Community Documentation Modernization Initiative

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Greetings Ubuntu friends!

In our ongoing effort to support and grow our community, I wanted to take a moment to share a new initiative the Community Team has embarked upon.

As with any open source project, it is crucial that we are presenting the most accurate and helpful information possible. With nearly two decades of Ubuntu, important community information has been spread across multiple platforms and has had the unfortunate effect of frustrating prospective community members. We need to ensure those who want to learn about our community, and become part of the Ubuntu family, can easily do so.

Here are some of the ways we plan on tackling the problem:

Initial Goals

  • Migration of all community governance pages to a Discourse backend. Snapcraft and Anbox Cloud are two excellent examples of this model.
  • Removal of old community pages from the Ubuntu Wiki that are no longer accurate or relevant.
  • Restructuring of the Community menu on Ubuntu.com
  • Creation of a new “Getting Started” landing page to help guide newcomers, regardless of their background and skill set, to becoming Ubuntu community members and contributors.

What comes next

  • Continued migration of community centric pages from other platforms to Discourse.
  • Empowering community members to help in the documentation upkeep efforts via special Discourse Badges and maybe… some Ubuntu swag :wink:

We strongly believe that addressing these items will help improve the quality of our community offerings and lower the barrier to entry for future Ubuntu community members.

Join in the effort

If you’d like to help with the effort, here are a few things you can do:

  • Create a Discourse profile. (You’ll need to create an Ubuntu One account first if you haven’t already).
  • Review Documentation in the Community Documentation category and suggest changes by commenting on the post. Editors are extremely important!
  • This is a big one! Help migrate Community documentation from the Ubuntu Wiki. We’ll be sharing some additional guides on how best to do this soon.
  • For team, council and board leaders: We’ll also be sharing a template for moving essential group information to Discourse in the near future.

If you have questions, please feel free to respond here, or reach us on the #ubuntu-doc channel on IRC.

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Looking forward to see guidelines on moving team docs to discourse :slight_smile: I’m thinking about moving all UbuCon Asia docs to discourse. (And also Korean LoCo docs maybe?) Since many members of our team frequently frustrated when working on Ubuntu Wiki :frowning:

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JANUARY 17, 2023 - UPDATE

  • We’ve just posted a simple Template for our Councils, Teams and Boards to follow when migrating their information into Discourse. At this time, we ask that representative members from each of our Councils, Boards and Teams begin moving their information into the Community Discourse.

  • We’ve also created a Community Discourse Docs Quick Start Guide to provide a basic How-To on migrating documentation from the Wiki into the Ubuntu Discourse.

  • The new front-end for the Ubuntu Community is being worked on by our Web & design team. Once it’s ready, we will be post another update.

Thank you to those in the Community who have provided feedback and helped assist in the efforts!

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FEBRUARY 1, 2023 - UPDATE

  • The new Community front-end is live at ubuntu.com/community along with some top level governance, membership and community support documentation. As new relevant documentation is created or migrated from the community wiki, they will be linked at this new location.

  • A new Community Navigation Menu for ubuntu.com is being worked on. We believe this refreshed menu will make navigating our community resources easier and provide a better overall user experience.

Initative Scope
I wanted to reiterate that this initiative is only covering community documentation. Community created Technical documentation, like the information found within the Community Help Wiki, is not within the scope of this project.

That being said, there is ongoing discussion on how best to address the Community Help Wiki and we will be sure to provide updates as things progress.

Thank you for your ongoing feedback and support!

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