community

Ubuntu - the Linux distribution - has been around for 17 years. Over that time many projects and initiatives have been started, some successful, others less so. Not everything we try can work out, but as a group, we should feel empowered to try. The Ubuntu community isn’t quite the same as it was back in 2004-2010, and nobody I know argues that it is. People who were keen and active contributors may have had circumstantial changes which meant they moved on. [Read More]

In the mid-90s I was an avid user of online conferencing system called CIX (Compulink Information eXchange). CIX was built using the CoSy Conferencing system from the University of Guelph, which has since been open sourced. Think of it like a dial-up or telnet-accessed forum or message board with a nerd-heavy userbase. Each day I’d dial-up to download messages, then read & respond offline. Later in the day I’d re-connect to send my responses and download more messages. [Read More]

A while back I proposed that we replace the old static Ubuntu Community site, which looked a bit like this, with something a little more dynamic. So today we are replacing the static site with an instance of discourse, which looks a bit like this You can go back and read that blog post for the full rationale but essentially it boils down to two aims: We want to improve community communication We want to smooth the onboarding process for new contributors. [Read More]

Status Quo For over four years now, the Ubuntu Community Portal has been the ‘welcome mat’ for new people seeking to get involved in Ubuntu. In that time the site had seen some valuable but minor incremental changes; no major updates have occurred recently. I’d like us to fix this. We can also use this as an opportunity to improve our whole onboarding process. I’ve spent a chunk of time recently chatting with active members of the Ubuntu Community about the community itself. [Read More]

Ubuntu Artful Desktop July Shakedown We’re mid-way through the Ubuntu Artful development cycle, with the 17.10 release rapidly approaching on the horizon. Now is a great time to start exercising the new GNOME goodness that’s landed on our recent daily images! Please download the ISO, test it out on your own hardware, and file bugs where appropriate. If you’re lucky enough to find any new bugs, please tag them with ‘julyshakedown’, so we can easily find them from this testing session. [Read More]