturally fall into conflict with other ideas.

The reason why people who avoid conflict get up my nose so much is simply because they refuse to address problems, they supplement working out ideas and rigorous peer review with the adult to child like arguments: “because I said so” or “because it is”.

The old story is of course of a brother and sister who are fighting, the brother likes the colour blue and the sister likes the colour red. So there they sit arguing with each other:

“Red is the colour of roses and I like roses.”
“But it’s also the colour of warnings and blood, but blue is cool.”
“But blue is so boring, it’s not exciting at all…”
And so it continued.

Later after this exchange had gone on for a few minutes their mother appeared, she’d been half listening in as she prepared their dinner. “Look dinner’s ready, why don’t you both compromise, if you like blue and you like red, why don’t you both like purple instead?”. At which point the children just scoff at the suggestion and continue to argue.

The problem isn’t the attempt at solving the conflict, the problem is the naive assumption that problems can be fixed by picking what ever apparently looks like the middle ground. This is what people do when they look at the Free Software and Proprietary Software ideals, they say things like “Ah well as long as people have a choice, what does it matter” and “So long as the program does what you need it to do.” whilst not understanding that they are completely missing the point of the conflict and get no points for avoiding the problem.

I believe the more mature argue a great deal and accept conflict as a part of working things out. Going inside and out of every argument, looking at every possible compromise and what is trying to be achieved by these ideals. Even looking at the way the world is, how we think it should be and conflict about how to get it closer to our ideal. These conflicts are not bad, only the form and skill with which the participants handle them are and I know Jeff S. could probably run you off a list of instances where I’ve handled conflict badly, unskilled, letting emotion and pride get in the way of a decent argument, we’re all human.

Then consider the people who I would love to have a decent conversation with about FLOSS are people like Cory Doctorow or Benjamin Mako Hill. It certainly wouldn’t be Richard Stallman or Linus Torvalds, the former because he’s a narrow focus idealog and the latter because he rejects the notion of conflicting ideals being a useful topic of conversation. This is why for me I would not see progress, new ideas, new approaches coming from either of these two luminaries of the FLOSS landscape, perhaps because they’re gotten old and weary of conflict.

That’s the other thing to consider, you don’t have to shove an argument down someone’s throat if they are weary of the conflict. Either because they’re engaged in poor arguments in the past or because they’ve hit upon their one true faith and have no need to discuss it further. Perhaps it’s worth leaving these people alone, after all we do want progress from our conflict.

Dialectics says that the new ideas generated from conflicts and other ideas may not even be obvious, or make any sense unless you’ve gone through the process of working out the conflict. This is why bringing someone into an argument late in the game normally mandates that the arguments have to be hashed over again and again, although if your response is to just say “Well we’ve talked about this before” then your pretty much guaranteed to have someone who doesn’t understand why you’ve come to a certain conclusion and is a great way to make sour non-contributors.

Anyway, I’d love to hear your thoughts, in regards to FLOSS communities or general the philosophy of social ideas, memes etc.

Note: If these feels familiar to you, it’s probably because I’ve written about this before, but I’m still fleshing out all the ideas.