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.
Isn’t Ubuntu ran by one already? Not trying to be snarky here, I just don’t understand what you mean.
How to create a community and keep it. Kylin is showing how. All the major contributors/companies were there, and a Uni.
Oh, I see.
On another note (and more noise), for the people-based folks, what are the barriers to entry? Is it shyness to say/suggest something or something else? It just came to me that just discussion about things is one method that one can get involved. I completely forgot that’s how I got involved in the first place along with some updating the Ubuntu Women wiki work. 
The flip-side is how long can someone stay engaged in general just from discussing things if they don’t have other skills. Well, I guess they can document/summarize what was discussed for others. It’s low-hanging enough. Maybe I’m really thinking of (personal?) sustainability.
Not noise. Vital signal.
Mentoring Succeeded: Lots, but none in the Ubuntu community. Perhaps I missed some. I have seen it work best when it’s within a small team, and baked into the goals of the team. All of the seniors on the team are expected to mentor newer members; the mentee expects to be mentored and trained, and simply chooses (informally) whomever they wish.
Mentoring Failed: Lots also, including most Ubuntu-related endeavors. Mentees were expected to seek out training, to seek out mentors. Some folks will do that…but many good folks won’t.
Barriers to entry: Here’s one important one that I see:
a. “Hi, I want to contribute, How can I?”
b. “Gosh, there are so many ways to contribute, What are you interested in?”
a. “Gee, I don’t know. It’s all so new to me. What’s available?”
The conversation goes round in circles after that. The greeter doesn’t know to (or how to) coax interests and skills from the new entrant.
Other barriers to entry:
Most of these seem to boil down to a lack of constructive supervision (including positive reinforcement) for new folks while they figure out their new and complex environment.
Most folks I have seen want to learn skills and contribute. That’s why they came. Folks, skilled or not, will remain engaged as long as they feel fulfilled by what they are doing. The leadership challenge is to identify folks who are losing gusto on their current task, and help them retrain/redirect the onto another fulfilling task instead of dropping away and joining a model railroad club instead.
Here’s another look at community creating and keeping it going by a company, from MS called the MVPs. If you have Windows device, or dual boot, just ask a question, see how the mvps (and the other users) come to help solve the problem. And, the kindness in the replies. You can even start a discussion, even one somewhat against MS.
We, at open source, are somewhat angry and intolerant. One reason, why it is so hard to keep a community going. Not only my thinking, the Ubuntu creator spoke about it in 2017.
Anyway, I know you are a community person, so I wish you all the luck in getting a dynamic community going in 2020! Start with the young and young at heart.
That’s basically is me in whatever community I try to get involved and something keeps on pulling back here. Maybe that’s also a priority.
True, true. I came here with barely any skills but I learned how to edit the wiki, create content, and some leadership. But as you said, I think the leadership needs to step up.
I missed that! Do you have the link of that?
Thank you and thank YOU for discussing!
It is also interesting to read about “the Open Source Tea Party” (His words. The link is there.) And, if you have time, please read the Ubuntu Creator’s blog from the beginning. You can practically see the growth of the Ubuntu desktop, and Linux desktop. Read the comments too.
So I asked in a Spanish community. Someone said his community it’s growing and healthy. I asked why don’t use LoCos, Ask Ubuntu, Ubuntu Forums,…
Using Telegram it’s faster and easier.
And, no one knows what a LoCo is. So maybe you need to promote it. Also promote the Wiki.
Loco is a terrible word in Spanish…
I certainly think that a program to take care of mentees is much needed. It needs to be something that major players are involved in, or at least people with a huge breadth of knowledge and experience. I’m always doing it in our channels, but it’s not codefied. I think that would be a good set of documents to work up.
Yeah, gosh. I made it a goal of mine since I had time in between work and going back to school to begin contributing to open source. I’ve had so much trouble trying to figure out what documentation’s up to date and where’s even /the/ place to find people interested in development. I’d love to be a part of revitalizing the community if it ever comes into fruition. I think wxl has had lovely, actionable, and well defined solutions and approaches that we could start revitalizing the community from.
I guess I’ll try to share what I’ve been experiencing as someone trying to learn for the first time, how to contribute to open source.
Least from my few days of trying to figure out how to contribute, what I ended up seeing was lots of outdated documentations. This was stuff from 2009 - 2014. Often when I thought I found a solution (of which, there were many wiki pages written by different people with different instructions), I would be told to join a launchpad group to gain access, which then I’d notice would have also been inactive for years - and the group would be headed by people who aren’t even active in the community anymore. (I ended up even cold emailing some of them in a burst of courage) There would even be multiple launchpad groups designed to give access to the same tools (in this case, editing wikis)
Likewise, the IRC channels seem to be equally dead. When I tried to ask around on #ubuntu-doc, #ubuntu-motu or #ubuntu-devel, I hadn’t seen any form of response besides someone saying hi to me once on #ubuntu-devel. This made it even harder for me to navigate the already convoluted system - much less even figure out which IRC client I could use that looked passably non-ugly (the-lounge is lovely by the way).
Asking on the forums (of which, there are also many, askubuntu, discourse.ubuntu, launchpad ask) is confusing. It became difficult to figure out which forum was for what purpose, or rather: which was most active and had the most up to date information. The active question responders on askubuntu seem to also be quite toxic, I noticed newbies posts often being downvoted for asking reasonable questions - as well as my own answers to them. I even had one be quite condescending to me, being harsh on me for updating my kernel via UKUU instead of educating me about the hardware enablement stack and its edge updates). He got upset the moment I gave the credit to my own answer and continued to attack me.
I guess I had decided to contribute to open source as a means to learn more about the greater world of low level software engineering that I previously interned in and just got met with some really funky experiences. I’d love to continue working in this space in a professional capacity but, well this has been my introduction to the Ubuntu community. It’s been a bit of a shame but if there’s anything I could do to help the place improve I’d love to know and will lend a hand to it in whatever capacity I can.
First, @HayashiEsme, thanks for your message. I really appreciate your honesty and your perseverance regardless of the experiences you faced.
So here’s a great example of the problems we have: we have someone excited and ready to contribute and they not only can’t figure out how to do it based on the documentation but they can’t figure out who to talk to about it!
There’s certainly folks that need much more in terms of a more structured mentorship program but there are others that probably just need that. In an ideal world, our documentation would do that, but not if it’s not all kept up to date. Barring that, we would expect other Ubuntu Members to do this but if they don’t know this is their responsibility, then we have an unreasonable expectation. Additionally, we need people familiar with the breadth of the community to act as a bit of a concierge, ushering people to the right places.
So really we need:
Depends on which one you go to, admittedly and also when. It’s been quiet during the holidays.
I got my original inquiry answered outside of #ubuntu-devel. I rarely pop in there, either, unless I’m trying to chase down one particular developer or set of developers that have a particularly close relationship with a project I’m working on.
However, I’ll point out that a lot of what happens in Ubuntu Development is packaging and not really development in the traditional sense, i.e. there’s not lot of code being written. Most often, we have upstream developers (example: that lounge IRC client you mentioned is packaged for Ubuntu but the actual code is really maintained by folks who aren’t necessarily from Ubuntu) that implement bug fixes.
I think a simple solution to this would be to have some sort of introductory overlay on all of them that explains how they’re different. Launchpad Answers, though, I’m not sure anyone is really using. For a project that wants to host on Launchpad that’s not Ubuntu (there are quite a few), this is a useful feature, but beyond that, I don’t know. Currently it doesn’t seem like we can turn it off for a project as we can with bug reporting, so that’s certainly a problem.
I’m surprised and concerned by this. Can you provide some examples?
I will point out something I suggested above: development in Ubuntu doesn’t necessarily mean a lot of code changes. If your goal is to help out with Ubuntu, by all means, we’d love to have you and would be happy to help. If your interest is more in software development in general, then it might be better to find a particular upstream software project that interests you or one that is written in some particular language you’re interested in. It’s also quite possible you might be interested in both. There is software out there that is not packaged in any way for Ubuntu. With universal software packaging formats like our Snaps being a hot topic, it’s clear that software distribution in Linux is a particularly thorny problem that could use some help.
If you wish to discuss how you can contribute further, please do not hesitate to contact me directly. I use this same nick on IRC and you can add @ubuntu.com to email me or add 23 and find me on Telegram.
This is the second time that I heard this so it might be a problem over there.