Ubuntu Studio Project Lead Changes

[Kaj Ailomaa]

On Mon, 01 Apr 2013 14:42:53 +0200, Scott Lavender  
<scottalavender at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: http://dullass.blogspot.com/2013/04/exit-stage-left.html
>
>
>
> Realizing what day it is, I should preface this by stating this is not an
> April Fool's joke.
>
>
> Effective today I am stepping down as Ubuntu Studio Project Lead and Kaj
> Ailomaa (zequence on IRC) will assume this responsibility.
>
>
> Since 12.04 was released I have spent less and less time on Ubuntu Studio
> as family and work increased demands on my time. Additionally, I will
> shortly begin work to complete my bachelors degree in IT with software
> emphasis.
>
>
> I fully believe that I am leaving Ubuntu Studio in much more capable  
> hands
> and have faith in Kaj. Please show your support by giving him a well
> deserved congratulations.
>
>
> Rock on.
>
>
> ScottL


Thanks for the confidence Scott.
I hope I can fill your shoes well, and continue the improvement of Ubuntu  
Studio towards the direction that has been laid out during your time as  
project lead.

You've been emphasizing your ideas around workflows, and this has been an  
important change in how we relate to our applications on the desktop. So,  
I will continue to work towards improving that.
With Len, who has been the most active in this area, creating our custom  
menu, and dealing with the problems therein, we've been continuing  
discussions on how to further improve the categorization in the menu, not  
just on Ubuntu Studio, but by making changes upstream to enable new  
standards for multimedia categorization.
If we had more devoted developers, we might even be able to start coding  
on workflow management software. We have the ideas, but we don't yet have  
the resources to pull it through.

You led the way, when Unity came along, and Gnome2 was abandoned. Changing  
to XFCE  was a huge step, one that has been well received by our community.
Also, our installer became a live ISO during the same process, providing  
yet more functionality to our users.
I will want us to stick with XFCE, for as long as our community is happy  
with it. It also keeps us more closely tied with a larger community, as we  
share a lot of it with Xubuntu.

My goal with these next two cycles will be mostly about two things.
One will be fixing some of the bigger issues that we have currently on our  
platform. Not only existing on Ubuntu Studio, but on any Ubuntu, or in  
some cases Debian derived distro. The most important is making sure jack  
can be installed and run without little or no effor from the user side.
The other goal will be to grow the team. We need more people involved.  
I've been working on adding docs to our wiki to help guide new willing  
contributors and giving them the possibility to get an overview of what  
Ubuntu Studio development is about, and thus hopefully making it easier  
for them to get involved.
As the wiki is more or less in a functional state right now, I'll continue  
with making posts in different medias, trying to attract contributors. I  
know there must be people out there who are willing to help, who only need  
to be alerted of the idea, and that might be enough to get them involved.  
There are so many areas where just a little bit of effort would greatly  
help improve the quality of the distro as a whole. In anyway, I believe we  
should be more active with public relations, and this is an effort I hope  
will be worth it in the end.
If we do get more people involved, and a more active community of users, I  
think it might be worth considering democratic elections of project lead,  
in a more formal way. It would make more sense for the future, I think.

I'd also like to see a gui control application in place at least for the  
release of 14.04. There are a lot of variants for configs that you could  
do for audio, but might not be good to have by default, as we are not only  
an audio distro. So, in order to make it possible to do things like  
disable pulseaudio and have jack run as the default audio server, I think  
the best way to achieve that is using a gui app.
falktx has been working on one type of control application. Perhaps we  
might be able to work together towards these goals?

As closing words, I again thank Scott for his confidence in leaving this  
responsibility in my hands. I find him to be a great leader, as he is good  
with people, and has the vision and drive needed to lead a project such as  
Ubuntu Studio. I will do my best to continue towards the same direction,  
and hope he will stick around to help us out, giving feedback and  
mentoring :).