Improving Community Health: Community Concerns

Aha. Now that’s a gripping concept.

I’ll commit six months help bring that to fruition…but unfortunately not this month (I’ll be offline for three weeks)

Okay, I’ll help with the wiki… Next month. Any advice on how to write documentation? I need some mentorship.

Our wiki uses MoinMoinWiki and this is its page: https://moinmo.in/ There you can find documentation and all the sorts of things you will need. If you are familiar with Markdown, you’ll find some resemblances but it is not the same.

The main challenge to properly write documentation is to try to demystify or simplify complex topic into human-readable format, of all levels and for all levels of involvement. Ultimately, imagine you are writing anything

The main problem you’ll face too often is that wiki load times can be significant and sometimes it will fail without any particular reason.

As people used to say to me, just edit whatever you feel that should be edited. People will most likely complain when don’t like things and then you take that feedback and see if there is something you can use from that :slight_smile:

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Hello, all! Much thanks to @popey for linking to the discourse site on Telegram (waves to anyone from the Ubuntu Podcast chat)

As someone just dipping her toes in the open source waters and who’s pretty happy with using Ubuntu, I’ve wanted to get involved, but have been unsure of where to start or how to start. I did try Launchpad, but got a bit whelmed, and was unsure what a monolingual person with beginner skills, tech wise, could contribute.

One thing I do enjoy doing, however, is advocacy and project/community management. Mind, I’m still learning as I’m going for project management, but if the community is looking for people to help shepherd new volunteers and ideas into clearer roles and paths, and to basically be a human golden retriever who keeps asking questions in search of the right questions, I would be happy to be one of them. There was previous discussion on how important the people-factor is for projects, just as much as an effective process, and I completely agree. The community I’ve met through Telegram has been wonderful, and I’d like to help bring that feeling to new users, and also help be a ‘translator’ for less technically adept users, to help them feel inspired and not discouraged.

So, nice to meet you all, and looking forward to joining the conversation and whatever solution we decide on!

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Reading through this thread as a newcomer it’s interesting to see the stuff that comes up. I’ve used Ubuntu for … I think I first installed it around 2007 or so, and I’ve used it on and off as my main desktop OS ever since. I’ve tried to get involved in the community several times, but every time I end up dropping back because getting involved takes a LOT of effort, and as multiple people have pointed out, that’s a big problem. Just look at the “Contribute to Ubuntu” wiki page (first result when you google “how to contribute to ubuntu”):

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ContributeToUbuntu

It’s over 6000 words – almost 15 pages. It takes a significant desire to contribute just to get through the document. And though that’s not necessarily bad, if you want a healthy, growing community than new users need to have a frictionless way of finding a way to contribute where they feel like they’re actually helpful, and thus feel a sense of satisfaction driving them to return.

It’s a hard problem because the community, to a certain extent, reflects the OS. Just like in Linux, where there are a thousand ways to do any one task, there are a lot of ways to contribute to the community, some more effective than others. And whenever someone comes along and tries to create one new, perfect way of accomplishing a task, well:

image
(https://xkcd.com/927/)

As someone trying, again, to contribute to the community I would love it if it were simplified. I would love a mentor or concierge program, as a few people in the thread mentioned. Honestly, it would help a lot if there was one place that said “What version of Ubuntu do you use? What’s your skillset? Here’s where you can best help.” But how do you take a community that is used to doing things any way they choose and telling them “This is the way we do things now.” I don’t think it’s impossible, but it will require a lot of effort.

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I am just checking in to see if there has been any progress made concerning the ability to do team renewals and get a formal leadership in place?