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UDS Copenhagen, Day 3

The day started again with the community roundtable and interesting discussions. To get ahold of the discussions had in the community roundtables, please look at the pad for the sessions.

Unfortunately, being able to see the pad needs you to have a membership in one of specific Launchpad groups. Those who are not members of any of those teams should apply to be a member of ubuntu-etherpad. You should be approved soon after which you are able to log in to see the pad contents.

In addition, you should be reading Planet Ubuntu and looking for community-related articles, like Jussi’s article on UDS for communities. Seriously, check it out now.

The Xubuntu plenary talk

The rest of the morning was intuitiously reserved for preparing the Xubuntu plenary talk. It really paid off, because I think the plenary went even better than expected, and I was able to communicate everything I wanted and even used all the time I was given. We’ll let you know when the video is uploaded online, but for now, check out the slides for the Xubuntu plenary.

Here’s my somewhat extended notes for the community slides as promised:

Focus on the community.

In the Quantal cycle, we focused on the community. We rewrote our Strategy Document to make it easier for new people to step in as they didn’t have to wander through pages and pages of documents to get to know what Xubuntu is about.

We also created an initiative to rewrite our offline documentation. We did that simply by asking people from our non-developer-community to step up if they were ready to help, and we got good results. Now we have a completely rewritten offline documentation.

We also created a Twitter account and started tweeting about the community and everything that is happening in the community. We also contacted people who had created Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ groups to ask them if they wanted to be the official pages or whatever for that social media with the condition that a member of the Xubuntu team should be made an admin for that group. They were all honoured to do so, and now we have three community-maintained social media outlets that they have themselves created.

Continue working on the community.

We should start doing the team reports again. (To empower the Xubuntu team as well as other teams, I’ve taken a work item to work on a web interface that allows easy reporting.)

We should continue engaging community members to write to our blog. We’ve done this before, and we want to continue doing that.

We will need to improve the ways we are working with all-technical issues, incuding trying to track Xubuntu-related bugs more accurately.

Afternoon sessions

In the afternoon, there was some quite interesting sessions about community.

The first of them was about improving the communication that goes outside the community, especially for journalists and people who are going to pass the news (or sometimes just hearsays and false information) forward.

The another one was a presentation by my roommate Pedro Perez Grande, who has been investigating the community cultures in open source software companies and compared them with similar data gathered from traditional companies. This is his masters degree, so it’s not going to be easy reading, but there will be some kind of summary about the most important and interesting outcomes of his study. I’m really looking forward to it!

After these two sessions, I went to be interviewed about Xubuntu. I don’t know when and where the video will be published, but I will inform you as soon as I get to know more.

The evening downtown

In the evening, we went downtown with my roommate Pedro and Christoffer from the Swedish LoCo to see another friend of mine from Helsinki coincidentally also in Copenhagen this week. After getting back to the hotel after varying amount of beer, we met again with Cristoffer who had left the city a bit earlier and went to the Sky Bar in the 23th floor. Nice views, even though it was quite dark already…

It’s now the morning of the last day of sessions, and we’re about to head for breakfast soon. More reporting later today or tomorrow!

This article is part of the article series .