That’s right, we be jammin’, too.
First the details from the original ubuntu-us-mi mailing list announcment:
Now, the great looking banner from Leandro Gómez:
See you there!
Tuesday night I gave a presentation at the Michigan!/usr/group (MUG) meeting about Creative Commons and its relationship with Free/Libre Open Source Software. I had a great time giving the presentation and judging from the amount and activity of the questions it seems like others enjoyed it, too!
I started off with a quick background on Creative Commons and what we do, in general. Then, after answering a ton of questions which were raised in the first 5 minutes, I went on to discuss CC’s role in the Free/Open Source Software community. Specifically, the FLOSS projects we develop and/or work on and how we can help others create awesome things.
If you weren’t there, you missed the opportunity to be a part of a great conversation between some great MUG members and I. But luckily, my slides are available online:
And, since Craig was nice enough to use my photo camera to record the presentation, we even have video! We only have 34 minutes of video, but that gets the majority of the talk. Apparently my camera records at a 1 gig per 10 minutes rate, we only got 34 minutes because it filled up my 4 gig memory card.
Thanks to everyone who came out, you made it fun.
Happy Jaunty Release Day Everyone!
Those in the Southeast Michigan area are more than welcome to attend our release party THIS SATURDAY. We’ll be toasting to the next great Ubuntu release. Bring your friends, bring your laptop (free wifi!), bring your questions. I’ll bring stickers!
Important Details:
What: Jaunty Release Party!
Where: Corner Brewery
When: 7pm – ???
Why: Because Ubuntu is awesome! Because we’re awesome! Right on.
How: Need a ride? Join the mailing list.
Release Party Time!
Thats right, the Michigan LoCo Team will be hosting our biannual Ubuntu Release Party on April 25th in Ypsilanti, Michigan. The venue of choice is The Corner Brewery as it provides ample seating and ability to move tables around to have bigger groups. Plus, if you know where to sit there are power outlets!
And you know the Michigan LoCo can throw a party, we even had people come up from OHIO last time because they knew our party was better. I wouldn’t be surprised if this year we even had people from CHICAGO make the drive over. I don’t even see Ohio or Chicago on the list of Release Parties yet.
Important Details:
What: Jaunty Release Party!
Where: Corner Brewery
When: 7pm – ???
Why: Because Ubuntu is awesome! Because we’re awesome! Right on.
How: Need a ride? Join the mailing list.
Be sure to check out what other teams are having parties on the nice JauntyReleaseParties wiki page.
Hope to see you there!
Well, I will call that a success.
First, we all traveled through the blizzard conditions to get to the event. No one was hurt.
When we arrived we set up quickly and got to work. The only hitch was the wireless at the library was effectively non-existent. Luckily, we had a hub and cables. Our turn out wasn’t the highest (I blame the weather) but our spirits were high.
Everyone there was really putting a lot of good effort into doing some quality triage today. Had lots of good questions asked (and answered!) and judging from the stats at the end of the event, we kicked some butt!
(sidenote: I’m not sure what is up with the stats now, because I’m pretty sure the michigan team did not touch over a thousand bugs today).
Be sure to check out the pictures taken by Craig, another Michigan LoCo member, and his blog post about the event: linky.
And speaking of pictures, so far I am the only one to have uploaded pictures to flickr with the tag of “ubuntu-global-bugjam-february-09” as outlined on the GlobalBugJam/Stories page; get your photos up there!
So I just showed up to the Michigan LoCo Global Bug Jam event after making the hour drive through blizzard conditions to get here.
But after figuring out the networking situation (thanks Clinton-Macomb Public Library for the ethernet cable!) we had the first big reward of the day.
A guy walked by our conference room and popped his head in, “Hey, is this a Linux User’s Group?”
Me, “Yeah, pretty much.”
Guy notices I am running Ubuntu, “Is this specific to Ubuntu?”
“Yep, we’re the Michigan Local Community Team for Ubuntu.”
“Oh, cool!”
“Yeah, we doing a Bug Jam right now.”
“Good deal”
Guy walks away to go be with his kids.
A little later he walks back by the conference room with his wife and kids and says “Hey kids, those people in there are who make Ubuntu better. They’re working on the new release, 9.04.”
Wow! That is a reward in and of itself.
Of course the Michigan LoCo Team will be participating with the Global Bug Jam, once again.
Here are the details:
For more information check out our event page.
Also, see what we did last time: first story on this page.
Be ready for another awesome and rocking bug jam with the Michigan LoCo!
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?
One of the coolest parts of being involved with the Ubuntu community is knowing some really cool people and getting to met up with them.
I went down to Ohio Linux Fest and had a ball! Those people really know how to throw an event: good speakers and a great pre- and post-party. The Ubuntu community came out in force also. There were at least 10 people from the Michigan LoCo and even a few from Chicago (be careful with them). A big thanks goes out to everyone at OLF; I am definitely going back again next year.
Oh, and yes, we all did have a great [1] time [2] at the Dance Off which was so thoughtfully initiated by Jono. I would like personally apologize to everyone who witnessed that event.
And speaking of Jono, I just had the distinct pleasure of listening to the new Severed Fifth album, Denied by Reign. I’ll be completely honest with everyone: I’m not the biggest death metal fan. I even talked about this before briefly on my blog. But, even though I don’t listen to it I can still appreciate it when someone really does put a lot of themselves into their music and make it special. Jono has done that with Denied by Reign. No in-depth musical review from me but I will tell you that my favorite track so far is “Edge of Design.”
When this album comes out, you owe it to yourself to at least download it to show your support of what Jono is trying to do. If you didn’t know he is going to be licensing the album under a Creative Commons license. That isn’t the most radical thing as other bands have done similarly, but he is choosing a more open license than most and there aren’t many others in the Death Metal genre doing anything like this (prove me wrong if you can, please!).
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