Bridging Ubuntu. Ideas for communications between devs and users

[.t.]

The wiki page:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BridgingUbuntu

The mailing list post:

On Sun, 10 Sep 2006 11:57:06 -0700
Matt Zimmerman <mdz@ubuntu.com> wrote:

> > There is an unfortunate communication gap between the forums and other
> > communication channels such as IRC and the mailing lists, and I would like
> > to find a way to address it. Grieving over this fact doesn't help, but I am
> > always open to hearing *constructive* ideas about how to promote better
> > communication within the project.

I don't have an answer of my own, but I think this is an important issue
for Ubuntu.

As a tentative first step I have created

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BridgingUbuntu

As a place holder for discussion of communication, and a place to air
grievances and/or suggest solutions.

There is no bug tracker for internal community communication bugs, as far
as I know

This is not directly on topic for -devel of course, but I have sent it in
answer to Matt's post.

If this is seen as a good idea, I will post to -users and sounder.

Peter

[maniacmusician]

certainly a good move...matt is absolutely right. the difference is simply too huge.

however some distance is needed...because if they're too close, the dev's will be flooded by requests from the community. there needs to be a way to find a compromise within the two. maybe the developers should drop in on the forums a couple of times a month and just say "hey whats shakin'?" to get some words flowing back and forth....

[aysiu]

How about we have ambassadors from the forums to the devs?

A few 500-post discussions with some accompanying well-crafted polls and then one or two resulting proposals brought to the developers...?

[maniacmusician]

How about we have ambassadors from the forums to the devs?

A few 500-post discussions with some accompanying well-crafted polls and then one or two resulting proposals brought to the developers...?

sounds interesting; how would you go about organizing such a feat? by that I mean, there are going to be thousands of "ideas"...how are they going to be narrowed down? There's just an excess of input

[.t.]

As I posted to the ubuntu-devel list, Gentoo already have a "user representative" system.

[aysiu]

sounds interesting; how would you go about organizing such a feat? by that I mean, there are going to be thousands of "ideas"...how are they going to be narrowed down? There's just an excess of input

Well, the ambassadors would have to distill and agree on what the community has "agreed on." That can be a little tough, but...

1. Most "ideas" are not practical at all and, thus, are not really ideas. For example, a frustrated new user saying "Ubuntu needs better wireless support." Gee, thanks. How does Ubuntu do that?

2. Threads that discuss an ideas ad nauseum usually have only one or two real proposals. For example, the whole CNR thing had hundreds of posts, but the only distinct ideas were: A) Include an easy link to install CNR, B) Make CNR the default Ubuntu package manager, C) Don't include CNR in any way. Not all of the hundreds of posts were offering hundreds of unique ideas.

3. There are people who actually read all the posts in a given thread, no matter how long the thread is.

Get a couple of dedicated readers, a couple of people who speak the devs' language, and have them bring a proposal on behalf of forum users.

[maniacmusician]

Well, the ambassadors would have to distill and agree on what the community has "agreed on." That can be a little tough, but...

1. Most "ideas" are not practical at all and, thus, are not really ideas. For example, a frustrated new user saying "Ubuntu needs better wireless support." Gee, thanks. How does Ubuntu do that?

2. Threads that discuss an ideas ad nauseum usually have only one or two real proposals. For example, the whole CNR thing had hundreds of posts, but the only distinct ideas were: A) Include an easy link to install CNR, B) Make CNR the default Ubuntu package manager, C) Don't include CNR in any way. Not all of the hundreds of posts were offering hundreds of unique ideas.

3. There are people who actually read all the posts in a given thread, no matter how long the thread is.

Get a couple of dedicated readers, a couple of people who speak the devs' language, and have them bring a proposal on behalf of forum users.

haha i always do that (read all the posts), even if it takes me an hour.

sounds like a good plan...its worth putting into action, at least.

[aysiu]

haha i always do that (read all the posts), even if it takes me an hour.

Any chance you'd want to be one of those ambassadors...?

[PriceChild]

I agree that the ambassadors idea is really the only sensible way to get through this.

It couldn't be too hard for a little test, say one of the devs gets given a little group of say 3 people or so to scour the forums for ideas in the dev's particular area. See what the dev thinks of the way his ambassadors work.

It isn't exactly like this system has to be implemented widescale immediately, and i'm sure that one of the devs will be nice enough to agree if someone asks nicely

[maniacmusician]

if you really want, i have no problem with doing it. I'd probably read it regardless of whether i was an ambassador or not.


But in all fairness, there's probably better candidates than myself that have been Ubuntu-ing a lot longer than myself. I have no problem with doing it though. the project is interesting enough