The success of the Ubuntu Project depends on a wide community of talented, passionate developers. Anyone with the right technical skills can contribute. If you’re new to the process, you can find people online within the development team to help you along.
There are lots of tools to support your efforts. You can find information about how Ubuntu is built in the developer documentation. It explains how the development team is structured, provides technical information about building Ubuntu, and indexes other useful resources for current and prospective Ubuntu contributors.
Non-technical users
Translation and localisation
If your first language is not English but you have strong English skills, you can make a huge contribution by helping to translate Ubuntu applications into your first language. Even if you just translate a few lines you can make a difference to someone in your own country who is learning about computers and free software.
Translate software in Ubuntu into your language using Launchpad. Join the Ubuntu-Translators mailing list to stay in touch with other Ubuntu translators.
When you find a solution to a problem, you can help others by writing about your experience. Some of the most constructive ways to get involved in the Ubuntu documentation community might be:
Take notes as you puzzle through a problem. If documentation already exists, you can extend or improve it. If it doesn’t, go ahead and add a page in the help wiki, and write up the answer making it available to everyone. You can read the Wiki Guide for help with this.
Join the Ubuntu documentation team. Visit the documentation team website for hints and tips on how to get started.
Donating
If you can, consider donating to the Ubuntu Community Donations fund on the Ubuntu website. With its funds we help LoCos with events, fly people to conferences and do all kinds of other great things. Find more information on the fund page.
Technical users
Diagnosing and recognizing problems is an excellent way to contribute – Test pre-release versions of Ubuntu to help find bugs before the final release. Test early and often! – Report bugs you find, and help the development team to analyse them. This is most effective if you run the development branch.
Engaging in technical discussions and providing feedback
Would it be a good idea for you to make a course that can teach brand new people who want to learn to help and learn how to do what the developers do. Like a path that starts you out with simple tasks and gradually keep going to a full blown developer. Theres got to be a good way to make a course which will teach you to do what the developers do like how you would start with A+ and move up but for this you start with Linux beginner and up to Advanced developer.
I agree, I still think Ubuntu lack some software like video editing. Blender is a good choice but way to big. I think the major of users nowdays want to use youtube and be able to upload videos with ubuntu. I also think Linux foundation is way to expensive and hard to connect with. An official udemy course from ubuntu would be great.
My main aim is systems programming and cloud computing, but i started to contributing to the public with translating articles and websites, and I started to follow again #ubuntu-hardened, #juju, #maas, #launchpad And also i’m following an Ubuntu community forum in Turkey.
Your post is great the only issue is the Documentation Team has been inactive since 2015 and doesn’t have a driver so there’s nobody to add a new contributor to the team and nobody to onboard or help a new contributor.
As a former Doc Team leader I can say it was more difficult to get started even with an active team than development was because of the tools and processes. Without anyone to actually guide a new contributor it would seem at this point almost impossible to contribute to documentation. Also aside from there not being a driver I do not believe any of the former drivers or contributors even are around the project anymore.
How will contributes your encouraging to get involved actually do what your asking? The wiki contribution pathway is reasonable since anyone can dive right in without having any access but doc team requires privileges to commit at the very least and isn’t a low barrier pathway.
@bkerensa2: Did it ever occur to you that finding out - before posting - how things actually have worked the past five years would have been a good idea? Your post is full of unfounded allegations and with that useless as a starting point for a constructive discussion.
@gunnarhj I agree with you, and also i want to say that i do not like discussions like that. So it will take maybe 30 minutes or less than it, to refresh all instances, if there was an issue, but i don’t think so. I believe that Ubuntu domains and subdomains are active, up and running. So it is time to take responsibility for me, and i hope i can do something good for the public and Ubuntu and it’s projects.
A quick solution is reading documentations and teaching the documentations to my friends, writing system scripts for basic administration needs, bash or anything else…
Actually I did check the team public facing wiki which hasn’t been updated since 2015 and the Launchpad team which shows no driver.
So yes I did look into it where things should be documented and what was apparent based on publicly available information on the documentation teams wiki and launchpad is that:
It has not been very active in years
It’s wiki page hasn’t been updated in five years
It’s launchpad team doesn’t show a driver or lead
So if there’s something different going on perhaps who ever is driver if there is a driver should address outdated public facing info where new contributors are being directed by the OP.
Do you expect people to expect something different occurring when the public facing entry points for contributors show a defunct group? As a former doc team lead i can say when i was on the team we kept these updated and there wasn’t any guess work as to whether the team was active.
Also looking at the team the last time a direct member was added was 2016 and of course this team is also owned by the Community Council which itself has been defunct more than a year.
So where can a new contributor find out where things work? Shouldn’t that be “documented”? Who is the team lead? When are meetings held? (Mailing list shows no regular meetings)
So please explain what’s unfounded? What’s incorrect in what i said? You haven’t given any example.
It’s true that wiki.ubuntu.com/DocumentationTeam leaves quite a bit to be desired. But that’s not what you talked about in your first post. Instead you made some statements which are simply not true. As a former team leader you should know better than jumping to such malicious conclusions.
@dsmythies and I are here, and even if it may be surprising to you, neither of us appreciate to be called “nobody”.
Some facts:
If you click the “Help” button in the launcher, the desktop guide shows up, and if you go to help.ubuntu.com, the web version of the very same guide is made available in many languages for the supported Ubuntu versions. And you know what? It was not “nobody” who fixed that.
The wikis are up and can be edited by 672 members of the ubuntu-wiki-editors team as well as Ubuntu Members and developers.
The mailing list, which is still the primary point of contact, is up and running, and anybody who shows a serious interest in contributing gets all the guidance needed and is added to the relevant teams as appropriate.
With that said, it would of course be nice if more people in the community showed a serious interest in contributing to documentation. Doug and myself are still around, mostly due to a sense of duty. We focus on getting the most important work done and guiding those who make themselves known as prospective contributors.
Our motivation to keep doing it does not increase when a former team leader comes here and pick on us the way you did in your first post.
I’m here for something very simple and need some help. I am part of the OSArch project to highlight free/libre software for architecture, engineering, construction and operations.
Such a course, in various forms, has been taught many times over the years.
However, it’s often less useful than you might think. Everybody has different interests, so a one-size-fits-all course can fall flat for many folks.
That’s why the advice at the beginning of the thread is structured that way.
Ubuntu is open source, and many initiatives are community driven. Any Ubuntu participant can dig out the various materials from their favorite Search Engine and re-offer the course (including you). You don’t need anybody’s permission.
I had a hard time getting past the picture at the top. It’s pretty clear that I should be a young white male to contribute. Or maybe an older white male.
I got to this page from the 21.04 release announcement, so I didn’t just find it in the undergrowth somewhere. It shouldn’t be hard to change the picture to something other than a bunch of young white men working together, and it would make a big difference.
Thanks for signing up and welcome to the Ubuntu community. And thank you for pointing out where we can do better, to make the community more welcoming to everyone. We’re going to be changing up the artwork to find something that better represents our community and the community we want to build.
If you have any other questions on getting involved, please let us know!
Monica Ayhens-Madon
Ubuntu Community Representative
Ah, this miscommunication is on me, there was a picture of said young white males at the top of this post and I removed it after @torix 's quite right post while @madhens responded.
We figured it would be better to just have text while we find a more representative image. I don’t think the problem was with the logo
