On Thursday, March 2nd I spent most of the day running an Open Source Infrastructure Day, but across the way my Ubuntu friends were kicking off the first day of the second annual UbuCon Summit at SCaLE. The first day included a keynote from by Carl Richell of System76 where they made product announcements, including of their new Galago Pro laptop and their Starling Pro ARM server. The talk following came from Nextcloud, with a day continuing with talks from Aaron Atchison and Karl Fezer talking about the Mycroft AI, JosÃ© Antonio Rey on Getting to know Juju: From zero to deployed in minutes and Amber Graner sharing the wisdom that You don’t need permission to contribute to your own destiny.

I ducked out of the Open Infrastructure Day in the mid-afternoon to give my talk, 10 Years of Xubuntu. This is a talk I’d been thinking about for some time, and I begin by walking folks through the history of the Xubuntu project. From there I spoke about where it sits in the Ubuntu community as a recognized flavor, and then on to how specific strategies that the team has employed with regard to motivating the completely volunteer-driven team.

When it came to social media accounts, we didn’t create them all ourselves, instead relying upon existing accounts on Facebook, G+ and LinkedIn that we promoted to being official ones, keeping the original volunteers in place, just giving access to a core Xubuntu team member in case they couldn’t continue running it. It worked out for all of us, we had solid contributors passionate about their specific platforms and excited to be made official, and as long as they kept them running we didn’t need to expend core team resources to keep them running. We’ve also worked to collect user stories in order to motivate current contributors, since it means a lot to see their work being used by others. I’ve also placed a great deal of value on the Xubuntu Strategy Document, which has set the guiding principles of the project and allowed us to steer the ship through difficult decisions in the project. Slides from the talk are available here: 10_years_of_Xubuntu_UbuCon_Summit.pdf (1.9M).

Thursday evening I met with my open source infrastructure friends for dinner, but afterwards swung by Porto Alegre to catch some folks for evening drinks and snacks. I had a really nice chat with Nathan Haines, who co-organized the UbuCon Summit.

On Friday I was able to attend the first keynote! Michael Hall gave a talk titled Sponsored by Canonical where he dove deep into Ubuntu history to highlight Canonical’s role in the support of the project from the early focus on desktop Linux, to the move into devices and the cloud. His talk was followed by one from Sergio Schvezov on Snaps. The afternoon was spent as an unconference, with the Ubuntu booth starting up in the expo hall on 2PM.

The weekend was all about the Ubuntu booth. Several volunteers staffed it Friday through Sunday.

They spent the event showing off the Ubuntu Phone, Mycroft AI, and several laptops.

It was also great to once again meet up with one of my co-authors for the 9th edition of The Official Ubuntu Book, JosÃ© Antonio Rey. Our publisher sent a pile of books to give out at the event, some of which we gave out during our talks, and a couple more at the booth.