C: Welcome to the Ubuntu UK Podcast, I'm Ciemon
T: I'm Tony
D: I'm Daviey
C: And what's in episode 7?
T: We're going to do some interviews from UDS
D: We have a discussion on programming with a focus on Python
C: And we're going to announce the results of our competition.
D: Sounds like a fun packed show
P: So Tony and I are now here with the internets Jono Bacon, we want to talk a bit about Foscamp and UDS. You're at least partly responsible for organising this whole shebang, tell us a bit about foscamp.
J: One of the problems with events is that they're often very much driven by certain vendors, you know, and you have things like Ubuntu developers summits, which are obviously very Ubuntu focused and there's things like the Red Had events and I think Novell do some stuff and we just thought it would be really valuable to get loads of upstreams together in the same physical venue. And base it around upstreams.
T: For people who aren't familiar with distributions, upstreams are just general open source projects.
J: Yeah because there's a lot value when you get a bunch of X people together, some Open Office people together, you know you get some HAL people together and interesting conversations happen. Yeah, so the last one was the first Foscamp and it was a blast and this one has been excellent, I mean I've heard some reports from some of the discussions and there's been some really valuable discussions happening.
P: So it's designed to be, kind of, Ubuntu agnostic or distro agnostic at least to some degree, but obviously its tacked onto the front of UDS, which is the Ubuntu Developers Summit, so you're going to have a high concentration of Ubuntu people here, but also developers who know a lot about upstream. Do you get a feeling that we need more upstream, more involvement from other people, more integration with upstream and other distros at an event like this?
J: Absolutley, I mean, yeah, one of the problems that we have is that there's quite a lot of Ubuntu people there and it's absolutley not an Ubuntu event, you know, if you look at the website it's got absolutley nothing to do with Ubuntu on there, it's not part of Ubuntu.com or anything like that it's it's own independant event that we just wanted to do. Part of the reason why we tacked it onto the front of the Ubuntu Developers Summit is so we can send people, because they're going to be in the same location and also we sponsor a lot of people for the Ubuntu Developers summit, who are from upstreams, so we think if we sponsor them to come out to UDS then well we might as well send them a couple of days earlier and have them come to Foscamp, we can actually pay for people to come to Foscamp, but there's, yeah, I mean there's people from Red Hat, people from Novell, there was a load of people from Debian and it's absolutley important to get loads of these different projects together.
T: And how do you think Foscamp differs from other events like FOSDEM?
J: I think what's probably more interesting about Foscamp is that it's more contained. Like if you go to Fosdem there's loads and loads of people around, and loads of different projects. There's far more open source, free software projects around, but it can be difficult to get the right people in the same venue, in the same room talking to each other because there's just so much going on, there's ten things going on at any one time and at Foscamp it's a smaller event but it's about having that level of diversity I think is important and also then just the format, the fact that it's an un-conference, you know people can just talk about what they want, you know we had some really really good discussions, unfortunatley I was locked in various sessions, I couldn't attend some sessions I wanted to go to but everything I saw was excellent
P: So when you say it's an unconference, how does the scheduling system work for an unconference?
J: Well basically it's great, it's the lazy persons conference because what you do is put up a big empty schedule then get other people to do it for you. So the plan was that like Foocamp, we have a big empty schedule and I did an intro and said this is how it works, if you want to talk about something go and add it to the schedule and people go in there and they add and you get some really random stuff, I mean I went to Foocamp, which kind of pushed this idea and they had like weird sessions on lockpicking and mind hacking and all kinds of stuff and it's much more focussed on this but you get that kind of level of diversity in terms of sessions and it's great you know, so this means that we don't define the schedule, people who are at the event talk about what they think is interesting and important.
P: You don't really know what's going to get discussed until you get here really do you?Oh yeah, I mean we could have some complete crack and we activley encourage it you know, you know you might have someone say yeah yeah I've got a session it's going to be called, you know, rewrite the linux kernel in you know, haskale or something and people sit down and have some really mad discussions that you guarentee at any unconference you're going to see sessions you'll think I'm going to have to go into that because it's just going to be a freak show in terms of what they're talking about.
T: But is there useful stuff that comes out of it as well?
J: There's a risk that these events, you just get people talking about a load of non-sense its not actually useful. I've been to a few unconferences where that's happened
P: But there's part of this that's building relationships, it's not just necessarily just about let's have a discussion about x or y, it's bulding relations between upstream and Ubuntu and also between various upstream projects don't you think?
J: Yeah and that's it I mean I think some of the best ideas in the world that have happened everywhere have been scrawled on the back of a fag packet, a cigarette packet for non-english people, or the back of a beer mat or something. They happen in pubs, they happen in corridors, they happen in people's front rooms. Some of the most valuable discussions that happen at a UDS or a Foscamp or anything will happen in a corridor, so it's getting people in the same vicinity and that's one thing that I was really pleased with this Foscamp was the fact that we had, you know, thirty or fourty different projects represented here and loads of people who probably never meet in other circumstances together. Because you get, like with most free software projects, you get the same kind of group of people going to conferences, there's this very definitive set of people who always attend conferences and you see them all the time if you do the conference circuit, so it's nice to get other people there and that's one of the things, particularly tacking on the front of UDS, it means that when we invite people to UDS, it means that we can think who are we also inviting to Foscamp and deliberatley pick people who aren't typically on that group of people who come along to these conferences all the time.
P: So you mention UDS, which follows straight on from Foscamp, what's the purpose of UDS, in a nutshell?
J: The idea is that we sit down and we discuss things, proposed features, proposed things that we want to do in Ubuntu or propose changes to the community. At the end of each session we have a set of action points that we can actually engage with. UDS is something that's really, I mean this is my third one, I went to, let me think, Mountain View, Seville, Boston, this is my fourth one and it develops every time. We try and fix different things and try and refine it in different ways every time and this is by far from what I can tell the smoothest so far.
T: Is it a case that Canonical come with a list of things that they would like to see in a release and community members then try to dib in a few extra things or does the vast majority of stuff come from the community?
J: Traditionally what we did was we had a system whereby people could register specifications on Launchpad and those specifications could be proposed for discussions at UDS. This particular one is a little different in the fact that the people that lead the tracks have gone and looked at the issues that are pertinant in their part of the community so there's been a lot of discussion about things that they think need to be fixed in Ubuntu. It really is very representative of the community. The other thing is that we deliberatley left slots blank so when we get here we fill them, I mean already today I've had two slots filled with community sessions.
P: What about the social side of UDS, you're getting a lot of people together who don't normally meet in real life from all over the world and do you have any kind of like social things arranged as well?
J: Yeah I mean the social thing is a very important part of a UDS, because one thing that we've learned in Canonical is that the whole company is distributed. We have people from all over the world, and if you don't get people together a certain amount of time every year they lose these social bonds that they have with each other, and luckily for the Ubuntu project we have peole meet up every six months. And part of UDS is getting people to have fun with each other so people enjoy themselves and have a good time as well as being productive, for example when we pick a venue, we deliberatley pick a venue that's got a fairly social area where people can mingle, and people can sit down they can plug in laptops, can code together, and that's part of it, but also evening events, typically at a UDS in the past as soon as events where finished people where left to their own devices and this time we've tried to pick places where, we've talked to the local loco team and they've advised venues where we can recommend people to meet up in the evenings. So if people don't know where to go they can go there. And we've also got this jam night on the Friday night, Ubuntu Allstars where we've hired a venue and got a load of musical instruments and we're going to play some music
P: Not death metal though?
J: Errr, unfortunatley not, as much as I'd like to have some cannibal corpse being played, it probably might no go down very well with the rest of the crowd.
P: Given the T-Shirts that most people are wearing here, I think it'd probably go down quite well. Most of them, they do look like metal heads most of them, I don't know what that is!
J: I think this should be encouraged you know.
P: Once UDS is over, theres going to be a lot of stuff that's been discussed and specifications that have been written where can people in the community find out what was discussed. Because obviously They can get involved during the week but once the week is over, they might want to find out what's been happening, what's been going on, where can they find out more information?
J: Well right now what we're doing, as UDS continues, we're asking each of the people that run the session to make a log pf the things they've discussed in the session and add that to this report page and then I'm planning on taking this content and merging it together into something more readable. So there will be a UDS report that will be released to the community afterwards. But in the interim if people goto http://wiki.ubuntu.com/UDS-Intrepid you can see that there's a link there to the report and they can see all the reports from all the sessions on the different tracks there and then obviously as time goes on you know the best place to find out about Ubuntu development is the planet, planet Ubuntu.
P: Thanks very much for joining us Jono, cheers.