Why I Have Nothing Interesting to Say

This posting has been kicking around in my draft's for almost 2 weeks now. I've been wanting to polish it a bit, since it's a bit personal, but Jono's posting a couple of weeks back inspired me to just run it over and get it out there, even if it's still rough. I have nothing interesting to say, anyway ;) Just be warned, the following is not well organized or concise in any way ....

Anyway ... I normally use my blog as a way to share and get feedback on projects like Quickly and Quickly Widgets. I haven't been blogging because I haven't been working much on those things lately, so haven't had much interesting to say along that front (though a friend did unblock me on my WebCam widget, so now I'm blocked on bending gstreamer to my will rather than a random crash.)

The reason that I haven't been working on those is two fold. One part, I've been traveling a lot for work and I took a holiday. But the main reason is related to a recent refactoring of the Ubuntu related teams at Canonical.

Changes to Canonical Organizational Structure

This refactoring (or "reorg" in corporate speak) was led by Matt Zimmerman and Robbie Williamson. The resulting structure broke the whole 100+ person Ubuntu team at Canonical into 3 teams:

1. Linaro Engineering. These are the Canonical folks working on the Linaro project.

2. Platform Services. This team is dedicated to doing work in Ubuntu for partner teams in Canonical, like OEM services.

3. Ubuntu Engineering. The team of Canonical developers focused on Ubuntu the Free and Open Source Community distribution.

I believe the purpose of this refactoring was to make the teams a bit smaller and more focused. However, one of the effects was to leave the Ubuntu Engineering Team with an even tighter focus on Ubuntu as a community distro. Ubuntu Engineering is the biggest team of the three, I believe 85 or so people working on it.

Changes to My Role(s) in Ubuntu

Another effect is that of the refactoring was that each of these teams needs a leader, or "Director" in terms of job title, each of whom will report to Matt. The reason that I have been a bit busy to work on Quickly and Quickly Widgets is that I interviewed for, and subsequently got the "Director" role for Ubuntu Engineering. So my job title is now "Ubuntu Engineering Director" (or something like that). I'm still also the Engineering Manager for the Desktop Team until we can find someone awesome to take that role (we're still interviewing, so if you are interested, please apply!!).

This all went down like 10 weeks ago or something. The personal effect on me is that I've been trying to learn how to do a new role while still trying to hold down the fort on the desktop. So, basically, I am working 2 full time roles. As you can imagine, I am not doing either very well.

Figuring Out My New Job

As Director, the engineering managers for the kernel, foundations, server, ARM, desktop, QA, and community now "report" to me. Of course, you know these folks (pgraner, robbiew, jib, davidm, tbh, marjo, and jono) and you know that they are awesome. There are a couple of new roles too (release manager and technical architect). We have very strong people in these roles as well.

So if the management team and the engineers are so awesome, what's my job? This is a question I have been asking myself, and I do see some areas where I should provide some leadership. I'd like to spend the rest of the post quickly commenting on just one of those areas. It's a bit hard to label, but I think I'll put it under the heading of "Nurturing the Ubuntu/Canonical Partnership".

Of course I was originally attracted to Ubuntu because it's a Free and Open Source Community Distro, but what made me quit my job and base my living around Ubuntu was that it's a community distro with a Commercial Partner. I thought that a commercial partner would make my efforts more relevant (by reaching more people) and more endurable (by sustaining the project for a long time). A commercial partner can also negotiate with OEMs and help fulfill the dream of a pre-installed FLOSS desktop.

So it's important for Ubuntu to honor this partnership in order to maintain it's staying power and relevance. Conversely, it's important to Canonical that Ubuntu is a thriving community open source distribution. The reasons for this are probably self-evident, so I'll leave that out. Anyway, it's helping Canonical with this part about being a good partner to Ubuntu that the rest of this post is about.

Being Part of the Community
Firstly, in my view, being employed by Canonical is not something that separates me from the Ubuntu Community. If anything, it provides me a lucky position within the community, if nothing else because I am paid full time to contribute to Ubuntu I have more time to dedicate to it. The point is that being on the Ubuntu Engineering Team means that I am part of the Ubuntu Community. This is true for allpeople employed by Canonical to work on the Ubuntu. The Ubuntu community is comprised of all kinds of people contributing in all kinds of ways, including some that get paid by Canonical to work on Ubuntu full time.

So, if Canonical and Ubuntu both benefit from this partnership, and I am both part of Canonical and the Ubuntu Community, I think that part of my new role of Director should be to help these partners work well together. There are some things that I think we (Canonical employees in the Ubuntu Community) can do better in this regard. I'm still thinking through it, but I am formulating two key goals at this point, one around transparency, and the other around growing the number of core contributors.

Transparency

I think that we (the whole community) still follow our transparent processes around UDS, blueprints, specs, and bugs. So we are transparent in the sense that anyone can come and carefully study our documents and learn pretty much anything they want about what Ubuntu is working on. I suspect that the way of being "transparent" work very well for the project when there were way fewer users and way fewer people working on the project. But now the project has grown a bit, and perhaps the old ways are not totally sufficient.

In one sense, we've made great strides in exposing what we are working on via our work item tracker. But this a very granular view. I'd like to see us do better in expressing the gestalt of a release, the high level goals for the release. I'd like to see us be able to *push* information at this level before, during, and after UDS, and throughout the cycle. I don't know if this goal is really about changing the way we work per se, so much as creating an information architecture around the work that we (and I mean "we" inclusively as the Ubuntu community) are doing, and then having the discipline to maintain a drum beat of communication within that architecture. In this way, the community should better be able to see what the Ubuntu Community and Canonical is focused on in developing Ubuntu, and how that work is going.

Growing Core Contributors

While I think the work item tracking system has been great for exposing what we are working on, and also for providing visibility into our status, I suspect it has had an unintended effect. I think it's turned the Canonical employees into feature creation machines. Something about a burn down chart motivates you to work to stay under that trend line. While creating lots of new features is great, I am concerned that it has come at the expense of other important work. A community needs investment, and I am wondering if our focus on work items and features has supplanted some amount of our investment in the community (and by "our" here, I am referring to Canonical Employees in the Ubuntu Community).

I can see several areas, such as patch reviews, REVU, archive admins, etc... that are bottlenecked by not having enough core contributors. But our very inability to focus on things like reviewing patches and REVU means that we are not inviting new people to build towards being core contributors. But new people is exactly what we need to remove the bottlenecks! A sweet catch-22. I think that this will require the bold move to hold back on commitments to features, to tilt Canonical Employees investments a bit toward nurturing those new comers (as well as our stalwart comrades, of course).

So there are 2 great topics for UDS discussions. Whatever the case, can I just say that I am thrilled to have this new gig, and I look forward to getting to know a whole lot of people and to help them with their goals for Ubuntu? I guess being my blog, I can say that ;)