Safe as Milk

Maemo community council elections: results in!

The Maemo community council election is over, and the results are in.

166 people voted to elect the incoming council, and when the dust settled, the new council will be made up of:

• Andrew Flegg
• Ryan Abel
• Tim Samoff
• Kees Jongenburger
• Alan Bruce (better known as qole)

For those interested in that kind of thing, you can download all of the ballots from the election in .blt format (the format used by OpenSTV) and replay the election with different counting systems and options for transferring votes. You can also browse the votes online, and verify that your vote was recorded correctly.

Congratulations to the elected council members, and thank you to all of the candidates for running!

Libre Graphics Meeting fundraiser update

With little fanfare, this year’s Libre Graphics Meeting fundraiser has been progressing nicely.

In the three weeks since the announcement of the launch of the campaign, we have raised almost $3,000 in community donation – mostly smaller than $50 – from 71 individual donors. Much of the credit for the campaign this year has to go to Jon Phillips of Creative Commons, Inkscape and OpenClipart fame.

The campaign has started earlier this year than last year, when we were really caught unawares by our difficulties in getting sponsors, and has lacked some of the frenzy of the last campaign, but Jon has been doing stellar work keeping the fire burning, and ensuring a regular stream of donations from supporters of projects related to Libre graphics.

It is hard to overstate the importance this conference has to the communities working on projects like Inkscape, GIMP and Scribus, among others, and to overstate the progress we have made because of these conferences in the past few years in the realm of graphics applications on Linux.

It’s useful to point out that in the Linux Foundation desktop linux surveys, the most popular applications which companies and individuals want for Linux are graphics applications – Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Premier, Autodesk AutoCAD, Adobe Dreamweaver and Microsoft Visio are the top 6 applications which people are missing on Linux. This conference is all about encouraging the development of applications destined to fulfil those needs. Also worth noting, when asked whether they wanted the applications above ported to Linux, or they wanted to use equivalent Linux applications where possible, a large majority want to use native equivalents, rather than ported commercial applications.

For any of you looking for a good cause which will go directly to supporting high quality applications that you use, I’d encourage you to contribute to the Libre Graphics Meeting. The conference is only as worthwhile as the people attending it, let’s ensure that we get a critical mass once again and provide energy and momentum to all of the participating projects for the coming year.

Maemo Community Council elections: The story so far

More than half way through the Maemo community council Spring 2009 elections, I thought it would be interesting to get a sneak peek at turn-out figures, to let people know how things have been going so far.

The results are slightly disappointing so far – but I know that there are a lot of last-minute voters, so I’m not exactly worried yet.

Out of 717 ballots issued, as of Tuesday at 15h UTC, we have registered 138 votes so far, or about 20% of the electorate. This tallies roughly with the participation rate that we had in the first council election with people who had more than 25 karma (roughly 35%).

The election will end at midnight UTC on Thursday evening, at which time anyone will be able to download the anonymous ballots and calculate the results of the election using OpenSTV or any other program that handles .blt format files. I will calculate the results using the pre-defined settings for the election (random transfer STV, static Droop threshold, with no lower limit for batch elimination) and publish them on Friday morning, European time.

All of you who have been waiting to vote, vote now! And all of you who have trouble voting, or who haven’t received the voting token you should have, contact me.

FFmpeg release – congrats!

Never one to hold a grudge, I’d like to congratulate the FFmpeg developers on their recent release of FFmpeg 0.5.

I’ve been pretty hard on FFmpeg in the past for their lack of releases and their API policy – it’s made packaging their software hard for distributions, and developing using their libraries hard for third party developers. A release is great news, and I hope it is the first of many.

Maemo Community Council referenda: the results are in

The voting is now closed in the Maemo Community Council referenda on election procedures for the upcoming and future Maemo Community Council elections.

The provisional results, which will stand unless successfully challenged within the next 7 days, are as follows:

1. Which of the following criteria do you want applied to the Maemo Community Council elections to be held in March 2009?
   • 25 karma and 3 month old account (status quo) (71 votes)
   • No karma requirement, anyone with an account for more than 3 months
     may vote (64 votes)
   • None of the above (4 votes)

   139 votes were cast of an electorate of 601 (23%)

   We will maintain a 25 karma requirement for the next elections.

2. Which of the following criteria do you want applied to future Maemo Community Council elections?
   • 10 karma and 3 month old account (48 votes)
   • 25 karma and 3 month old account (status quo) (46 votes)
   • 10 karma or 12 month old account (22 votes)
   • No karma or account age requirement – everyone with a maemo.org account may vote (13 votes)
   • None of the above (0 votes)

   129 votes cast of an electorate of 601 (21.5%).

   For future elections, voters must have a karma of 10, and have created their maemo.org account more than 3 months before the closing date of the election.

3. Which of the following voting systems do you want used for Maemo Community Council elections?
   • A single transferable vote preferential system (60 votes)
   • No change – single vote, with top 5 candidates elected (51 votes)
   • A reweighted range voting system (score candidates between 0 and 100) (13 votes)
   • None of the above (3 votes)

   127 votes cast of an electorate of 601 (21%).

   Future elections, including the election to be held in a few weeks, will be by preferential vote, and will be counted using the Single Transferrable Vote system.

I will be modifying the Maemo election system (stolen borrowed from the GNOME Foundation) before the next elections to implement preferential voting, and we will likely be using OpenSTV to count ballots after the next election.

Governance best practices

Jono asked on the AOC blog for successful governance stories, and while I’m happy to comment on the blog, now that I’ve taken the time to write some down, I thought I might as well share them 🙂

Governance comes in many shapes & sizes of course. My favourite governance stories are about federating individuals, who manage to channel community efforts, maintain a meritocracy where code talks, and yet don’t come across as authoritarians.

Outside of Linus (who’s a good example), Ton Roosendaal of Blender has this kind of presence. Talking to Ton, it is easy to see that he cares about Blender and about the Blender Community. The care and attention that he brings to projects like “Elephants Dream” and “Big Buck Bunny”, or to the supporting documentation and conferences he organises for the community, illustrate the esteem in which he holds his users and his developer community. Even the way the Blender Foundation came into being was amazing.

One of my favourite communities is Inkscape. When they broke from Sodipodi, there was this acrimonious flame war, and something of a bitter taste in people’s mouth. So what Bryce Harrington, Nathan Hurst, MenTaLguY and Ted Gould did when they split was decide to throw open the doors, and accept code from all comers. They set a direction and some ambitious goals, but they were very clear from the start – come right in, you’re welcome. And this gave the project some great results, especially early on when it was still establishing itself. Bryce describes one of them in this article.

The success of the Inkscape project’s governance model is borne out by its ability to escape founder’s syndrome – Bryce, Nathan and Ted have now backed away from the project to some extent, they’re still there as wise heads, but they have passed off the direction of the project to other capable people.

I think the way that Drizzle was born bears some resemblance to this, and I really like the way they have consciously broken down the walls which were necessarily up around MySQL. Brian Aker’s been something of an inspiration on this. His mission statement at the announcement of the project was astounding.

Subversion‘s governance model is an exemplar of best practices too. Set a clear project scope (“Subversion is a compelling alternative to CVS”), clear goals, establish transparent and fair community processes, and open up the gates. Anything within the scope of the project is fair game. And once again, code talks. This story, from Karl Fogel’s “Producing OSS” illustrated the robustness of their governance, and the confidence the project’s leaders had in their ability to influence the project.

The Maemo Community Council has the potential to be a very good governance structure, I think.  The idea of a governing body of the community, by the community, for the community, whose goal is to canalise the efforts of a disparate group into something coherent, and to provide a legitimate point of contact for technical decision-makers in Nokia, is a novel one, and hasn’t been tried, as far as I can tell, by other companies.

Counter-examples of good governance are all around, I won’t name any in particular to protect the guilty. But many of them stem from a misguided belief in absolute free speech, to the detriment of the quality of discourse and code in the project (“we are all created equal”) which results in very chatty, but unproductive, individuals taking senior positions in the community, or a sort of shyness of the founder or leader, who doesn’t believe that it’s his place to set a direction and tone.In company-run projects, excessive control or influence is an equally toxic characteristic. Companies who retain a veto on community decisions are companies who do not trust their communities.

Maemo Community Council referenda: voting now open!

Voting is open for the 3 referenda around the election procedure for Maemo community council elections.

A wiki page has been created for each referendum, where arguments for & against each of the options can be listed. For the moment, these pages are skeletons, but feel free to debate in the Talk page, and perhaps add some arguments for & against in the main page (but they will be heavily moderated to avoid flame-wars).

A reminder of the 3 referenda:

1. Election procedure for the next Maemo community council elections: The choices are the status quo in the election procedure document (25 karma + 3 month), or removing all requirements. The council is recommending a vote to remove requirements.
2. Election procedure for future Maemo community council elections: The choices are the status quo, lowering the karma requirement to 10, and maintaining a 3 month requirement for accounts, lowering the requirement to 10 *or* 1 year since account creation, whichever comes first, or removing all requirements of karma and account age. The council is recommending lowering the karma requirement to 10, and maintaining a 3 month account creation limit.
3. Counting method: Three choices are proposed: first past the post, preferential voting using single transferrable vote, or reweighted range voting.

Voting is open now, until midnight UTC next Monday, the 23rd of February. As we used to say in Ireland in the ’80s, vote early, vote often!

Wisconsin Ubuntu fall-out

Bamboozled.

That’s what I am. Bamboozled.

For those who haven’t heard this story over the last week, a young woman in Wisconsin accidentally ordered an Ubuntu laptop from Dell and dropped some college classes because she couldn’t make her internet connection work, because when she put in the CD it didn’t launch, and she didn’t have Microsoft Office, which was a requirement for her online classes.

The story, for me, is the total ignorance that both the university and the ISP have of other operating systems. Instruction manuals have information for Windows, maybe Mac, and outside of that, you’re on your own. A newcomer to Linux can’t get by on their own.

Course requirements list specific commercial programs you need to have. And we have a long hard battle to fight for minds & hearts of the universities, hardware manufacturers, ISPs and everyone else who gives software to users, or who exchange files.

The news station story had a happy ending:

However, we think we’ve helped her get back to school.

Verizon says it will dispatch a technician to try to assist her accessing the internet without using the Windows-only installation disk. Verizon says its high-speed internet does indeed support Ubuntu, but some advanced features and installation disks clearly don’t work with Linux.

MATC also says it promises to accept any of Schubert’s papers or class documents using whatever software she has installed.

Schubert’s computer came with Open Office, a word processing software package that is compatible with Microsoft Word. She says she wasn’t aware it was compatible. MATC promised to show her how to save documents in compatible formats so she could enroll in online courses again.

So – happy ending, right? We’re helping win the hearts and minds, we’ve solved a new user’s problems, and we’ve got some nice press showing how Linux users are neglected by the industry.

Ummm… no. That’s what has me bamboozled.

The story quickly got spun as “news channel said Ubuntu sucks” on tech blogs looking for a big headline. And from there, all of a sudden, the reaction of “Ubuntu fans” becomes the story. The young woman in question got some abuse for not figuring out how to solve her problems – she was “lazy”, “a dumb girl”. The news channel gets lambasted for “unscrupulous reporting”.

We all get lumped in the same bucket. When I go to free software conferences and say I work with GNOME, I hear stories about rude behaviour of others in the GNOME community. Outside the free software world, people don’t make a distinction between the lunatic fringe and people like Mark Shuttleworth or anyone in between.

One of these days that’s going to change. The loony fringe will become the loony fringe, and the mainstream will go mainstream. It’s happened with every “movement” to come from off the radar, and it will happen to us. In the meantime we need to start controlling the story – reminding people what’s important, and generally drowning out the fringe.

Links for getting flights

After my last post, a few really useful links came out in the comments, they’re worthy of getting more attention, on top of sites like expedia.com (where I got my tickets).

Edward Hervey recommended kayak.com – a nice web 2.0 site that aggregates low-cost airlines as well as traditional airlines, shows you prices on or around your flight dates for more options. It didn’t find my train-and-plane combo, while Expedia did, but definitely worth a try.

Nelson pointed to the websites of three airlines that fly to Gran Canaria, for those who want to look to the source: aireuropa.com which I mentioned, vueling.com and spanair.com – as far as I can tell, these are all covered by the above agregator sites.

And sdf (quite possibly a spammer, but maybe not) pointed to tuifly, a German no-frills who flies to Gran Canaria from a wide variety of German sites.

Gran Canaria flights: Now is a good time

I just bought a round trip for the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, flying out on July 3rd and returning on July 11th, with Europa Air, from Lyon to Las Palmas via Madrid, for €254 including taxes. I found the ticket on Expedia.

This is, quite frankly, very cheap – and I expect that ticket prices will only start going up from here on in.

To all those planning on attending: please buy your tickets now.

If you need some travel assistance, buy the tickets now, and keep a receipt, and ask for assistance afterwards. The longer you wait, the more expensive your ticket will cost, and the less likely it will be that we will be able to partially or fully reimburse you.

It might be worth your while checking ticket prices via a travel agency – since this is a holiday destination, the travel agency may have access to charter flights which aren’t listed on sites like lastminute or expedia. Also, have a look at Easyjet, a budget airline that can give you really cheap flights and isn’t listed in the online reservation sites.