State of the Community Now Vs. Six Years Ago

Community
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Hey all,

I returned after six years and wow, whatever the storm that was blowing that I might of caused along with other concerned Community members ceased. I re-read all of that plus whatever was on the Ubuntu-community-team mailing-list!

Anyhow, I’m Svetlana Belkin, a former Ubuntu Community Member, who posted under @belkinsa back in the day. I never renewed my Membership and lost access to my @ubuntu.com e-mail address and I recall that I might of left because of the state of the Community at that time. The reason why I returned, is not to come back, but to learn what was learned from the mistakes of the previous era- the one that I was active in from 2012 to 2020, from starting in Ubuntu Women, to getting my Membership in just six months to the various elected Board memberships, all the way to my downfall. I found myself back into a local, in-person, volunteer-lead (and city-member lead!) community that might be facing some of the same issues that Ubuntu Community had and might still have. The big ones that I can think of are how much time is on hand (which can’t be avoided anywhere) and the fragmentation that the favors might be creating (another topic for another day).

It’s good to see this Community being active still!

Svetlana Belkin

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What did you, yourself learn from the mistakes of the previous era?

I am no one. I am not one of the elite. I never was and I never will be. Perhaps that was one of the mistakes. People thinking they were superior to others.

I starting posting in Ubuntu Forums because I wanted to give something back for the gift of Ubuntu. And that was the only way I could do it. It was once suggested to me that I could apply for Community Membership. I decided not to. I could not guarantee the level of involvement that I thought would be necessary. Life does get in the way, you know.

I switched to Ubuntu Discourse towards the end of last year. I read an old post about Community Membership. A certain Community Member was demanding that those Community Members who had slackened off in their community involvement should be stripped of their Community Membership.

There, in my mind, is the problem. Such a self-important attitude does not fit the “Circle of Friends” way of doing things.

Years ago, when I first read rumours of disagreements I was shocked but also relieved. Based on all the fine words in the Code of Conduct I was beginning to think that I was getting involved in a cult.

“Ubuntu for Humans.” Right? There is good and bad about being human. And we all have both.

There is one change that you may not have noticed. The diminishing of “Community” has forced a commercial entity to take over and raise things to professional standards. This is noticeable with Tutorials and Guides. I think this process is all to the good for Ubuntu users. Whatever their size.

Regards

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That would be a shame. I applied for membership because, back then, I was needing access to certain areas because I was creating documentation for people.

Membership is a two-way street. My contributions have dropped, mainly due to long-term illness, but I still contribute as I can, and membership helps me in return. Having my membership revoked after everything that I have contributed would feel like a slap in the face.

I’m glad that I belong to the community, and I shall continue to contribute.

Graham, you indeed deserved membership.

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This is actually something that happens automatically … membership is managed via a launchpad group and launchpad will send you a reminder ((IIRC every two years) that you have to reply to, else it will suspend your membership status … this is easily reversible by contacting the community council if you come back though.

That setup has been implemented from day one…

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Perhaps, but it doesn’t feel like it’s that at least for me because I had the drive to keep going for those years. A few months, I learned about the Meyer’s-Briggs temperament system and I an ENFJ. The “J” helped me to get things done, not just for me, but for everyone of whatever team that I was in. I never felt like a no-one.

The ENF part allowed me and still allows me to provide these discussions.

Not to re-open any wounds here, but I would like to see that post and how did that get remedied? I don’t recall any of this outside that post in any of the mailing-lists or even if that ever made to the Memebership Board. I severed as an elected member of the Membership Board in 2014-2016 and the CC around that time too. The only thing that the CC had to deal with was a member who got banned from their behavior.

Honesty what I see, in hindsight, is what I see even outside the Ubuntu Community, is the inequality. Between Canonical and the Community. Paid and the un-paid. The contractor and the client. It’s everywhere. Which seems to be what it really ways as you did state it, @graymech. Although, it seems to be one of the problems and if you read some of the early e-mails from 2014 of the Ubuntu-community-team Archives and then this: Improving Community Health: Community Concerns , it shows others.

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As requested. Note the very last reply to the topic.

Topic where a demand is made for removal of Membership if involvement slackens off

I was not aware of this discussion at the time I made by decision not to apply. At that time I did not visit Ubuntu Discourse very much. When I did I was looking for news about Ubuntu.

To get back on topic. Are we having an inquest on what went wrong? Did anything go wrong? People left Ubuntu. I noticed that much. And some did not leave quietly.

I stayed. I credit Ubuntu developers with knowing what they are doing. In some areas of life I have very strong opinions. As regards the development of Ubuntu I have no opinion. I accept what we get. There are no “deal breakers” for me.

On reflection, I guess that some could not accept that Ubuntu is not a democracy. I guess that the development of Community gave some the idea that they were part of the decision making process.

Regards

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It’s a meritocracy and a transparent one where everyone and anyone can see how the Community functions along with the Boards and Teams wherever that was IRC, Wiki, Mailing-list. I don’t recall if I never seen that term ever used back in my day, but I knew that’s how the Ubuntu Community functioned. In my experience, one needs to know their limits and not try to go past them or burnout can happen.

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To be honest it actually was like this for the first decade of Ubuntu when we still had the original UDS (Ubuntu developer summit) format…

Canonical actually invited community people regularly, paid for everything and we had them sit in the planning meetings, sparking new ideas, picking up developer tasks for certain feature sets that spannend across multiple areas of the OS and so on, there was a massive involvement of the community in the early years…

But the company grew and with that responsibility of the company grew alongside.

It started to become important to actually make money to make sure paid developers have a reliable perspective to pay their rent and feed their kids.

An UDS costed around $10Mio and we had them twice a year, this is quite an amount of money to fly people around the world for having a good time with their community fellows so it had to be shot down eventually in that format.

We tried to switch that 1:1 to a complete online format but that did not work out so well (you can not easily replace the hallway, bar or dinner conversations which are usually the most fruitful ones to spark new ideas and plans)

It took quite a while to get back to something better as we have today with the new Ubuntu Summit and plenty of LoCo events.

Along with that the communication channels also changed drastically (nobody uses IRC for direct communication anymore, things moved to matrix, mailing lists moved to discourse etc. And you simply lose people with such a switch)…

A big shout out should go to @ilvipero and @aaronprisk for their tireless work to make all this happen and to give us all a home (and to listen to the community to carry requests into the business part of Canonical to turn it into something both sides benefit from)

As @belkinsa1 said, it was a completely different community back then and years ago it looked to be on a grim path but @sabdfl always cared for the community and knows about it’s importance (which is why Canonical always had and has a community team staffed with full time engineers) and I think you can rely on this going on for the foreseeable future, the community is part of the plan and that won’t change (the world will though and we will all have to adapt as will the community as a whole)

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I feel that’s what is the cause of loss of contributors and/or engagement is the experimentation that Canonical was and still is doing. Back in 2010, when I first used Ubuntu, it was Ubuntu One syncing service. 2014 was Ubuntu Touch. Without it, stagnation and complacency kicks in. Just as @ogra said, you will lose people that way, but you always will have those who do care. @popey , @aaronprisk, and @ilvipero and others seem to be the ones nowadays and back then it was @wxl, @ian-weisser, and @bkerensa2 and others of the Community Team back in 2014. We tried to create engagement but it didn’t go well. Whatever it was, I’m grateful that the Community Team of 2026 learned from those experiences and created a better way to do it. I feel that consolidating the Community Wiki to it’s core content was the best thing to do along with keeping everything else publicly achieved.

Edit to add: Or was it really the lack of focusing on what the competition was doing at those times?

It feels that what harmed the Community back in the 2010’s into the early 2020’s was stagnation. We just kept on trying the same old ideas over and over again without learning from the mistakes. I almost want to say that this was happening in the other communities that fed into Ubuntu; KDE as an example. Whatever got Ubuntu Community unstuck helped the others.

:clap: to Canonical and the Ubuntu Community for willing to make changes and take action!

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Another thought came to me is it wasn’t the stagnation, it was the shear amount of non-Core teams due to fact that anyone could create the spaces for them either on LaunchPad or the Community Wiki without the consequences of risk-taking without a continuation plan. Or trying to reboot a team. Removing that power was a very good move in my eyes.

And I believe that I’m wrong here, but I feel that there is something that needs to be said. :woman_shrugging:

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I think there’s a difference between community activity and community health.

During the first 10 years, there was a lot of noisy activity, but health waxed and waned.
During the second 10 years, it’s been a slow build of health, while noisy activity waxed and waned.

Activity

My perception is that a lot of the community activity during the first 10 years centered around various flavors and subsystems and features. After about 2018, with systemd+dbus+Gnome+snaps, much of that activity settled down. Ubuntu has been a stable platform since then, and many of the tinkerers moved on stuff they could build on top of Ubuntu instead of trying to integrate their favorite features into Ubuntu. So there are still a lot of tinkerers and contributors in the Open Source ecosystem, but they’re not as interested in the OS piece.

Loud, cool projects still come and go. Remixes/Flavors and regional UbuCons are popular right now. Ubuntu-on-air, LoCos, and Planet Ubuntu had their day…but might come again.

Health

My measure of health is community influence in the process of governance and development. It’s not a great measure, but it works for me because it’s easy to measure: Do development teams, governance boards, and the community use the same platform? Do developers see community discussion? Do they weigh in?

  • If developers are active in the community, or even just monitoring regularly, that’s health. That’s success for the Discourse platform.
  • If developer have fled to some other platform, and the users have an echo chamber that nobody developing Ubuntu listens to, that’s unhealthy. Platform failure.

A key community leadership change occurred here at Ubuntu Discourse. We changed from a rather noisy community-forum orientation to a much more developer-collaboration-workplace orientation. Our goal has been to keep the developers and governance boards here in the collaboration space and involved.

The reliable and robust community moderation has fostered a much healthier community (using my definition). We have a deep bench of great support volunteers. We have the constant trickle of new folks interested in various projects. We have a many Canonical and non-Canonical developers who drop by and weigh in. We are the primary place to post updates and announcements by key teams.

There are some serious health concerns. Many of our active volunteers are aging; many have been around for a decade or more. The pipeline of new volunteers is small. Not enough women participating. Not enough non-English speakers. Too few volunteers standing for elections. So I’m not ready to say that we’re healthy. We’re just healthier than we were a few years ago.

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I feel that you nailed it, Ian. What we were trying to improve was health, just didn’t really recognize as it. EDIT: I’m wrong, we did in the end and that’s where it might of started from.

I agree that we were fragmented in a different way, some of us thought it was an activity thing via all of the flavors/remixes, but it was really as you said it, the spaces and platforms that we used. Especially the wiki. Too much noise, less signal. A pain to keep up-to-date because you allowed everyone and anyone with an account to edit without any peer review. I feel that support fragmentation is a different topic for those who do focus and care about that.

We still still have the same serious health concerns as when I first got active in 2013, but I feel that’s everywhere Online and in-person for at least a woman the tech-world. If I recall correctly, we had at least five active women, including me, and now, I don’t even know as I only came back a few days go.

As for the pipeline, is it because there are barriers to entry? I would say most likely and are they identified and are there methodology (for the lack of a better word) to less them? At the same time, I feel like some of this can come down to physiology and how people are naturally are, A.K.A a measure like the Meyer’s-Briggs. I might be one of the few who are more social science and people orientated then most; which is where a lot of my feelings, thoughts, and questions are coming from. And not to brag here, but I feel that I matured after taking a break, as I feel that I might come back, in creating and just being apart of these types of discussions.

As a final word, I feel that Canonical and Ubuntu are the Debian-version flagship of the Linux world. While I might of moved over to KDE Neon, it’s still powered by Ubuntu and Debian.

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I doubt we have any higher barriers than we did in the past, but the whole IT world has completely changed…

When I got into Linux in the 90s it was common to build your own desktop computer, you had to tinker with the hardware a lot and after that with the software, there was more requirement to get involved on a very low level with hard and software…

Times have changed, the generation after me grew up with mobile phones, tablets and laptops where these requirements are simply not there anymore so only people with actual curiosity for that level of functionality will learn that layer while it used to be more common knowledge in the past…

So at least on a developer level there is less people to fill the pipeline… if you look at other (less technical ) areas that have changed less drastically you will see there is still a crowd… a good example is the wallpaper contest we have before every release, I don’t think the amount of submissions has gone down a lot even compared to the farther past…

I personally expect that AI will actually be the next “phones and tablets” type of thing where you are all of a sudden not required to know a programming language anymore to produce software but are only limited by your imagination …indeed we’ll still need knowledgeable people working on the language or the AI models but it will be another general shift in focus of the masses like mobile phones were…

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Makes sense. While there is always rapid growth in certain areas, there need to be fundamentals in place and the resources to sustain which shows the health of a community. Of course, you would also need certain types of people and leaders to do so. @sabdfl is a great example of a certain type of leader that is called a servant leader or the tier five leader. He built whole community and a team to support it around providing a service- co-creating Linux for Human Beings, not just developers and the IT world. I bet that he is also a connector leadership archetype where he connects people-to-people, people-ideas, and ideas-ideas but still has a somewhat balanced team of other servant leaders to fill in the other leadership archetypes. He might be also a mystic leader as his can see the unseen too.