OStatic

As KDE jumps boldly into the waters of its new brainstorming initiative, the Ubuntu Brainstorm team battles a strong current of incoming ideas.

Ubuntu's Brainstorm project has witnessed a steady increase in idea submissions since its inception, and given this upward trend and current workload, the team has decided to call for reinforcements. The Brainstorm team is seeking users familiar with Ubuntu's Brainstorm process to act as Idea Reviewers.

This week I had a unique opportunity to talk with Ubuntu's community manager, Jono Bacon. As community manager, Bacon is the Ubuntu community's connection to Canonical, responsible for encouraging and supporting growth and harmony in the community.

This is no small feat, considering the recent rapid growth and adoption rates of Linux in general -- and Ubuntu in particular. Bacon shares a bit about the subtle (and not-so-subtle) nuances of managing and maintaining a healthy community -- from planning and assessing its growth, to encouraging (and appreciating) members who participate to the best of their abilities.

At the Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE) late last month, Ubuntu community manager, Jono Bacon, spoke to attendees about community, and why it means so much to open source projects. Ryan Paul at Ars Technica put together a concise, informative overview of Bacon's SCaLE talk.

Bacon says that community -- and building a sense of belonging -- are crucial to growing and maintaining any open source project. No doubt this is due to the heavy element of voluntary participation in the open source world, but the belonging concept is one that any project or company -- open or closed, with paid employees or non-compensated volunteers (or any mix of the two) -- would benefit from applying to its management techniques. It is, without argument, one of open source's strongest traits.

Bugs, system conflicts, and errant bits of code add unique challenges to the technical area of open source development. They also affect a project's community -- and as any community manager can tell you, developing a healthy community is often more difficult (and has higher stakes) than rogue code.

Management is tough all round, but managing open source projects is different still. Most developers are giving their time because the project interests them, and non-developers join because they find the project useful, and they want to share their enthusiasm. But a community not being any one remotely homogenous group means that passions sometimes run high, and it's not always easy to keep a project's community -- it's life -- moving forward.

It may have just gotten easier. Ubuntu's Community Manager, Jono Bacon, announced his upcoming book, The Art of Community will be available later this year.

Open source software is inextricably tied to the idea of giving it away. Projects open their code for a number of reasons -- to better the codebase, or to allow others to bend an application to their own needs. Maybe the reasons are entirely altruistic, or maybe the altruism is the happy side effect of more project-centric decisions.

Of course, the open source approach doesn't just help code, or simply act as the framework for strong applications. The desired end result of any application is to improve the life of the user in some way. It sounds like hyperbole, perhaps, but if an application isn't making work in some way easier (or play more fun), it's not an application you'd want to use again.

Ubuntu community manager Jono Bacon announced Wednesday the Ubuntu Open Week schedule for the Jaunty release. Ubuntu Open Weeks are routinely held right after a release to welcome and encourage new contributors to get involved in work on the next release.

The Open Week for Jaunty takes place next week (November 3rd through the 7th) on the #ubuntu-classroom channel on IRC.

Last week, I had the pleasure of getting some unique insight into the Ubuntu 8.10 release ( Intrepid Ibex ) from Canonical's marketing manager, Gerry Carr. The finalized server and desktop editions of the 8.10 release will be available for download October 30th, and host a variety of new tools and features.

The Linux Plumbers Conference may have ended last Friday, but the discussions -- and one discussion in particular -- will be analyzed, deconstructed, and argued for quite a bit longer.

Greg Kroah-Hartman's assertion is that Canonical doesn't contribute significantly to kernel development and the packages that make up the core of a Linux system. Canonical CTO Matt Zimmerman responded to this assertion. It seems at that point, much of the community, developers and users alike, took to examining their particular parts of the open source elephant.

Herein lies the problem.