I scan the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter in liferea (my trusty RSS feed reader) as the Ubuntu Fridge posts are viewable via http://feeds.feedburner.com/ubuntu-fridge (it actually reads from https://ubuntu-news.org/ which is a mirror of the Ubuntu Fridge; the mirror was off-line a few weeks earlier this year but is back again )
The Ubuntu Fridge also propagates to Planet Ubuntu (which is available in RSS form too).
You can read Ubuntu Forums via RSS reader, though I’ve not tried to limit it to only UWN issues so I have no idea if that’s possible (but they’ll appear along with other UF posts).
I believe the feedreader service was put in front to alleviate load on the backend, and enable us to move the fridge to a different URL without everyone having to update their RSS links.
I had 2 feeds in my liferea & I forgot they differ (actually that was how I noticed the ubuntu-news feed wasn’t working when it was migrated earlier this year) but I forgot that… Thanks
Okay, replying to a few posts here, so prepare for some tl;dr!
In trying to assume everyone’s best intentions (which really helps in discussions!), it seems like moving this to a separate topic in the community category gives the issue the attention it deserves in a dedicated place, rather than it being lost in this thread, which might be pretty long by the end.
The great thing about a community like this is that the ways to contribute grow with each new wave of contributors! And having community advocates and standard/accessibility stewards and champions sounds exciting and necessary, and I love that bit about ensuring your data and access for today and the future. We will be rehauling our get involved and contributor guides, but no need to wait until then! Please feel free to start a topic in either this category (especially for advocacy) or in Documentation (especially for accessibility/digital standards) and start talking about things you’d like to do or see changed - and I can’t wait to see who joins you.
While this is a decision above our paygrade, it is something we are championing for the community and ourselves as wiki users.
Agreed. Especially on promoting that necessary patches and fixes are merged, which is an area where we can work together with the relevant teams to help improve this process. The collaboration section is trickier, and you rightly acknowledged that there’s business decisions involved which make things complicated. What I can say is we want to make collaboration easier so people can make their time invested meaningful and valuable - and to raise the community’s concerns where that isn’t happening.
Hello! We still have a LOT of IRC channels, though they’re quieter than they were in their heyday. Here is a link to the channel list. A lot of the channels on Telegram and Discord are unofficial, and are a little more focused, and we don’t have an official presence there. But I think having a conversation/getting feedback about where people are and where they’d like a more official presence to be is a good idea! (Also, thanks for watching the stream!)
This isn’t the clearest thing, and it is frustrating, especially being new. Getting the community more connected - and helping figure out where the community planning happens (probably here) and where the socializing happens (forums, unofficial channels, in person once that can be an option again!) and where the support happens (AskUbuntu) is very, very, very high on our priority list. And making sure we highlight polls is a good reminder, because like @guiverc sais, they can be easy to miss!
Reading through this discourse throughout the years and posting I have the feeling that the word “Community” is not so very sharp in describing what we actually mean with this.
Is this a community of free software contributors (code contribution, productive issues/feature requests) or does this also include simply the users of Ubuntu, who like Ubuntu but either do not want or can not contribute? Or both? Etc
Those things could eventually be a bit more transparent. This could also prevent the misunderstanding of what this means. I think the word Community means different things in different contexts
This is a really good point! I think the word “community” has gotten abused in a lot of cases, and honestly is describing users/customers who only download or purchase the product, and then have no further interactions.
Based on chats with other employees and community members, for me, the core community are the contributors to Ubuntu itself. Developers, testers, documenters, translators, support, advocates, etc. And then the greater community is people who make things to be used with and for Ubuntu - like snaps or in the very near future with Flutter. That’s who we’re here to support and grow.
But as we start thinking about revamping our documentation, especially for new contributors and people curious about contributing, having a “Who/What is the Ubuntu Community” section in a prominent place might be helpful.
I was involved in the Ubuntu community initially because of my interactions involved with ubuntu_news, but in testing I eventually became heavily involved with a flavor, and I’m aware that some people are involved only within a flavor (or a subset of the wider community) with no desire to step beyond that. Are they included? or excluded?
@madhens your response I feel could be read as missing out the flavor communities & whether or not they are included/excluded within the wider Ubuntu community…
Flavors (and remixes!) are all Ubuntu and are a distinct and important part of that core community. Full stop. I have, erm, badgered so many of the Ubuntu MATE team to apply for Ubuntu Membership, and when they say “But I’ve only contributed to Ubuntu MATE” I say, every time, “and that’s contributing to Ubuntu!”
So the flavor and remix communities are ABSOLUTELY part of Ubuntu. They are Ubuntu, full stop. I am sorry (and slightly mortified) if I wasn’t clearer, which was probably because I just assumed everyone felt likewise! And when you assume…
I like to think that we consider every user, in addition to contributors in all the various guises, are part of the community. If we were to say “users are not part of the community” then they never will be because we’d be ignoring their input. While the core contributors are key to the continued existence of Ubuntu it’s the ideas that “mere users” have that will make the project better - the ideas, which are about actually using the thing for every day tasks are likely the sort of thing that long-term contributors tend to just accept as the status quo. We’d be worse off if we didn’t listen to these ideas.
the time you use my software and tell me about an issue in it, you effectively contributed to said software … the time you tell your mom about that cool program she can use on the computer you maintain for her, you contributed to it by promoting it and getting it another user … there is no line to draw here
some of us contribute more, some less, some write code, others write docs, help at events, draw pretty icons, translate a string or even a word …
ubuntu means “i am what i am because you are”, which in the end boils down to “everyone is a contributor and we can only make it together”
Thank you, Dan, for reminding me and all of us of this. Users have passion and excitement and ideas, and connecting them so they can at the very least share those ideas is important, and not just because that’s where the next generation of core contributors is going to come from. Just because our community has different levels of engagement doesn’t mean the casual members aren’t part of it.
(Also, I need to stop my crankiness with marketing e-mails that try and use “community” to sell me a sandwich color or interior paint from tagging along here.)
So this brought me back - in 2019 I was a new Ubuntu MATE user and had just started hanging out in the Ubuntu Podcast Telegram chat. I was “just” a user, super new to Ubuntu and to Linux, but people were so welcoming and warm that, despite my imposter syndrome, I felt like part of the Ubuntu community already. So even though supporting the councils and checking in on testers and similar things are an important part of what we do as a team, helping kindle and nourish that welcoming and inspiring feeling that brought all of us here for everyone, like @ogra said, is also at the heart of our charter.
I’ve been helping users install and use Ubuntu for more than a decade now and I’ve been looking for a way to build an installer that i can send them to boot from and enable me to help manage them with tools like remotepc,
is there something like that ever going to be available for ubuntu to tech support to setup and use to get new users up and running?
Could also help get more enterprises enrolled in situations where the employees only need a simple web-capable OS with simple apps. (VM for users on legacy software!)
Cheers,
I’ll definitely be visiting the platform more.
Hello! Thank you so much for posting, and for helping so many people get started with Ubuntu!
I don’t know the answer to that question, but I can certainly bring it up to members of the relevant teams, and see if any of them can chime in on whether something like this might be possible - I imagine there might be some technical issues and security concerns re: unscrupulous people using an installer like that for bad ends. But it would be exciting if that could be done safely - I think a lot of us here do tech support for friends and family!
Thanks Ken, very interesting what you wrote and, by chance, it is just what I need because I joined this community just today and, to be exact, I am just a candidate for an HR role so, every introductory information are “gold” for me, in order to better uderstand this communiny and, consequentely, this Company that - as per my knowledge - is “founded” on it! Thanks again - Michele
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