Ubuntu Finland & community effort

Happened last Wednesday, the day before the release of Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx LTS at Ubuntu-fi teams IRC channel (#ubuntu-fi-tiimit @ Freenode).

Someone organizing the Ubuntufest release party at Tampere, Finland on 5th of May (Akademy 2010 will also be there this summer!) asked if we’re planning to write a press release of the new Ubuntu release. Well.. it was on our TODO list but it really didn’t look like anyone would have the resources to write one like we’ve done earlier.

So I decided to run a small test on the community – would it be possible to create a press release without making it a pain to anyone. I opened an Etherpad, copied the original English press release there and annouced it on the same #ubuntu-fi-tiimit IRC channel requesting people to join to translate it.

Etherpad

Etherpad used to be a proprietary, but free (as ‘no money asked from you to use it’) service at etherpad.com. Then came Google, bought it, disabled it for a while, open sourced it, reassigned the developers to work on Google Buzz and now finally shuts Etherpad completely down. Quite exactly what happened with Jaiku, the Finnish microblogging service some years ago: Bought it, Open sourced it, reassigned developers to work on Buzzz. Jaiku is still up&running as it was moved it over to Google App Engine.

So now as Etherpad is open source, there are open source versions of it, see piratepad.net, pad.ubuntu-uk.org and http://etherpad.org/etherpadsites.html

The cool thing with Etherpad is that anyone can use it without a need to register or log in. Many people can edit the same file at the same time and they will immediately see the changes the others make. You can save revisions, export the files as txt, html, pdf and so on. It’s also great to see how the text is color coded: each user has his own color so it’s quite easy to see what has changed and so on. It also features an awesome time slider letting you to see when the changes have been made and so on.

Results

Screenshot of the press release - click to see it bigger

In less than two hours we had a press release, translated by around 10 people. See the screenshot on the right to see how one sentence can be edited by many people – and still make sense. At least to us, who read Finnish ;)

Releasing (=mailing it to news papers and other contacts) started immediately. This resulted a nice visibility in Finnish IT magazines – we’re still waiting for the break through on non-IT magazines :/

You can see the pad we used here: http://pad.ubuntu-uk.org/JnzhILi8dT (Thanks Ubuntu UK for supporting us :)

So I can recommend Etherpad to you and your community – it’s an awesome tool to allow your volunteers to skip all unnecessary registrations and focus on the results.

Thanks for everyone who contributed. You can check the final press release at Ubuntu-fi wiki.

ps. My guess is that Google will buy Doodle and ‘do the magic’ there in the following 12 months ;)

Share

Related posts:

• Behind Ubuntu Suomi -haastattelu Minua haastateltiin Ubuntu Suomen blogiin teemalla ‘Behind Ubuntu Suomi’. Lue...