DoctorMo's Blog

One of my goals of UDS was to do a little survey on the floor to get a feel for why participants were contributing to Ubuntu and how they see the reason for doing all this work. I set out a simple 5 questions and asked attendees one after another and recorded them on my phone. The Data Source was then compiled into the following statistics with some answers folded into each other since spellings and meanings of difference words meant the same thing.

• Males: 53
• Females: 7

What is your role in Ubuntu?

• developer: 33
• manager: 7
• design: 6
• marketing: 4
• quality assurance: 4
• business admin: 2
• systems admin: 2
• writer: 1
• translators: 1

Why do you work on Ubuntu?

• It’s my job: 15
• Enjoyment: 7
• Free software: 6
• Interesting: 6
• For myself: 4
• Best software: 4
• Give back: 5
• Making Better Software: 5
• Open source: 3
• Recognition: 2
• Challenge: 2
• Community: 2
• Research: 1
• Change the world: 1

What will benefit the world when Ubuntu succeeds?

• Freedom: 12
• Making Better Software: 11
• Community values: 7
• Improving Collaboration: 7
• Improving Access/Empowerment: 7
• Alternatives/Competition: 5
• Improved Flexibility: 3
• Free Cost Software: 2
• No benefit: 3
• Improving Education: 2
• Getting Developers Recognition: 1

Canonical Employees: 33

I really did enjoy doing this survey, hearing each person recount what they thought and having them reflect on what it is we’re trying to achieve here in the Ubuntu project was very enlightening. I hope you too can post your reasons for being involved in Ubuntu or Free and open Source in the comments below.

Community Canonical Relations

The community wanted to make sure Canonical is doing the right thing and communicating with everyone in best place places and the best ways. So we had a heavy discussion about all the issues surrounding this relationship and how we can make it better.

Improving UDS Sponsorship

We really need to improve the UDS sponsorship process, there was many people who it was desirable to sponsor or who were nearer (and cheaper to sponsor) to the event and then there were plenty of people who just needed a little help to cover the costs instead of paying for everything. We didn’t manage to make any tasks for this item but I need to follow up on it.

Ubuntu Themed Websites

We have a set of code on launchpad for the designs behind the wiki, php, django and other websites to make sure ubuntu sites have lovely branding and we aren’t duplicating this branding work with each website. This session was about how we can make this better, easier to use etc.

Ubuntu Developers Manual

There is a manual which we need to make to teach programmers how to quickly get involved with Ubuntu development. Part of this session was dedicated to finding the right people to write chapters, look after translations and other issues. Hopefully a manual for the Natty release will give us a basis to teach as much as learn about how the Ubuntu development process works.

Ubuntu Light – Plannary

Ubuntu light is a system in co-development with Dell (I believe) and this system is quick, small and dedicated to launching web applications. The system will be installed dual-boot with windows machines and hopefully will help in fixing Bug #1.

Where you there?

Date/Time and Calendar for App-Indicators

One of the barriers to getting Unity as the default interface for the Ubuntu desktop is the deficient clock applet. In order to fix the issues there will be a made a ui for changing the existing settings which are currently only available from gconf, plus changes to allow calendar entries to be taken from multiple sources with a default plugin for data from evolution. There will also be geo-location information used for changing the time zone automatically if possible.

Developer Outreach and Education

We need better documents for explaining how the development process works in Ubuntu and how new developers and existing programmers can get involved. Part of this will involve writing new documents, some new diagrams to give good overviews. There was talk of improving the mentoring system and improving the social relationship between experienced and new developers.

“Donations” through the Software Center

An exciting discussion about using the software center to accept payment/donations/flaters so that users can put money into the projects they love. This proposal is more of a donation system than a payment system so free Free Software would be able to register their donation method. Normally a commercial FOSS package should be added to a different part of the Software Center system. Participation will be initially limited to google summer of code projects since google have done a lot of the hard leg work for identifying project authorities for accepting payments.

The Ubuntu Artwork Team

The artwork team is getting a boost. We’ll be working on researching and designing a website for supporting artwork and design processes. This web presence will be our main goal for this cycle.

Keynote

Mark Shuttleworth kicked off this week’s UDS with a couple of interesting messages.

First was the focus on quality now that we’ve got a fair way through both the cadence and design pushes which Mark has been keenly interested in. We’re told to be super attentive to little issues and to demonstrate this Mark got together all of the best Canonical people involved in the Maverick release and gave them ice cream as a special treat. He then revealed that one of the bowels of ice cream had a fly in it. “This sweet ice cream doesn’t look so sweet now” he said. We need to pay attention to all the little flies like flickering screens and slow shell use because no matter how sweet we make Ubuntu, it won’t be attractive if there is even one fly in there. “we can do much much more, and be much much better”

The Unity interface will be coming to the default desktop. Thanks to demand and feedback the unity interface will be enabled for all users who have the hardware support and it’s being promoted as an easy to use interface. I agree with this, I’ve had the netbook launcher on my mum’s desktop for years now.

There was a note about Ubuntu’s relationship with the Gnome project. Part of this was the emphasise that Unity is a shell on Gtk/Gnome just as much as gnome shell will be, everything is the same Gnome in all other regards. The second part was a short clip of Monty Python’s Life of Brian where the Judians People’s Front is raving about how their not any of the other groups. This is trying to show us that groups that are trying to change the world too often focus on the very small differences between themselves instead of the main goals. The main message is: “We’re here to fight the Romans”

I was personally very happy with the mention of Ubuntu economics. Mark affirmed that the Ubuntu Software Center will support Free and Open Source software sponsorship where anyone can push money into projects and programs in order to move development forward. Improving the position of Free Software projects in the software center and allowing non contributing members to still contribute to projects. I know this is a bit of a dirty subject to a lot of people, but economics is _really_ important for Free Software and we ignore it at our peril.

Content Media Library

A really interesting project to create a multimedia sharing and collaboration platform which involves sharing and streaming your content around. It’s early days but it’s looking like Shotwell, Ubuntu One and PiTiVi are all excited about the possibilities presented here.

Development Learning Events

We’re discussing the organisation of further events to teach people development skills and introduce them to key technologies in the FOSS ecosystem. Brought up was linking up more of the existing documentation, making screencasts and having the information available on the project pages. Having development sessions which focus on how to get involved with projects rather than the basics on some technology was also brought up.

After some research and discussion we’ve put together a plan to get much cheaper, closer and nicer accommodation for everyone who wants to come to UDS. the price is about ~$350 for the whole 6 days for your own room and about $180 if you want to share your room.

Wiki Page with full details

As before, please email me doctormo@ubuntu.com if you would like to participate.

UDS is only a month and a half away and there was again a very tight selection for places for Canonical to sponsor us community folk. I’m interested in finding people who didn’t get sponsored this time but may still have some means to go or would still like to go.

The first goal I want to see if a number of people clubbing together can reduce the cost for rooms, travel and anything else in order to make UDS less stressful on the budget. If you’re interested, I’d like you to email me at doctormo@ubuntu.com and let me know what your means are. So far I’ve discovered rooms and resorts near by which are very cheap when sharing.

The second idea is to make a Kitckstarter funding drive to sponsor community members who would be able to give valuable input at UDS. I’m sure there are lots of Ubuntu users who would like their thoughts carried to UDS and for them I was thinking of making a to get some of the more important community people flights and accommodation. With this you could each give $20 and have your per peeves and notes of consideration brought in. For a higher donation the person could attend a session on your behalf with your notes and try to get your thoughts brought into the discussion live.

Would you sponsor someone to go to UDS?

One of the things I hope to talk about at UDS is ground control and it’s development focus, these are the current things on the table that are outside of bugs in existing features:

* Create Project / Branch
* Extract from gtk and make available to qt, attract developer to work on dolphin plugin
* Extract from launchpad and allow savanah and other project management sites
* Extract from bazaar and allow other systems
* Develop a conflict resolution feature
* Separate launchpadlib interactions into a dbus based system
* Develop a type-of-content set of default buttons for certain kinds of projects (this is moving more towards quickly territory though)

I may also want to discuss methods of payment for these features, who needs the features and for what reason, perhaps organise a crowd funding event to free my time up from job hunting and other spurious pocket money activities to work on this.

Your Thoughts?

Today I’m going to talk a little bit about one of the sessions at the Ubuntu Developers Summit, it was a session about AptURL Policy when dealing with Debian repository links and how best to add them.

At the moment in Jaunty the functionality to add PPAs and other repositories from a single click is developed but turned off. The fear that turned it off is that a user could add just about anybody’s repository and install anybody’s software without so much as a security check to see if what they are installing is safe.

So what was the problem? Well a number of staffers at Canonical want to make a white list which gives Canonical or the Ubuntu Technical Board implicit trust on every default installation Ubuntu to favourably select which repositories it considers to be safe. On the other hand some community members are concerned that giving Canonical this power could be easily misused by keeping competitors out or favouring corporate partners more than individual developers. Those on the white list would enjoy one click installation of repositories (including PPAs) and those not on the list would be relegated to the current system of hacking the user’s sources by hand and trying to convince them to add a gpg key manually. To get on the list a repository would need to sign an agreement stating the stability of the packages and so forth (which is not a bad thing IMO).

My position is user centric. Unsurprisingly, while I would be in favour of allowing the user to mess up their own machine if they wanted to, I’m much more concerned with the duplication of yet another trust system and one that would be inflexible technically.

What I would prefer to see is a system of identity trust and qualitative peer review scoring based around GPG keys and some form of open quality system. One where the Technical Board trusts Dell and if I trust the Technical Board, all is well and I can trust Dell with a nice little pop-up box telling me everything I need to know to make an informed choice. What I would not like to see is Dell software installing automagically without ever asking me what I wanted.

On the other hand if I wanted to install something from my PPA, then I should in theory be allowed to express my social trust and technical confidence through the exact same system. I believe in providing the end user with as much relevant information as possible and then handing off ultimate control of their own machine’s to them. While it’s true that lots of users are not well trained on security issues, I would not want to see us give in to the idea that all (or any) users are an incapable idiots who could never be educated and would always click away everything.

The two mockups above are very rough draft, but they are my current thoughts brought to life by glade. the buttons would open up a web page with further information, could be a launchpad account or some other website with nice verbose information.

Update: Jeff has made some very good points below, I’ve attempted to update the post to reflect a more refined view of making sure that qualitative and identity issues are not mixed up. I will use “trust” to refer to identity to mean “I trust that this person/company is who they say they are” and “confidence” to mean “I understand this person is technical and morally able to not ruin my computer”.

Today is the last day of the Ubuntu Developers Summit 2009 for Karmic Koala, I’ve seen some pretty amazing things, boot speeds, data integration, netbook software. It’s all still to come. So now we start growing this next version from our discussions here.

I’ve really enjoyed coming to UDS and if ever any of you get to come, please do, it’s an exciting opportunity to discuss not just technical issues and features but also community management and events. We’ve been discussing just as much about Local Community groups and Education as we have about kernel regressions and xorg bug tracking.

Checkout Carbon 6’s image gallery in DeviantArt.