This talk was by Jeff Waugh who works on the Ubuntu team and has experience with the GNOME team in Australia.

How the Ubuntu community came about? The Ubuntu project is the brainchild of Mark Shuttleworth, who wanted to build a Linux distro that was clean, simple and easy to use. Interestingly, before building a distro, he went about building a community. A community with shared values and shared vision. His group, which largely intersects with employees of Canonical, Ltd. got together and brainstormed about the concept of what people need and how it can be done. Ubuntu has a Code of conduct which is explicitly spelled out. This lays a foundation for a common ground to work from. Next is the Ubuntu commitment - explicitly spelled out a well, and typically found printed on their free CD covers. Some of those points are:

• No charge
• Regular and predictable releases
• Internationalizations and Accessibility
• Free software development

The goal of this group is to build a single CD distro based on Debian, clean GNOME based, free as in beer (gratis) and free as in freedom (libre).

They have something interesting called "bug#1" This is the bug of monopolistic hold that a certain company has on the desktop worldwide. This is the #1 bug that they'd like to eliminate with free software.

Governance at Ubuntu is very important. It provides them with structure. Levels within the team follow a structure like: patches, commit, maintain, upload, team leader, tech. board (CTO), governance board (community council), SABDFL (self-appointed benevolent dictator for life - Mark Shuttleworth), baby jesus (when sabdfl makes a wrong decision, baby jesus crys. For example: older backgrounds had unclothed women...someone had to cry out about the problem and let Mark know that having nude pics on the desktop would not work in many parts of the world).

Ubuntu is a great example of a community that has grown around a company.