I’m often surprised by new content appearing in UbuntuOnAir, and Google shows no readily-available schedule of upcoming streams. So if there is one (and I’ve looked!) it’s not easy to find.
Proposal for one that is easy to find. The proposed page below would be:
Permanently pinned (easy to find)
A wiki for easy maintenance and trivial updating by any Discourse user (no single gatekeeper).
Input and refinements are welcome before I actually create this page. Alternately, if I’ve really missed an easy-to-find UbuntuOnAir schedule, let me know!
Ian, this is a fantastic proposal! Any ideas I had about a schedule were, um, a bit overengineered (@yannick-mauray will certainly understand) but this would be an easy way for anyone to maintain it. Very curious to see what the other hosts think, including @rs2009, but this has a very big thumbs up from me.
And clearly folks have figured out the format (hooray).
Seems like a success so far.
Special thanks to the Ubuntu Weekly News Team, who have added schedule data to their Featured Audio and Video section (example)
I wonder if there is a useful metric and fairly easy-to-implement tracking to establish the usefulness of the schedule page, and to discover how useful improvements are.
I also wonder how we can expose UbuntuOnAir a bit more widely (without attracting trolls and vandals, of course).
And I see a lot of great content (and documentation) that becomes hard-to-find after it falls off the schedule. I wonder about ways to increase the effectiveness and reach of this effort.
I think we’re sharing a brain cell, because I’ve been having a lot of these same thoughts.
Let me poke around the admin dashboard? There may be something built into Discourse that already does this for us!
That is the $25,000 dollar question! And for not the last time, I miss the Ubuntu Podcast, and its reach in our community. I think it’s worth asking the community how they get their news about things happening in Ubuntu, and in desktop Linux activities in general, and find out if its a good idea to promote ourselves there - or if the risk of trolls/vandals is too high.
This has come up on the Canonical side too - we have educational groups who want to promote the more educational streams, and having an archive of streams that are tagged/easily searchable is going to be key to helping groups like these and our community members. Right now, ubuntuonair.com just points to our YouTube page, but maybe it could become a more searchable page - or another page linked to the community side of the Ubuntu web side could host it.
The “Recent Streams” section has gained a new column for the link.
Most folks simply append an URL onto their description when they move a stream listing from “upcoming” to “recent”. Just put a | before the URL to push it into the new column.
If you don’t like this change, please say so. The whole point of this page is to be useful for you.
The guidance to remove old streams after one week has been rescinded.
This is LESS housekeeping for you. We’re going to clean out old streams for you. Well, actually we’re going to try letting older streams accumulate in that section so it’s a useful index. I’m leaning toward a six-month index that matches a release cycle. But that’s not in stone; good ideas are welcome.
Newer streams should still be at the bottom of the list, which I’m not thrilled with when the list might sometimes be six months long. Ideas to make the page easy to use for streamers AND easy to browse for viewers AND a useful index for archiving and searching AND is (essentially) self-maintaining are welcome.