An eventful week
I am now safely back from the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Mountain View after a long week of planning the next 6 months for Ubuntu.
As I said in an identi.ca message: “I am just now realizing how crazy this past week was. You don’t notice it when you are in the middle.”
But now that I am back and able to reflect on what happened I have this to say: WOW! I am really excited about what will be happening in Jaunty and beyond. I am sure that because this was my first UDS I am, on average, more excited than some. It is always inspiring to be in groups of highly productive and intelligent people all working towards the same (or similar) goals. Now that I have this inspiration it is time to see what I can do with it.
First: My personal/work project (I work for Creative Commons): Content producing/playing applications should be “license aware.” WHAT? By that I mean that applications that play media (songs, videos, images) could display the license for the currently playing item. A good example is Banshee. There could be an additional column that shows which license a song is licensed under. Words don’t describe it well, how about a picture:
The really cool part about the above image is that Gabriel Burt added that functionality after the discussion on Monday at UDS about this very topic. He saw my dent that it was being discussed and decided to code it up for Banshee. It apparently only took him 40 minutes (!) to do it. Gabriel is a rock star, pure and simple.
Gabriel also wrote all of the license detection code himself, which he didn’t need to. Creative Commons provides a LGPL licensed library (liblicense) that can read and write license metadata for a variety of file formats (ogg, mp3, pdf, jpg, png, mov, etc). But, Gabriel would have needed to write Mono bindings for liblicense as it is written in C and only has python and ruby bindings right now.
Second: The Jams that various LoCos have been putting on are always a winner. Whenever you get a group of people together who want to learn something new with each other good things tend to happen. The Michigan Team has done Packaging Jams and Bug Jams. There are even thoughts of expanding the idea to other activities (Answer Jams, Translation Jams [wouldn't work too well for US State teams], and such).
Third: Now that we are getting good at putting on events like Jams and release parties we should let others know how we do it! The various LoCo teams are going to start producing some Best Practices when it comes to hosting events and such. Basically, we want every team to know how Mr. 4k and the French LoCo were able to host a release party for FOUR THOUSAND people. Granted, not every team will be able to do something like that in April, but learning how the French LoCo performed marketing would help us all.
Fourth: The Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase is a great opportunity for artists to get their works on MILLIONS of computers worldwide; how can we get more participation in this contest? This is one project which I will be working on with Jono. Ideas: get the news out to other venues that we didn’t get to last time (ie: ccMixter).
I think that should be enough to keep me busy for the next few months. How about you: what projects/ideas really caught your attention at UDS?
