I've been procrastinating writing about my Boston trip, for no particular
reason.
A bunch of us went to the Boston Ubuntu Developer Summit (in Cambridge,
actually) for work purposes. We currently derive from the Long Term Support
releases, and Hardy Heron is going to be an LTS, so I wanted us to get more
involved directly, particularly at this stage of the game, rather than after
it's already a done thing.
Anyway, the reason I'm writing this in the "Debian" category is I found the
whole thing to be totally awesome. Debian should do something similar.
Rather than being a conference, this was essentially a week of 1-2 hour
small-group meetings to discuss various features for Hardy. I thought it
worked pretty well. I'd never seen gobby used before, and it's
basically a poor-man's Google Docs (although one could argue it handles
real-time collaborative editing better).
They had VoIP up the wazoo. You could dial into a conference bridge to just
listen in, or you could dial a different bridge to participate. Every room
had a Polycom conference phone in it. That seemed to work pretty well.
I think the main reason I think Debian could take a leaf out of Ubuntu's
book on this was it helps resolve potentially controversial technical
decisions very quickly. Rather than having a two week protracted flame war
on a mailing list, you can have a 30 minute rational debate in person and
move on.
So I've no idea how this UDS stacked up to previous ones, but I was very
impressed by the whole thing. I'm in total awe of Scott James Remnant and
Colin Watson for not having burned out by now. Doing a release every 6
months, with all the associated stuff that goes around it (i.e. running a
UDS) has got to take it out of you.
