One thing I love about Ubuntu is that Ubuntu fans and contributors are spread around the whole globe. So when I started planning holidays in Morocco it was almost certain that we’d meet somebody from the LoCo team there.

When I let everyone know about my plans, Adnane Belmadiaf immediately came up with dozens of ideas what I could go and visit in his country. For those who don’t know Adnane, he is one of the heroes behind many of our Ubuntu web projects, for example the LoCo Team Portal, Summit or cloud.ubuntu.com. Adnane is easy to work with, fun and as I found out in Rabat, he’s also a great tour guide.

We arrived in Rabat around noon, quickly found a hotel and got a text message by Adnane saying that he took off the afternoon off work to show us around. Walking around was loads of fun as we not only saw lots of the city, but also because Adnane explained to us a lot about what’s going on in the country.

The second person who contacted me was Hassan, who is member of the Moroccan and Swiss LoCo team. He said:

First, I wish you a Merry Christmas. I know that you’ll be in Morocco. You can have a look on my albums maybe you can see some good plans to visit.

Have a nice trip and in case of any help needed in Morocco you can inform me at <phone number> and I’ll take care.

The Ubuntu community are simply the friendliest bunch on the planet. Amazing, isn’t it?

Two weeks unfortunately isn’t enough to see everything, so we “just” visited Málaga in Spain, took the ferry to Tanger, went to Rabat and Marrakech, did a tour through the desert and flew home from Casablanca. We had a great great time.

Thanks again everyone for making these holidays even more enjoyable!

Big big hugs! شكرا بزاف!

(I still haven’t looked through all the pictures yet, but I’ll upload a few quite soon.)

A few days ago I read the mail from Iain Lane on ubuntu-devel-announce, which announced that ‘syncpackage’ is now able to directly perform syncs for you (if you have sufficient upload rights), without having to get the sync through the archive admin queue first. Great work to everyone involved, both in the Launchpad and the ubuntu-dev-tools team. Awesome!

Of course I had to try it: I had a look at the sponsoring queue, picked a sync request for projectm (among others), reviewed it, test-built it and finally ran:

syncpackage -d unstable -b 916955 -s ximion -v projectm

Here’s what the parameters mean:

• -d unstable: sync from Debian unstable
• -b 916955: close the Launchpad bug with number 916955 during the process
• -s ximion: sponsor upload for Launchpad user ‘ximion’
• -v: verbose output please
• projectm: package we’d like to sync

The whole thing worked flawlessly. Great work everyone!

Aït Ben Haddou (Photo by Oscar Gomez - CC-BY-NC-ND)

See you back on 9th January 2012.

Don’t you love it when you get contributions to your project when you didn’t expect them at all?

By reaching out to contributors, thanking them and welcoming them to the Ubuntu community you do a lot to encourage them and help them integrate into your team more quickly. Generally I feel this is part of our culture already.

Discussions at UDS indicated what we probably could do better is:

• do this even more, try to be more personal,
• talk about it more, because it encourages others and motivates others who might still be a bit unsure about getting their feet wet,
• generally talk more about what we’re doing and what’s going on, to explain where you need help.

To help with this, we set up a team of people who work on weekly development news to get the word out. The only thing you need to do is send a quick mail to ubuntu-news-team AT lists dot ubuntu dot com with “[dev]” in the subject if it’s about Ubuntu development.

Feel free to send a just few lines about

• what you (or your team) is currently working on and where you might need help
• a new contributor who just helped your team out

In addition to this, this will give your work the publicity it deserves.

You can also tweet/dent/google+ with the hashtag #thxubuntu.

Thanks in advance!

I have been writing weekly Ubuntu development updates for about one cycle now. As many seem to like these updates, it’s time to raise the bar a bit. As I can’t do this just on my own, I need your help.

After some discussion with the Ubuntu News team, we agreed that development news can now be submitted to the ubuntu-news-team mailing list by simply sending a mail there with “[dev]” in the subject. To get a better idea of which kind of news we are looking for, check out the development news wiki page.

This is a very important service, as it will help us all to stay informed in our huge development community, it will make our efforts more transparent and inspire others to help out or get involved in similar efforts, so if you have just a few news bits, send them there. If you want to thank somebody for their work, tell us about it.

Also if you have ideas for additional topics we should write about, either send a mail or add a comment below.

Also am I looking for contributors, who would like to get involved in writing and collecting information about Ubuntu development. It’s not a huge amount of work, but should be pretty fun. If you are interested, please leave a comment below or drop me an email.

Today is Ubuntu Community Appreciation Day, which is excellent. It’s the first time we do it and from now on 20th November will be a day to remind ourselves that Ubuntu is put together by humans and not “fabricated somewhere”.

The human aspect of Ubuntu was what instantly won me over in 2004. This comes in multiple facets: From a product point of view, that computers stopped being dull and grey boxes, but devices I use to interact with the people I care about. The vision of Ubuntu, that it would always stay free and empower millions of people out there.

I care a lot about the points above, but the most important point to me is “Ubuntu” itself, the recognition that “I am what I am because of who we all are“, which always at the center of all we did. Since day 1 of my participation in the Ubuntu community I was surrounded by people who became friends and it amazes me to see through how many ways I benefited: the amount of encouragement I got, the positive vibes, the uncountable learning experiences, the common feeling of making the world a better place together is something that still drives me and even on some of my slower days will bring an involuntary smile on face.

The list of people I should thank is very very long, I can’t and won’t try to list everyone. I know that I will leave people out, but I can only hope I thanked you all enough in our conversations already. Big hugs to you all, you know who you are!

First I’d like to thank our mustachioed leader. A lot of you will probably know Mark as the founder of the project and somebody who is involved in some of the difficult decisions. I admire the vision and energy with which he has been driving the project for seven years now, especially staying focused after all the shouting and swearing on the internet. Mark gets much less credit than he actually deserves. On a more personal note, I got lots of encouragement from Mark over the years, which I appreciate. Also I’m still glad Mark gave me the opportunity to come to Sydney and do much more.

Also would I like to thank everybody who is involved in making more Ubuntu community happen. This obviously not only this bunch of hippies, but many many more who put a lot of work into organising meetings and events, thinking about how to get more people involved, dealing with conflict, getting the message out there and loads loads more. It often is a thankless task, it doesn’t come with fortune and fame, but is still rewarding to see if your part of the community is thriving and awesome things happen. If you are not there already, make sure you join #ubuntu-community-team and get a hug!

Another group of people I deeply appreciate and would like to thank is: first-time contributors! I know how hard it is to get involved for the first time. It’s not only the steep learning curve, but also that you don’t know anybody in the project yet and you might be worried that you make a fool of yourself. Still there is lots of new contributors and their level of excitement about having gotten their first contribution into Ubuntu is just fantastic. It never ceases to make me smile if I get a mail where people write about their experience. Thanks for sharing your energy and being awesome!

A big big hug to everyone who helps to make Ubuntu happen. You rock!

If you lack context, here you go.

Cryptkeeper by Dholbach on Mixcloud

1. Intrinsic 005 – Submorphics & Chino – Infused
2. Bad Taste 017DD – Telekinesis – Sacrifice
3. OWSLA 001 – Porter Robinson – Spitfire (Kill The Noise Remix)
4. Critical 057EP – Enei – Movin Fast
5. Digital Soundboy 037 – Breakage ft. Jess Mills – Fighting Fire (Loadstar Remix)
6. Funkatech 050D – Far Too Loud – Moneymaker
7. Audioporn 014PT1 – Shimon & Tali – Get Out
8. Play Me Too 020 – Flufftronix – Bassface (Kanji Kinetic Remix)
9. Bad Taste 011DD – Hedj & Neonlight – Joker
10. Hospital 194DDS – Camo & Krooked – Funk You
11. MTA 009 – Nero – Crush On You (Knife Party Remix)
12. Hospital 194DDS – Camo & Krooked – Cryptkeeper
13. Life 003DG – Sigma – The Jungle (Sub Zero Remix)
14. Digiform 006 – Blockhe4d & Cabbie – Dive
15. RAM 104D – Cyantific  & Wilkinson – Get Into It
16. Metalheadz 094 – Lenzman – Broken Dreams

Ahmed Shams and others have put together a fantastic idea! Ubuntu Community Appreciation Day. Ubuntu is not only an operating system, but also a community full of awesome people, who want to make the world a better place.

Sometimes a little thanks is all it takes to make somebody’s day, to bring us closer together and show that you care. It’s important for us to remember that Ubuntu is put together by people. People who care a lot and put hours and hours of work into this.

From this year on, we want to celebrate and appreciate everybody’s hard work on 20th November. What you can do? It’s simple: just go and thank somebody. Whichever medium choose to do that, just do it! (The UCADay wiki page lists more ideas how to do it.)

Thanks a bunch for putting this great idea together and thanks to everybody for their support! BIG HUGS!

Some weeks ago, I asked for feedback in a survey about Ubuntu development. Particularly, how well we reach out and how Ubuntu development is generally perceived were focus points of the survey. The great thing is: we had ~350 people replying and we have lots of great feedback and ideas in the results.

You can download the summary (including all the answers) here.

Let’s use all the feedback to make Ubuntu development even easier.

Thanks everyone for your replies!

I love planning a new Ubuntu release. It’s a great experience to take a few steps back and look at the biggest challenges and opportunities in your area of interest and try to identify the most promising.

Personally, I want us to get better at involving interested Ubuntu users in the development process. We have gotten better and better over the years, but there’s still things we can do better. The fantastic answers in the survey I announced recently helped a lot to see the issues more clearly. (Expect a report of the survey soon.)

So here’s the list of blueprints I registered and where I expect some movement next cycle (feel free to subscribe to any of these, and follow along, if you’re not at UDS):

• Celebrating developer contributions
  How can we get better at celebrating contributions to Ubuntu development? There is massive amounts of great work going into Ubuntu, some of this is under the radar because it is less visible. Celebrating this more publicly would be both inspiring for those who did the good work, and others who didn’t know about the great work before.
• Developer Advisory Team
  As opposed to having fully-fledged 1-on-1 mentoring, we might want to think of a much more light-weight approach and coordinate efforts such as: 1) reach out to new contributors, thank them for their work and get feedback, 2) reach out to people who might be ready to apply for upload rights and help them, 3) reach out to contributors that went inactive and get feedback from them and offer help.This should be easily manageable by a small team and would make the developer world a much more social experience.
• Development documentation improvements
  It’d be worth to discuss the list of open issues of our developer documentation and review the results of the recent survey.
• Making Harvest rock
  Harvest hasn’t seen much development recently, but we still need a good place to summarise all the needed work in the distribution.Problems both in representation and data should be discussed.
• Reaching out to future Ubuntu developers
  There is a huge interest in getting involved in Ubuntu development. We want to better reach out to everybody who is interested. The recent survey data will probably help with the discussion of this.
• Weekly Ubuntu Development News
  We have weekly development updates already, so these can serve as a good piece of news infrastructure. We need to put the project on broader feet and figure out submissions processes, etc. Also are we going to talk about new interesting news bits we might want to include.

These are just the sessions that I will be leading, there will be loads more I’ll attend and contribute to though.

I’m looking forward to this great UDS!

The Ubuntu Packaging Guide has made a lot of progress since its inception and we have a bunch of great articles together already, which make it a lot easier for newcomers to get a sense of direction and find out how to use the tools.

Some of us have been filing bug reports about it recently, and it’d be great to get them fixed and out there. If you are new to the packaging world, but still want to help out, just say so in your merge proposal and we give it another fact check.

The good news is, the process of fixing these bugs is quite simple, just:

• bzr branch lp:ubuntu-packaging-guide
• <edit and fix>
• bzr commit
• bzr push lp:~<yourlaunchpadid>/ubuntu-packaging-guide/<bugnumber>
• bzr lp-open
• <click on “(+) Propose for merging”>

Here is a list of bugs that would be great to have fixed:

• Update CSS of Packaging Guide to be in sync with developer.u.c (CSS gurus, please step forward)
• be explicit about installing packages from universe in getting-set-up
• apt-cache included in basic packaging software section
• Diagrams could be a bit more Ubuntu-y
• Mention http://screenshots.debian.net/upload in the packaging-from-scratch sections
• Please add to the footer a link how to propose fixes/changes to the guide.
• Advertise ‘setup-packaging-environment’ in getting-set-up article
• contributers → contributors

And here is a list of articles that still need to be written:

• Need a Quick Start Guide
• Add article about “Updating package versions”
• Add article “Python packaging”
• Add article explaining how to work with Debian/Upstream
• Add article that explains how to use Launchpad and Bugs
• Short article that explains PPA best practices

Be bold, propose changes – every little fix will help.

(Here’s a list of more bugs.)

If you haven’t checked out the Packaging Guide yet, here is it online, or install it like this:

1. sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-packaging-guide-team/ppa
2. sudo apt-get update
3. sudo apt-get install ubuntu-packaging-guide

It’s time for another fantastic Ubuntu Open Week!

From 17th October to 21st October there will be one-hour long sessions on IRC about a huge variety of sessions.

Myself I’ll be part of the fun, I’ll speak about Getting Started with Ubuntu Development tomorrow, 18th October from 14:00 UTC – 16:00 UTC.

For my session it will be good, if you set up a Launchpad account already.

Join in, learn, participate and make friends.

It’s just great how easily you can make friends in the Ubuntu world. When I first entered the IRC channels, it took me a few minutes to get to know people, some of them I’m still in touch with, even 7 years later.

The belief that we can make the world a better place together and the excitement about what we’re doing clearly bonds us together. Over the years, I met many of my Ubuntu friends in other places, was it at conferences, holidays or elsewhere – it was always big fun. Even if you can’t travel, the good thing is that there is loads of additional Ubuntu-unrelated places (like social networks, etc.) where you can easily get in touch and keep up with what’s happening in their part of the world.

Yesterday I set up https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Social to make it easier to spot where all your Ubuntu friends are hanging out elsewhere. Please feel free add your team or group to it.

You were always interested in Ubuntu Development and gave it a try already? Perfect!

With Ubuntu 11.10 almost out the door, we started the planning of the 12.04 (precise) development cycle and we would love to know how well our documentation is known and working today, so we can see what we can improve.

Please give us your feedback in this short survey – it just takes a few minutes (if you’re not trying to write a novel in reply). Have your say and help us improve!

Thanks a bunch in advance!