Oh dear. Code of Conduct “enforcement” as a primary duty is a terrible concept. Even police officers at their best are peace officers, as in keeping the peace. If enforcement is primary, we have a police state. I don’t want that, and I don’t think anyone else does either.
Keeping the peace takes leadership, not a focus on enforcement.
Hmmm, you say the sweet grandmother didn’t lead. However I see from what you write about her that her leadership was crucial. All technical work products are half coding/packaging etc. and half communication. If you have lots of technical people who don’t communicate much or well, you absolutely 100% need those community people who do.
It’s true that we need newcomers, but who recruits, welcomes and guides them? The elders.
We need everyone.
That is how the Kubuntu Council works. Members step up and do the work sometimes and at other times recruit and train people or just help the newcomers find their way in.
Let AskUbuntu function as it is now. It is working and let us not break it. English is not my first language, but I have decent command over English. So does for a lot of people who do not have English as their mother tongue.
That said, I do believe that people should be able to get support in their preferred languages. That can be done by local community on their Discourse board ( or a big board where all local communities have their own space ).
If some local community want to use Facebook group, they should have their freedom to do so.
The LoCos are supposed to offer support already but something seems not to be working so I tried to find a better solution. The new AskUbuntu would be totally independent so there should be no risk of breaking anything at all.
I created a different thread to talk about this.
LoCos may offer support or not. LoCos that do offer are tagged as such on the LoCo Portal.
@qiii responded to this already, so I’ve been trying to bite my tongue …
I use askubu far more than Ubuntu Forums, or IRC, but I’d not see any as better than others.
Personally I feel the support is better in both IRC & Ubuntu.Forums, though the format of Ask Ubuntu I find far easier to read & understand. I see many users seeking help on askubu where they’d be better asking on IRC (they want a guiding hand), or get closer to what they seek at Ubuntu Forums (not reach askubu’s comment limits trying to work out their issue).
Our community health is stronger with all (askubu, forums, irc & others I’ve not mentioned). My 2c
AskUbuntu has enough bullies. Same as " like hunters " in Facebook. They will attack your questions and answers either just for their satisfaction or to make sure that their answer is accepted ( to gain points ? ).
That’s gamification for you if they just want points and badges. I’m going to admit, I was one of those in the early to mid 2010’s. Funny enough, I was one of those who thought about using it in other pages with Open Badges.
Do you know how many are doing that? I’m just wondering here if it’s an issue that could be brought up on the Meta AskUbuntu site.
If I look at the original post, concerns were brought up about, ultimately, keeping people engaged. I’m not sure focusing on support methodologies is going to get us that. I think we need to worry about stuff like UOS (an Ubuntu conference anyone can participate in) and the Beginners Team (mentorship). Maybe we should do something like a podcast to introduce parts of the community. I also think community should be front and center and be in places like release notes and installer slideshows. We need more help making it all accessible and international, too.
Any podcast, email to a mailing list, a post here or any other ‘forum’ should be honest about exactly what is required or is expected of anyone volunteering and where any such involvement may or may not lead.
Of course, any offers to help from the community should also be honest about what can be provided otherwise project/team leaders will stop asking for help as such offers often fail to materialise when the volunteer realises that they can’t actually contribute to the level required due to a lack of experience or expertise once they fully appreciate what is required of them.
I say this as during my time contributing to Ubuntu I’ve seen many ‘offers to help’ simply vanish after a few days or weeks due to team/project leaders not fully explaining how volunteers, especially those without specific development, programming experience or even Launchpad permissions, can effectively contribute.
I think those types of contributions are not what we need the most of. Even then, many who would aspire to be developers need some mentoring just to grasp the landscape they need to work in. Debian packaging (and yes, even Snap packaging, despite suggestions otherwise) is not the sort of thing you just walk up and start doing. I have always understood Ubuntu, both the philosophy and the software project, to be about humanity. For us, ease of use and approachability are important and, as such, it’s necessarily a social endeavour. We need advocates and mentors and documentation writers and friendly support folks and bug triagers and translators and artists, etc.
Here’s my problem with this:
How much can we do as a community without Canonical? And for the things we can try to do, where would be the best place to house documentation and other things? The Discouse forums are the best place to me under this board. If that’s the case, this board needs to be called “Community Team”.
As a side note, I do feel we do need a reboot of the Community Team where we should include the mentorship program (Beginners Team) within that team instead of it being a separate team. That could give the “Beginners Team” a better meaning since it’s more referring to getting started within the Community then being a new user.
Well, we don’t know what Canonical’s involvement is going to be but there are plenty of distributions that have no company backing them (e.g. Debian), At the very least, we could submit requests to the Community Donations Fund. Or we just get creative. GitHub Pages could be used to house documentation, for example.
And, yes, I think mentorship has an urgent priority. One of the top priorities, if not the top priority.
Nothing much. Even this discourse is paid by Cannonical.
Remember someone here stating that debs are hard to maintain? Ubuntu debs are different than Debian debs, so the company needs lot of developers to keep them running and that costs money. If snaps catches up with IoTs, there won’t be a real reason create different packages than what’s available in Debian for snaps.
The different packages/debs were needed to differ Ubuntu from Debian as a desktop OS then. The need for that had most probably gone, I presume.
I forgot about GitHub Pages! I know that Mozilla has Open Leadership Training Series which are set of pages explaining the best practices for working in Open. Perhaps we could do the same but tailored to our community. It will lower some of the barrier since most do use Git and it will be more protected from spammers.
There’s plenty of best practices and successful examples out there. There’s no shortage of resources we have.
On the topic of mentorship, does anyone remember what succeeded and failed? For the failure, how would we fix those problems?
Maybe, this might give an idea how to make a community successful. The distro is also run by a company.
