[ubuntu-studio-devel] 17.04 cycle

[Set Hallstrom]

Greetings everyone!

Technically we entered the new cycle after releasing the previous one, but 
its fair to say we all need to live a little bit of delicious post release 
relaxation. The new cycle, Zesty Zapus 17.04 is a special one for US. While 
it isn't an LTS, it marks the 10th aniversary of Ubuntu Studio. While 16.10 
saw a few oldtimers leave, it gained new blood in contributors. By fear of 
forgetting someone, i will skip dropping names, but we've seen activity in 
our artwork team, in the PR team and in the tester team. The IRC channels 
have been running hotter than i have ever whitnessed and while there was an 
episode of hurt feelings, it's been fun and interesting to exchange on- and 
off-topic chats. 

I would like to invite everyone to share their thoughts on how we do this 
10th aniversary unforgettable. From the top of my head these are a few 
things i think we should work on this cycle:

- Recruit devels. We have an acute need of actual coders. While those among 
us are awesome and skilled, we need to work on discharging workload from 
their shoulders so that they can remain happy and relaxed contributors. The 
only way i can think of is to campaign about it e v e r y w h e r e. Engage 
the community and emphasise our users production. Create pride of the 
healthy kind. Gain attention and outline the fact that there is actualy a 
demand for what we do. Our community is small from a global scale, but it's 
huge from the perspective of an altruistic volunteering based project. 
There has been discussions about creating contests and i think it is great 
and now that have a job, i am ready to invest a few bucks into some prizes 
in the form of swag from the distributors we have at hand.

- Include gameing design tools. There is no doubt that game art is a an 
ecompassing artform, including most of the multimedia fields we cover. 
While blender has game engine, i hear there are interesting alternatives 
and including this expression forn would open us up for a wider community.

- Review our artwork. Some of the artwork we have, such as boot images and 
loading screen could need a makeover.

I invite you to fill the list :)

The emergency project right now is the website. It's been queued for too 
long and while it is mostly an issue of miscommunication with Internet 
Services, we still need to figure how we showcase the community with it.

Now for a little bit of reality check, on my personal side, my new job is 
super interesting but also, well... fulltime and some...  I basically 
manage IT events, and while i'm learning craploads of stuff that are 
usefull for my work with you, these first weeks i've been struggling to 
find the energy to do anything else than procrastination on my freetime. 
I'm hopefull iöthis is due to the nature of beginning something new and 
intense that requires a lot of energy and dedication. I do not intend to 
give up on this project by any means, but for the sake of the group unity, 
i need to inform you of this. I will probably not be able to learn all i 
still need to learn to be a packager and therefor i think i should focus on 
doing what i already know how to do: PR, docs, artwork and troop 
coordination/motivation. On that note i would like to invite everyone to 
observe how xubuntu has migrated from having a project lead to having a 
project council. Xubuntu has a remarkable infrastructure, and while our 
team is small enough to be quite agile we should learn as much as we can 
from their methods. In any case, i invite you to share any and all ideas, 
suggestions, and motivations regarding our group in this thread.

Looking forwars to read you, with warm regards from cold sweden,


-- 
Set Hallström
Sent from my Ubuntu pocket computer