Lack of Connection Between Canonical and the Community

[Scott Kitterman]

On Monday, December 08, 2014 20:13:07 Alan Pope wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 8, 2014 at 7:41 PM, Alan Pope <alan.pope at canonical.com> wrote:
> > On Mon, Dec 8, 2014 at 7:27 PM, Elizabeth K. Joseph <lyz at ubuntu.com> 
wrote:
> >> There was an Ubuntu+OpenStack event half a block from my home, at a
> >> venue the LoCo had used for events before, and I only heard about *the
> >> morning of the event* it because I follow an Ubuntu Cloud Twitter
> >> account. Not much time to invite the local community, indeed, after I
> >> shared it on our mailing list I was the only one from the team who was
> >> able to go at such short notice.
> > 
> > I
> 
> Stupid keyboard. Lets try that again.
> 
> I don't know the specifics of that event, and I can see how it's
> exclusive and unfriendly to our community. I know that that there's a
> push in the sales team (who often run these) to be more inclusive of
> the community at events.
> 
> I recently spoke to people in sales about an upcoming UK event.
> Canonical doesn't have budget to fund a (very expensive) community
> stand at the event but we're trying to work out how to have one if we
> can, and if we're attending. There's worries that we wouldn't have
> enough community people to cover the stand for a multiple day event
> during the working week, and whether those people would be appropriate
> for the target audience. If it's a sales-driven event then it clearly
> makes sense for us to have community people at the event who can speak
> to booth visitors with authority on the subject. It's sometimes hard
> finding the right people who can do that.
> 
> It's not always as simple as "Lets phone the LoCo team and get them to
> come along", much as it would be awesome to do that (and I'm not
> suggesting you're recommending that). However there's no excuse for
> not reaching out to the team to let them know we're in town, even if
> there's no budget to have a community stand.
> 
> >> Now I can understand if the sprints themselves are
> >> Canonical+invite-only for business purposes, but even offering a small
> >> evening meetup, or Ubuntu Hour, or inviting us along to a 3rd party
> >> event some Canonical employees are going to because it's of interest
> >> to Ubuntu would make a huge difference in how the company is perceived
> >> in our local community. It breaks down the barriers between "us" and
> >> "them" significantly. It makes us feel valued and that we're important
> >> to Ubuntu too and instead of ignored.
> 
> I too am guilty of this. I have been to Turkey, Malta and Washington
> DC this year and didn't contact the LoCo team at either location
> before going. As most of the Canonical events are organised centrally,
> it might make sense to centrally contact the LoCo and let them know
> we're in town. However I think this should really be down to the
> individuals attending events. Sometimes it's just not possible to meet
> up - for example I flew into Turkey and straight back out again after
> an event with no time for socialising. Longer week-long sprints tend
> to be pretty intensive and many people appreciate a bit of down-time
> in the evening after working on and talking about Ubuntu all day.
> Perhaps we should be reviewing the upcoming events in our internal
> calendar and pinging those people attending to let them know there's a
> LoCo nearby.

The lack of connection is not just about development or sprints.

Another recent example is this press release about the Ubuntu deployment for 
Munich Germany [1].  Although this was a deployment of a Kubuntu derivative, 
this was nowhere mentioned in the release.  Immediately after this was 
published, I filed a bug [2] to point out the error.

If Canonical marketing understood the project at all, I would have imagined 
this would have resulted in a quick "Oops, sorry, fixed."  It didn't.  It did 
finally get sorted out, but the experience didn't make me feel at all like 
Canonical (outside the distro team, which I know gets it) understands the 
project or the broader community.

This also ties into my earlier comment about feeling like Canonical taking 
credit for the community's work.

Scott K


[1] https://insights.ubuntu.com/2014/07/07/ubuntu-and-open-source-help-the-city-of-munich-save-millions/
[2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-website/+bug/1339508