Charles Profitt: UDS Day Two

• Intros and Housekeeping (15 mins)
• Finding New Leaders (45 mins)
• Focus on putting people in positions at a natural part of the community
• Stop people taking leadership positions for purely power hungry reasons
• Unspoken problem, especially in loco teams
• Emphasize that leadership isn’t about having a leadership title
• Providing great mentoring
• Being an effective listener, not just a teacher
• Finding opportunities to delegate
• Surgery Session (1 hour)
• Governance Review (1 hour)

• Lightning Talks: (1 hour)
• Daniel H (Developer Advisory Team + Trello)
• Jorge + Marco (building support + governance)
• Jono (team planning and organization)
• Laura (getting things done)
• Charles (team formation or empowering a team)
• Pen (dealing with crisis)
• Popey (podcast)
• Horsepeople Q+A (1 hour)
• Leader Q+A (1 hour)

One of the things that I noticed in the discussion was mostly focused on the positive with the exception of two bullet points.

• Stop people taking leadership positions for purely power hungry reasons
• Unspoken problem, especially in loco teams

Both of these items could have been better expressed in positive terms. In my opinion it is also a function of the community nurturing future leaders. In a community of doers, effort must be taken to identify people who show the ability to naturally make the transition from doing to leading; where listening, delegating and mentoring become the key skills. People who are great doers sometimes lack the the natural ability to become a leader. I feel it is important to help potential future leaders make that transition by giving them opportunities to learn how to lead. This involves delegating leadership of projects that require others to contribute to project completion. In my management career the most difficult part of the transition was letting go of having total control of tasks and allowing others to complete them in their own way. They may not do it the way I would, but that did not make the method or approach wrong; just different. I am excited about the upcoming session on Thursday. I think the lightning talks and Leader Q+A will help community members to step up and provide leadership in the future.

Ubuntu Accomplishments Development Planning
Ubuntu Accomplishments was the product that has made amazing progress in the last cycle and I am excited about the plans for the future that were shared in the session today. There are accomplishments that are verified externally and tasks that are ‘local’ to the person’s computers. A verified accomplishment example is ‘filing your first bug’. Clearing a level in a game is an example of a ‘local computer’ accomplishment.  The ‘reveal’ for me was the plan to have ‘kudos’ accomplishments which will allow a person to give a ‘kudos accomplishment’ to another community member. This would allow loco team leads to recognize their loco members for organizing an event or providing significant contributions to the success of an event.

Transition help.ubuntu.com to SUMO
This session was a community evaluation of potentially migrating help.ubuntu.com/community to the system that Mozilla uses to provide a help site for their users. There was a lot of attention paid to not injecting unnecessary bureaucracy to the process of community documentation. It was clear that this would not be an intended result and all efforts would be taken to ensure that not happen. There are many features that would make this a significant upgrade to the wiki for the end user seeking help.

•  Better search capabilities
• The ability to mark a how-to as ‘helpful’
• Comment thread based on how-to articles
• Language translations built-in

These are important improvements. The plan is also to migrate current content on the wiki, but there is a desire to review the current documentation to eliminate outdated articles before the migration. If you are interested in helping with that task please feel free to send me an email.

JuJu Charm Writing
The afternoon involved my attempting to learn how to write a JuJu charm. Despite having no previous background with JuJu charms I was able to easily grasp the concepts by looking at current JuJu charms. I am currently up to testing my JuJu charm. I was amazed at just how easy it was; trust me… if I can do it, you can too. If I am successful I hope the JuJu charm will help others make their environment more secure by making it easy to deploy OpenVAS.

Google hosted an amazing circus themed event. I have to give big kudos to the clowns who really made it a fun interactive experience for everyone. The Blue Bunny, Marionette and Bunny really stood out. This was not an ‘event’ that allowed people to hide in the back because the clowns went out and pulled people up on stage. Amazing fun, but I will allow the pictures to speak for themselves.