With the coming release of their new version the people at Canonical are running some free workshops all through the week of October 22nd through the 27th. I am pretty excited. The schedule looks like it has a lot sessions related to the different derivatives of Ubuntu as well as some Q&A. It seems that they are focused on how to get involved, but I am sure that it will be an informative event even for the casual Ubuntu user.

I am going to try and attend what I can and then just transcribe the rest for later reading.

Information about the sessions.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuOpenWeek

The workshops will be done over IRC. Below is a list of IRC applications for the different platforms, so you can join in. I would encourage anyone looking for volunteer opportunities to consider giving time to worthwhile open source projects.

Linux
Konversation - http://konversation.kde.org
XChat - http://www.xchat.org

Mac
Colloquy - http://colloquy.info

Windows
XChat - http://www.xchat.org