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Moving Past UbuCon & Looking At Global Jam

 

Greetings from Ashtabula.

To start off, scheduling an UbuCon fell apart this year.  If anybody remembers how hard scheduling last year's was, this year was worse.  I made the decision Sunday night that we would not proceed as we could not even get support from neighboring LoCo groups.

I don't like making a commitment and then having to back off from it.  However, one must also be ready to recognize when you don't have a reasonable chance of succeeding.  A consequence of there being no UbuCon at Ohio Linux fest 2014 is that there will be **no** Ubuntu-related content of any type at the event this year.  Upon consideration, I can live with that.

There is a point where we end up preaching to the choir.  Strategically I do not think we need to do that.  In the age of people coping with the foundational shift that is systemd, having people change over from Fedora to *buntu or perhaps Mageia to *buntu is a route of diminishing returns.

Now, we do have Ubuntu Global Jam coming up.  Canonical Community Team decided to hold a meeting this morning to plan out Global Jam.  Their etherpad notes are here: http://pad.ubuntu.com/j2HWUfgxCp

Global Jam is running September 12th through 14th.  Software Freedom Day does **not** overlap as it falls on September 20th this year.  I am open to suggestions for public-facing activities for either weekend.  I would like to break these up so that we have a northern activity, a central activity, and a southern activity.  The northern activity would be preferably in the Cleveland/Lorain to Sandusky area potentially.  The central activity would be in or near Columbus.  The southern activity would be near Cincinnati, Dayton, or Athens.

Svetlana Belkin is requested to take lead on organizing activity in the south.  James Gifford and Unit193 are requested to take lead on organizing activity in the north.  We need a volunteer to handle central/capital activity organizing.  If we need to break the northern activity into northeast/northwest, we'll split that up later with probable fall-backs in Kirtland or Chardon as well as somewhere beyond Sandusky like Perrysburg (algae blooms permitting, of course).

We've got two weeks to think about how to plan two weekends of *buntu-related activity.  If we want to talk DevOps, lets talk Juju.  If we want to talk Xfce, I do believe the Xubuntu Debian Liaison is here in the State of Ohio.  Public libraries have meeting rooms and other spaces we can leverage as we head into autumn for holding these sorts of activities.  It is necessary for us to show **the general public** what Ubuntu is, what it can do for them, and why they should come join us.

Nicholas Skaggs from Canonical Community Team is eventually going to contact us about what we're doing.  If we have some ideas started by the 21st, we'll be in good shape.  If we have things fleshed out concretely by the 28th, we'll be in rather good shape.  By the 28th I can also see what we can do in terms of having marketing collateral (stickers, flyers, etc.) to pass out if we have sites designated and ready to go.

With that, the matter is open for discussion.

Stephen Michael Kellat
Point of Contact/Leader, Ubuntu Ohio