People like shirts, stickers and goodies to show support of their favorite operation system, and though the Xubuntu project has been slower than our friends over at Kubuntu at offering them, we now have a decent line-up offered by companies we’re friendly with. Several months ago the Xubuntu team was contacted by Gabor Kum of HELLOTUX to see if we’d be interested in offering shirts through their site. We were indeed interested! So after he graciously sent our project lead a polo shirt to evaluate, we agreed to start offering his products on our site, alongside the others ...

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This past Sunday I hosted an Ubuntu Global Jam at the Gandi office here in downtown San Francisco. Given the temporal proximity to a lot of travel, I’ve had to juggle a lot to make this happen, a fair amount of work goes into an event like this, from logistics of getting venue, food and drinks, and giveaways to the actual prep for the event and actually telling people about it. In this case we were working on Quality Assurance for Xubuntu (and a little Lubuntu on a PPC Mac). It’s totally worth it though, so I present ...

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For years Gandi.net has been a strong supporter of Open Source communities and non-profits. From their early support of Debian to their current support of Ubuntu via discounts to Ubuntu Members they’ve been directly supportive of projects I’m passionate about. I was delighted when I heard they had opened an office in my own city of San Francisco, and they’ve generously offered to host the next Ubuntu Global Jam for the Ubuntu California team right here at their office in the city. + = Jam! What’s an Ubuntu Global Jam? From the FAQ on the wiki: A ...

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Sorry, this is long, but hang in there. A little while back I wrote a blog post that seemed to inspire some people and ruffle the feathers of some others. It was designed as a conversation-starter for how we can re-energize leadership in Ubuntu. When I kicked off the blog post, Elizabeth quite rightly gave me a bit of a kick in the spuds about not providing a place to have a discussion, so I amended the blog post to a link to this thread where I encourage your feedback and participation. Rather unsurprisingly, there was some good feedback, before ...

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For many years Ubuntu has had a comprehensive governance structure. At the top of the tree are the Community Council (community policy) and the Technical Board (technical policy). Below those boards are sub-councils such as the IRC, Forum, and LoCo councils, and developer assessment boards. The vast majority of these boards are populated by predominantly non-Canonical folks. I think this is a true testament to the openness and accessibility of governance in Ubuntu. There is no “Canonical needs to have people on half the board” shenanigans…if you are a good leader in the Ubuntu community, you could be on ...

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