A big thanks for participating in the Ubuntu Summit! While Canonical hosted the first ever Ubuntu Summit (similar but different to the Ubuntu Developer Summits of old), it is the people—the sum of its parts—who collectively create the body of the community. We could not have had such a successful event without physical and remote participation, so thank you!

This event was to bring the broader open-source community together to share experiences, ideas, and to inspire future exciting projects. To that end, we have succeeded. With five talk tracks and two workshop tracks—all in parallel—many folks often wished they could be in multiple places at one time! There was high attendance and engagement across the board, which is energizing in and of itself!

Highlight Reel

Oh boy, there was so much going on! After a great opening by Philipp Kewisch (Community Leader) and Mark Shuttleworth (CEO), we dived right back into the fondly familiar conference routine, complete with coffee and snacks. Courtesy of a professional photographer, Stanislav Milata, here are some lovely photos of the Ubuntu Summit in Prague.

With so many tracks, it would be cumbersome to mention every talk and workshop, so a selected handful from each day have been highlighted to give the reader a feel for what it was like to be there, and the excitement buzzing everywhere. All of the talks and workshops were wonderful and left the audience with a feeling of motivation and passion.

Day 1

Selected talks/workshops

After an amazing opening, there was a talk by Craig Loewen from Microsoft on the latest WSL updates. His talk included tips and tricks on setup as well as what to see in the future!

Motivated by his creation of the snaps of the printing components of Linux, Till Kamppeter, co-founder and leader of the OpenPrinting project for 21 years, organized the Snap tutorial workshop series. It got kicked off with a Q&A snap panel, where he had invited several folks involved with snaps, the snap architecture, and the active community around snaps, and they all answered some copious great questions.

The Flutter workshop series was kicked off by Michal Predotka with a “gentle introduction” to creating UI in flutter where everyone was walked through building a smart home hub using Flutter.

There was an exciting hands-on Mini Pupper workshop from Mangdang where people had great fun interacting with the robot puppies! First, they tried out driving them manually, like an RC car, with a game controller. In the second part, they installed a robot emulator on their laptops. And there was one partially dismantled Pupper, where one could see its inner workings, especially the brain, something many of us are familiar with …

The CutiePi project is a Raspberry-Pi-based tablet. The project designer, Penk Chen, gave an excellent talk on the story of the CutiePi project and surviving supply chain shortages in the pandemic.

The first day gave way to so many wonderful talks and conversations! Everyone wrapped up the tech side of the day with a handful of fabulous lightning talks and then went out for dinner.

stolní fotbal (foosball)

Out in the lobby of the ballroom, there was always hot water and coffee, and someone at the foosball table. It supported 10 people on each side and a 1:1 match meant running!

The foosball table provided a nice fun outlet that was guaranteed to put a smile on anyone’s face. While sometimes it was an exercise, it was always full of energy.

Kinetic Knitting!

Many people came back after dinner for a nice chill textile workshop. Using close to the Ubuntu orange and aubergine colored acrylic yarn, Heather Ellsworth taught 10 folks how to knit! Most picked it up and seemed to even enjoy it a little, and a few others joined in just to chat. Those that stuck with it made a little rectangle with a row of 10 stitches. Thanks to everyone who participated, and keep on knitting!

Day 2

Selected talks/workshops

After a brief intro, day 2 was started off with a cool keynote from Robbie Williamson on Ubuntu on Arm, where he gave a history lesson on Ubuntu running on Arm processors.

Aleix Pol i Gonzalez, president of KDE, gave an informative talk providing recent updates from KDE and then a whole tribe of GNOMies talked about recent updates in GNOME.

In the hands-on arena, there was a workshop on building Flutter desktop apps from Frederik Feichtmeier and a second run of the Mini Pupper workshop, for those who missed the first one!

After lunch many people attended Daniele Procida’s documentation workshop to get in-touch with their own inner documentation writer. Later on, Daniele taught people how to build a pen plotter from parts only priced at 12.50 EUR, perhaps the cheapest hardcopy device in existence! It works completely with free software and the output quality is naturally more art than what you would expect!

How fantastic that the pen plotter, Mini Pupper robots, and CutiePi tablet are all using the same brain: a Raspberry Pi!

In a workshop on collaboration on music creation with open source tools, Tom Ray showed how using Ubuntu Studio made remote music collaboration an achievable method of producing art. He is the frontman for Lorenzo’s Music (performed at the closing party on the boat!), and they produce all of their music under the Creative Commons license.

The afternoon packed in even more full-length talks about snaps, Micro k8s, Juju, and then some. Also, if one filled out a survey about Ubuntu Pro, they got a tasty cupcake, too!

Game night!

Two of the rooms were opened up and connected to host a vibrant game night indeed! There were two projectors connected to various gaming systems, and many tables filled with excited people desperately trying to win a game. Among the various card games, there were Carcassonne and Code Names. Robert Ancell even made his own game, Launch Champion, and many got to play it over the course of the event!

Day 3

Note that we did not have the photographer for the third day of the conference. The photographer was only at the boat party.

Selected talks/workshops

After a great day 2, punctuated with gaming with friends, day 3 kicked off with a keynote by Eylul Dogruel on being a FLOSS artist. She took everyone through her artistic practice and how free software has influenced her methods

Later on, there were talks on Ubuntu in Colombia, and Ubuntu in Portugal. Both countries have vibrant Ubuntu communities and long histories! Daniele Procida gave a couple of talks with the hiring leads at Canonical on the process of joining Canonical and how to apply. They talked about where to find the open roles, and answered the audience’s hiring questions. 

Since snaps are central to Ubuntu, there was another great Pi workshop that involved Ubuntu Core, building an RPI monitoring station, where Gabriel Aguiar Noury and Oliver Grawert showed to the audience how to add a sensor to a Raspberry Pi, package a snap to read and display the sensor data, and run this on an Ubuntu Core system. Subsequently, there were other, more advanced topics of the Snap tutorial workshop series: snapping daemons (one of the neat things about snaps), snapping Flutter apps and snapping general desktop applications

Given the amount of content packed into three days of fun, there were other talks on topics such as RISC-V, Juju, printing, Unity, automation.. and more

This concluded the final day, and all that was left was a big ole party!

Boat party! 

All participants were invited to board a privately rented boat where a full buffet, open bar, and live music awaited. It only seemed fitting to close out with a live performance of the wonderful creative commons music from Lorenzo’s Music! The drinks flowed freely as the rain drizzled down outside. Courtesy of the photo booth, many folks took away all sorts of silly costumed pictures of themselves with good company. 

Outcome and Remembering

What memories do you have from the Ubuntu Summit? If you have pictures to share please fill out our upload form and we’ll put your images into our Community Gallery. We will be sharing more of the professional pictures over time.

Once again, Thank You, everyone who attended the first Ubuntu Summit! Thank You, everyone who was involved with the planning of the Summit, and Thank You to Canonical for throwing an epic orange party!

This is the shape of our broader community, formed from all corners of the world. We collaborate to have fun and build great things. Together we are greater than the sum of our parts.

“Put your hands up like the tentacles of a Jammy Jellyfish..”