Ok, no need to be obtuse. Now I asked for some more data.
Agreed @belkinsa , multiple outlets for questions, support, the proposal of ideas and finding positions where one can get involved.
@wxl, Your team (member) does an excellent job there.
Over the past couple of days I’ve composed and deleted several replies to this thread as I’ve not come up with a reply that I’ve been totally happy with but isn’t it the now case that there are so many places where you can ask questions, ask for support or read of current developments that many users just stick to what they know?
The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter highlights the various sources of news, information and resources available to Ubuntu users but if you don’t read the newsletter…
May be there is nothing (perhaps there can never be anything) in place to bring everything and everyone together?
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I do think we need to have at least some sort of community structure. At minimum, we need some way to ensure that the Code of Conduct is upheld. That, I would say, is extremely significant. As a veteran of the project as well as an employee of Canonical, do you have any ideas to resolve that particular issue?
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I certainly have some thoughts, but not fully formed solutions. I think we’re at the stage of identifying the issues first. Once we can agree these are issues, and they need fixing, and in what order, I think then we’re in a position to work together on solutions.
In a broad-brush, high level though, I think the community structure could be simplified, considerably. I agree we still need some project governance, and ways to inspire new developers, and users to get involved. But I think we’re a bit process-heavy in some places. I think we perhaps should look at moving a little faster, and being a little more agile. But that’s just my staring out the window, 2p thoughts.
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Indeed, there’s one member who watches the Forums, but he does check in with the rest of the team when he doesn’t have the direct answer. Though he may be the only person replying, it’s often a team effort. He actually does an excellent job in a lot of different areas, including communicating over a broad variety of platforms, including AskUbuntu, IRC, mailing lists, and our own Discourse. We are so lucky to have him. But something to take note of for the next point: he responds over a broad variety of platforms.
Well, I think you have to meet people where they are. I think that means that you have to open up every avenue to communication. That will necessarily mean that the communication will not be unified, but it will mean that no matter the method someone prefers to communicate with, they will find it easy to reach out. A healthy community is strengthened by the number of voices and perspectives in it. You have that by making it easy to communicate with. So having all these different methodologies is a good thing.
I’ve never seen the conversations like this on the ubuntu-community-team or ubuntu-leadership mailing lists, nor with such broad diverse input. I would argue Discourse actually made this possible. I think there are many folks that prefer mailing lists (I do) but I have found that Discourse instances for Ubuntu, Lubuntu, and LXQt all have had significantly more activity than the mailing lists. I’m not sure this means we should get rid of the mailing lists, though, as I still see traffic there. I could make similar parallels with Telegram and IRC. We have users that would never bother with Telegram (the IRC Council certainly has a rather dubious view of it, at least when bridged to IRC) and we have Telegram users that would never bother with IRC. But ever since having Telegram, we’ve had a lot more participation.
Basically, leave all the doors open and more people will come. When they walk in, introduce them to the rest of the community and show them how to use all the other doors. Then you can get everyone together.
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I agree with you on two points:
- We need some basic governing body to ensure our community stays healthy, but we don’t need to make it so complicated. We need to make it so it works, always. Right now, it seems the process is getting in the way of that.
- We need some leadership to keep pushing the community forward, providing initiatives and projects to encourage participation, among other things. Again, we don’t need to make it too complicated.
Right now, the biggest complication we have is the requirement to have Mark short listing candidates. I’d say we need to jettison that immediately.
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Do the users, who come to your Lubuntu discourse, ask any questions say, on XFCE or Gnome? Can anyone out there give a solution for example, why Thunar doesn’t open ext4 partitions as user, but only as root?
You see, your Lubuntu discourse is a separate community/forum only for those who (might) use Lubuntu, but not for those, who (might) use Gnome, or Kubuntu or any other flavour. It is specialised for one DE. That’s fragmentation.
We actually do occassionally get questions that surround Frankenstein installs, i.e. they installed Xubuntu but then installed lubuntu-desktop to switch desktop environments but perhaps they still use Thunar instead of pcmanfm. So, yes.
What you’re describing is certainly differentiation. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. You’re still failing to prove how this is negative, nor are you answering any of the questions I proposed.
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Nothing to say, is there?
Other “flavours” become Frankenstein…
Flavours were fun stuff once, say 10 years ago. Users get confused what to use, what to standby for. They would always have “Frankenstein” installations. Why not try, when they are available?
All one needs is to debootstrap the base and apt install any DE or few DEs in one shot. Any apps one needs. After all Ubuntu is Linux, and one is supposed to know Linux…
Which major Linux distribution today doesn’t have a flavor or spin or derivative of some kind?
You’re already well over the heads of lots of Ubuntu users. That’s not meant as an insult. It shouldn’t be important that users have to know Linux, no more than OS X users should know Unix or MS users know .Net. And now you know why flavors exist.
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Well, all those Frankensteins would at least try to know Linux…It was fun, when we knew some Linux. Those newcomers would always try to learn Linux. That’s why it is still there, existing. If we allow the devs to do everything for us, better buy a Windows or Apple device.
I think that’s all of them for main Community, without looking the favors.
In what ways are thinking of simplifying it? For some reason, I’m thinking about really just having the Community Council with maybe a Community Liaison from Canonical. I might speak to you, @popey, about this on Telegram.
As for the documentation, maybe closing the Community Wiki and perhaps have another wiki/system for member profiles would be a good idea. But then again, documentation gets outdated fast anyways. 
EDIT TO ADD I think AskUbuntu should used for tech support rather than the forums.
This is something that’s got extensive discussion over the years, but with no movement. I think the big issue is that of moving all the content over. If we’re going to wait on automating that, it’s going to take forever. If we just want to go ahead and do something different and copy things manually as needed, that should be pretty quick, but there again, we’ll be waiting for Canonical to produce something, unless we decide to do it ourselves.
Oh, we could just use Launchpad. They don’t have to be that extensive. Lots of them, mine included, has a whole life story. So unnecessary. Let’s stick to the basics.
Documentation is the part of the wiki that’s actually important. Lubuntu’s got a nice manual that’s under source control and built with Sphinx. That should be pretty darn easy to implement and should be easy for anyone to contribute to.
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Mr. Popey. I’m glad you finally came here 
Yes indeed. These points summarize the most important/urgent problems to solve.
I hope the thread slow down a bit so we can talk about these issues.
Please, take your time to reply.
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I agree and it sounds like progress is made in the right direction.
You talk about Lubuntu, Lubuntu, but calls those, who by chance installed Xubuntu as the “other” system in that, as having Frankenstein installation. See the matter?
We are fragmented, the little community that still exists.
You say, the users shouldn’t have to know Linux. Why not? There are no out of box devices with Ubuntu/Linux, except some terribly expensive ones from few businesses. So, you at least have to know how to download, copy to a usb/dvd and install the distro. Only those, who like to explore, experiment and learn come to Linux. Others won’t.
If the community has to be rebuilt, it has to be done around one one major flavour/system. Arch has a community without a DE. Debian has a community, where they even argue against systemd, and allowed to do so. OpenSuse has a community, where the main installer iso comes with all 3 main officially supported DEs. And, so on. Ubuntu, too had a community that rallied around the default, once.
You just can’t have 3-5 discourses pulling people around, away from each other to have a lively, dedicated, oriented community. Today, Ubuntu is just another flavour. Once, from Ubuntu 10.10 up to half way 17.10, Ubuntu was unique, the heyday of the community. There was a lot of Ubuntu related web sites, some creating lot of ppas, but most of them are gone dormant since. Those web sites were also the community. All gone. There should be lot of related web sites, high interest in the internet for the community to grow. Not any more, sadly.
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We have the Free software foundation that tries to group several different companies around open source. But we don’t have a community that tries to group all projects and tries to coordinate efforts on which technologies to use and support. They compete with each other to see what it’s better and like a kind of Darwin’s law the best product survive.
You can’t force someone to use something they don’t like. In an open collaborative model we put one stone at a time to build a house. We just hope the chaos theory would help us get to the goal.
We could build some structure to help the community grow but you can’t change the basis of what we are.
Maybe this model is not made to succeed in a wide community as we all dream but it’s definitely still here and alive for people brave enough to restart his PC and get into the bootloader.
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Agreed, and that major favor should be Ubuntu itself. And it should be the upstream like Dedian is. Hence why I was using the term “umbrella community” in one of my earlier posts.
We could since majority of the community are coders or they upload via Launchpad. But what about the minority, those like me, who are more people-based? My only solution, if we ever consolidate, rely on Discord activity.
As an afterthought, if there things where people-based persons can upload via Launchpad, then Launchpad would be the best choice. I guess when I say “people-based” persons, I’m talking about people like me who try to improve the community or those who help with tech support.
LP is another thing that should be addressed. LP is old, out-fashioned and uses its own version control software, which is not that great and git is the standard. That just increases the barriers to contribute to anything in LP.
The eternal argument is that no one can build a better one or implement features to improve it. I know we cannot simply move to GitHub or GitLab but LP drives people away with its utterly non-practical interface. Still, LP is a problem in my perspective.
The topic of fixing the community is huge. My conclusion is that there are too many issues to address simultaneously, which require a strong leadership with strong, reliable ideas and that the majority of the community accepts. Like many companies do in these days (Facebook is a good example in this case, with all the ReactJs and Redux people), perhaps its time for Canonical to hire a community lead to engage, handle and address most of these issues and have enough power to design, propose and aid implementing any solutions that are needed. Obviously this person will in turn need more people to work closely with him/her, so I am not sure how feasible this is.
My concern is that most of the current problems cannot be resolved by the community alone, the reason being our lack of ability to do so. As wxl suggested, most ideas require waiting for Canonical to do/approve/fix something, or build our own solution which will lead to more diversity, again.
Thank you everyone who has shared their concerns as well and thanks for trying to find a solution. Hope we get it all sorted soon and start implementing ideas to improve our community 
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