Just a quick note: you can find blogs from many of the Bazaar guys now at Planet Bazaar.
Bloggers featured so far include: Aaron Bentley, Andrew Bennetts, John Arbash Meinel, Mark Shuttleworth, Martin Pool, Robert Collins and Szilveszter Farkas.
It’s not long now until Ubuntu Live! July 22 – 24 in Portland, Oregon.
Ubuntu Live will be a great opportunity to learn more about the technical and business background to both Canonical and Ubuntu and how Launchpad and Bazaar fit into that.
So, if you’re particularly interested in Launchpad and Bazaar, the sessions to look out for are:
It probably goes without saying that the Ubuntu project is the largest user of Launchpad. Hearing Matt and Paul’s tale of how Ubuntu uses Launchpad will give you a practical understanding of what makes Launchpad unique.
John Meinel’s talk will be a great way to see how Launchpad and Bazaar – together – can work for your project. In John’s tutorial session, he’ll then show exactly how Launchpad and Bazaar work together, with plenty of opportunity for attendees to learn the ins and outs.
Now’s a good time to book, if you’re thinking of going, as you can get a fat discount with the super-special-Canonical-discount-code 
Enter the code ubu07ucm to get a 35% discount.
Taking your first steps into a free software project can be intimidating.
Whether you want to code, write documentation, help with marketing or whatever, there’s a learning curve to overcome.
Launchpad is all about making it easier for free software people to work together. Recently, we introduced a new feature to do just that: mentoring.
Mentoring is simple: it provides an easy way for new participants to learn the ropes of a Launchpad team that they want to join.
It works like this:
During that process, Sarah learnt how to contribute effectively to the Telepathy team. The Telepathy team not only got one of its bugs fixed but gained a new member. Daniel found satisfaction in helping Sarah and the team, whilst having time to work on other bugs.
Importantly, the only people who had to give time to the process were Daniel and Sarah. Although offers of mentorship are linked to teams, team administrators don’t have to become involved. Mentoring is about relationships between individuals who choose to work together, so there’s no need for time-consuming bureaucracy to manage it.
You can find all the offers of mentorship, that are related to Ubuntu, at:
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+mentoring
There, you’ll see how recent each offer is, which team it’s linked to, who made the offer and which bug or blueprint it relates to.
You can find out more about mentoring in our guide at:
https://help.launchpad.net/MentoringManagement
I’m really keen to hear what you think of mentoring. To me, its simplicity is its strength. It’s so easy for both sides to use that I can see it quickly becoming a core way for communities to encourage and develop new members.
Comment here, drop me a mail, or join us on the launchpad-users mailing list.
It’s no secret that Dell will soon ship Ubuntu pre-installed.
This is fantastic news and reflects the quality of both the community Ubuntu team and the business development guys here at Canonical.
Congratulations to all involved!
Got a question about Launchpad? Want to make a suggestion or complaint? Or perhaps you just wanna say how much you love Launchpad
We’ve got another Launchpad Users Meeting coming up this Wednesday 2nd May. It’s the ideal time to tell the Launchpad team what you think, to ask for help and to make feature requests.
Add your question, comment or suggestion to the agenda and I’ll rally up the relevant members of the Launchpad team to talk to you.
Look forward to seeing you.
Agenda: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LaunchpadUserMeeting/2007-05-02
This week is Ubuntu Open Week!
Launchpad is a pretty important part of the Ubuntu ecosystem, so features fairly heavily in Ubuntu Open Week.
We’ve got sessions on each of Launchpad’s tools, as well as two sessions where I introduce the basic concepts of Launchpad and a general Launchpad Q&A session from Kiko. There’s also a great session on Bazaar from Martin Pool.
As with all Ubuntu Open Week sessions, simply join #ubuntu-classroom on irc.freenode.net.
If you can’t make it to a session, logs are available.
And if you have any questions, comments or suggestions about Launchpad, you can always join us in #launchpad on irc.freenode.net or in the Launchpad Users mailing list:
Wow, we’ve put Launchpad version 1.0 into public beta and it looks great!
Since I joined Canonical, almost all the Launchpad team’s work has been focused on 1.0. The chaps have consistently impressed me with their talent and 1.0 is testament to their vision, high standards and skill.
So, let’s take a look at what’s new.
The most obvious change in Launchpad 1.0 is the new interface.
Launchpad does a lot. It is made up of five principal tools and has different contexts depending on the project, distribution, team or individual you’re working with at that time. The interface has a lot of work to do to make it intuitive to navigate all that information.
The previous Launchpad home page was great for people already using Launchpad but I think it was a touch overwhelming for people new to the service.
The new Launchpad home page is clean and its simplicity sets the tone for the rest of interface.
Importantly, it’s now easy to get a feel for what Launchpad is and to see what tools it offers:
You can also jump straight to a project by entering its name in the nice big search box.
Many different projects use Launchpad. To make it obvious which project you’re working on, Launchpad displays the project’s logo at the top of each page.
Brandability isn’t just for projects, though. I’ve got my mug on pages associated with me:
Similarly, it’s now easier to identify pages associated with particular Launchpad teams:
A drop-down menu, in the top green navigation bar, lets you drill down further into project, team or individual that you’re currently working with:
Nice obvious buttons help contributors dive straight in:
The Actions menu, in the left-hand column, is always a useful place to find out what you can do in that application, in that context. Beneath, expandable boxes have additional information about the project, team or individual.
Launchpad is all about collaboration. Knowing what projects and types of work interests a person is useful if you want to work with them.
User profile pages now have more information about that person’s activity in Launchpad:
Launchpad’s code hosting solves three problems in one go:
The project cloud gives you a quick way to see which projects host their code with Launchpad. The darker the name, the more active the project and the larger the name, the more code they host.
Launchpad 1.0 also has loads of new code under the surface, ready for all the new features we have planned for the coming months.
Soon, we’ll be re-opening the private beta again, as we get to work on making free software collaboration even easier. You’re welcome to join the Launchad Beta Testers team.
For now, we can’t wait to hear what you think of the public beta of 1.0.
Visit https://launchpad.net and email feedback@launchpad.net with your comments, questions and suggestions!
Marketing sits awkwardly between art and science.
Trouble is, big money goes into marketing and, if successful, even bigger money comes out. If you’re a business-person and about to hand 10% of your budget to a spangly-suited marketer, you want some reassurance. Marketing, as an academic discipline, provides this reassurance through theories, frameworks and studies.
Human beings are an awkward factor in marketing: you can’t guarantee that one set of inputs will result in a specific outcome. The closest that marketing can get is to say, “customers did this, we believe they did it because of our marketing activity and we have these studies to back that suggestion”. You can’t have a genuine control experiment. If you want to know why someone chose Nescafe over a brand of instant coffee that isn’t quite so foul, you can perform all sorts of studies to determine how much influence promotion, price, distribution or, unlikely as it seems in this case, product had. Despite your best efforts, two things get in the way:
1. People can’t always tell you why they make certain purchasing decisions.
2. Your marketing activity isn’t the only influence.
So, marketing people continue to come up with ever more elabourate, and often very useful, ways to measure their effectiveness and to help make success reproducible.
If we’re to introduce marketing to open source software projects, these theories and frameworks can help us greatly. While it’s important to remember that marketing isn’t a true science and that there are no guarantees, they can teach us what mistakes and what good decisions people have made previously.
It leads us, though, to the frustrated philosopher. Usually with good intentions, one or two people in an open source project point out that marketing is a well established discipline and that there are things to be learnt from other people’s experience. There are ways of doing things, they say, and that random marketing activity is of little use. In traditional business marketing, if you can’t measure your results, you’re wasting your time.
This is where I have to make my confession. A while back, I got stuck into frustrated philosopher mode. I was concerned that the Ubuntu Marketing Team needed to set SMART objectives, to have a strategy. After all, OpenOffice.org has a nice fat document in which they describe their five year marketing strategy.
Open source projects don’t necessarily work like that, though. OOo is, probably, an anomaly, for the time-being. I don’t advocate the eradication of plans, objectives, measurement, etc, as Pinko Marketing does. Instead, I think we marketers can learn something from the open source process: do it, share it, make it better, formalise it when appropriate.
People working on open source projects are giving out of limited time. Many of us want to see quick results, to reassure us that what we’re doing is worthwhile. With code, my impression is that the satisfaction of writing something and seeing it work is what makes a lot of people tick. Those of us interested in marketing open source software need that same kind of reward to keep us motivated.
There is also the rather odd relationship between community marketers and a commercial sponsor. More than likely, the commercial sponsor will have marketing plans and, quite probably these days, professional marketers. Commercial realities, professional marketers who are unfamiliar with the FOSS community and lack of time mean that true collaboration between a community marketing team and the sponsor’s marketers can be rare. Agreeing a common, mutually beneficial strategy can, therefore, be nigh-on impossible for commercially sponsored projects.
Although you’re taking a risk, because your marketing activity is likely to be outward facing, open source marketing should come from the bottom up. The same community processes that iteratively improve code can apply to marketing. It’s still important to aim to have a strategy and to be able to measure what you’re doing. However, to put that before all else will mostly only prevent any actual marketing activity from taking place and, if imposed by one or two vocal people, will probably fail to gain acceptance.
Marketing theory is important and useful. Strategy is important. However, while one or two people grow ever more frustrated because no one wants to set objectives, some other project is wowing everyone with its highly visible grass-roots promotional campaign.
A future Conservative government would “create a level playing field” for open source software, George Osborne – Shadow Chancellor – has announced. It’s the top story on the Conservatives home page, at the moment.
Citing the Japanese government’s plans to move to open source payroll and Extremadura’s Linux move, Osborne claims open source software could bring a?5% saving on central government’s IT spending.
It appears, though, that Osborne understands that it’s not just about cost savings:
“What it is about is better and more effective government. The problem is that the cultural change has not taken place in government. There isn’t a level playing field for open source software. As it stands, too many companies are frozen out of government IT contracts, stifling competition and driving up costs.
“All too often, a government IT system is incompatible with other types of software, which stifles competition and hampers innovation. Looking at the litany of IT projects that have collapsed or spiralled over budget, it’s clear too that this has meant billions of pounds wasted and public service reform being hampered.
“Let’s start being open source right now.”
It’s great to see the number two of the UK’s opposition party taking open source seriously. Whether it translates into action …?well, let’s see.
Think about town criers:
Before mass-literacy and mobility, they served a useful function. Now that we have mass-media, town criers are inefficient.
Newspapers, radio and websites have wider geographic reach, allow people to develop specialised skills, can be targeted at specific groups.
Town crier marketers often do a great job. They speak with passion, they share common language and experience with their audience, they have authenticity. Word of mouth has long been one of the most powerful forms of marketing promotion and, as we all know, is ever more important now.
To bring the full benefits of marketing to an open source software project, though, we need to make a step forward similar to that from the town criers of old to the mass media of today.
A true marketing orientation allows to us gain:
Marketing is about matching people’s needs with ways you can help. It’s an attitude of considering what’s most appropriate to the people you’re dealing with and putting that before your own preconceptions.
If you find out what your users need, feed that into your software and consider how to take your message to those users, you’re already hundreds of years ahead of the town crier.