Multiple international communities came together for another BarCamp here in Japan last weekend, this time at the Yokohama International School about a half hour south of Tokyo. Back in May we organized a BarCamp in Tokyo, and I think we`ll do more of these events after this Yokohama effort. This BarCamp model for conference organizing is very interesting and extremely efficient because it`s such a flat structure and distributes tasks widely: everyone organizes, everyone participates. Some OpenSolaris guys were there, and we gave out OpenSolaris t-shirts and CDs and other items. The theme for the event was 21st Century Education. Special thanks to kurisuteen for leading. Great event.

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Monday was a holiday here in Japan so I went to the O`Reilly Make Conference and saw some of my Tokyo Hackerspace friends there -- among thousands of other Japanese Makers. Really good time.

Make Magazine

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One of the challenges that every community faces, particularly teams inside a larger community, is the ability to coordinate what goals and ambitions the team is going to work on. Traditionally this has always been somewhat ad-hoc: people join a team and work on whatever they feel like. Ideas are ten-a-penny though. For most teams [...]

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I have never been to a Make Meeting. Just BarCamp and Hackerspace. May try Make.

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There has been a little bit o’chatter on the tubes recently regarding quality and our recent release, Ubuntu 9.10. There we were on Thursday, champagne in hand, kicking a new release out the door and while I have seen countless reports of happy users with effortless upgrades and hardware and software working better than ever [...]

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Thanks to my friends over at ZDNet for allowing me to post another guest article on their Between The Lines column. This time I have written an article discussing the importance of a productive, pleasant and pleasurable community that rewards great work and celebrates the exchange of both agreeable and challenging opinions, ideas and views, [...]

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It may have changed by the time you read this, but The Art of Community has now hit the #1 slot for the Business and Culture category Amazon.com: You can see it on this page and you can check out the Art of Community Amazon page here. Go and buy a copy and support the project, [...]

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Just a quick note: I am doing a webinar on my book The Art of Community at 9am Pacific today. You can join us here.

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Last year we wrapped up LugRadio after five seasons, over 2million downloads and six live events. For over a year now Tony Whitmore from the excellent ubuntu-uk Podcast has been working on a documentary chronicling the history of the show, and packed with interviews, behind-the-scenes footage of how we planned a show, the studio, LugRadio [...]

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A few weekends back I was in Wolverhampton for the power and glory that was LugRadio Live 2009 and I just wanted to write up a quick blog entry about someone who never ceases to impress me with her work: Laura Cowen. As usual, Laura was knee-deep in crew responsibilities at the event, and she could [...]

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Earlier I blogged about us trying to get 1000 people in #ubuntu-release-party. Today we release Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala, and traditionally we all celebrate there. Well, it happened: Thanks to Pete ’snugglemonster’ Graner for the image. Of all the people, lool aka, Loïc Minier, was the 1000th member. Folks, come and join us there!

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Today we release Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala. You all need to come and party with us, right from your web browser. Let’s try and get over 1000 people in there.

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Failure as a springboard to success. Nice piece there from Jono Bacon on how to fail gracefully, recover, and move on -- learning all along the way. I like it. Very practical advice for managing projects -- or doing anything, really -- in a community environment where credibility can be earned and/or lost rapidly and publicly. Much of the issue involves just recognizing your mistakes, apologizing, and fixing things so your actions support your words. Works for me. But I think many people struggle with this concept because they wait too long and the issue gets too big and complex. Then they feel they can't back down. Too much has already been said. So, they spin. What I have found is that if you get out there fast and correct things early -- whether it's your fault or your company's or someone else's in the community -- it's much more casual and normal and most people will engage pretty well. Early apologies on the small stuff tend to be more understated and easier to deliver than those bigger ones later on.

Also, Jono utters this gem in the article: "In my experience of working with communities, successes provide an incredible opportunity to learn about our strengths, but failures provide the inverse opportunity to learn about our weaknesses." I totally agree. People have always told me that you have to fail because "that's the only way you ever learn anything" or words to that effect. I never agreed with that. Actually, that notion always pretty much made me sick to my stomach. The truth is that you learn just as much from success as you do from failure -- it's just that you learn different lessons, that's all. You need a balance of both. That's obvious, right?

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Tomorrow I fly to England back to Wolverhampton for LugRadio Live 2009. I have been over in California now for over a year and it will be the first time I have got to see many of my friends since I moved. It will also be the final re-union of the LugRadio team for the [...]

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This is a screenshot of a conversation I had today with Rick Spencer, leader of the Ubuntu Desktop Team at Canonical. Using the Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala, we are having a video chat using Empathy, while also sharing Rick’s desktop, also using Empathy, and he was demoing some of the work he been doing on [...]

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