Ubucon NYC

I had a great time at Ubucon a couple of weeks ago. I ended up running two sessions.

After an initial opening, I opened the conference with a talk on how folks can participate in Ubuntu. The talk was roughly based on Andreas Lloyd’s absolutely wonderful Contribute To Ubuntu page in the Ubuntu wiki. His page was, in turn, based on my own Participate In Ubuntu page. The talk tried to provide a solution to the common question of, "I love Ubuntu and want to give back! How can I?" — when I was answering info@ubuntu.com (for my sins), I would get this question several times each day.

The talk was a relatively straight forward walk through the different teams and group working in Ubuntu along with examples of their projects and fun anecdotes from my experience in the community along the way. I worked in a bit of talking about different community governance structures and issues and the membership process. Trying to cram an overview of the community and its different subsections into an hour is a pretty sobering experience. There’s a lot going on and I barely had a chance to give a poor description of the most visible things going on.

In the afternoon, I reminded folks (and myself) that I know a little of this tech stuff too by walking folks through a quick introduction to building and modifying Debian or Ubuntu packages. It was a quick variant on the "Debian Packaging for Sysadmins" talks that I’ve given in the past.

Of course, the best part was getting to hang out with some folks I know from the community and to meet a bunch of new people. It was a blast and I’m definitely looking forward to the next one.

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