[Ubuntu-US-CA] Project: Letters to our Representatives

[Elizabeth Krumbach]

On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 11:32 AM, Nathan Haines <nhaines at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> UDS is a development sprint; it's not a social gathering.  It's set up to
> get people working world-wide on important parts of the Ubuntu project
> together in one room so they can discuss and decide the focus for their work
> for the upcoming development cycle.

Right. While there is a community track, even this track is focused on
giving action items which lead to producing results and material and
isn't going to be valuable or interesting to your standard Ubuntu
*user* who is not interested in contributing, let alone someone who
only has a passing interest in technology on a policy level.

> Inviting large numbers of non-developers who have no prior knowledge or
> experience with Ubuntu or Free Software to anything other than the keynote
> would seem to be unproductive, unsatisfying, and subversive to the goals of
> UDS.

I agree, but you do mention "anything other than the keynote" which is
where I think we may have an "in" here. Ubuntu is a major player on
the Internet today, and the existence of the summit in California
again is something that's exciting and important, but as Peter points
out, actually inviting them to the summit to attend the workshop
sessions about SELinux implementation or whatnot would be useless.

> If I wanted to risk hurting UDS anyway, I would at least come up with a
> consensus of what UDS "might mean to" California lawmakers before
> starting a letter writing campaign.

So say we're just inviting some people to the first 2 hours of the
summit to see the keynote, I don't think this would be harmful to UDS.
But it would require volunteers to properly receive them, it would be
a mess to have people spend valuable time and be completely lost. And
I think coming up with a consensus as to the value of UDS is
essential.

Grant - perhaps the team you put together can work on this value
document in a broad sense? Even if it's not used for UDS I could see
the team leveraging such a document about having active Ubuntu
presence in California for other things, including user-focused
conferences and involvements with groups like opensourceforamerica.org
that Jason mentioned.

-- 
Elizabeth Krumbach // Lyz // pleia2
http://www.princessleia.com