ForumAmbassadors

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 * regarding Kubuntu : Jonathan Ridell suggested to have some FA member come to the Kubuntu Council meeting and report there.

Please check the status of this specification in Launchpad before editing it. If it is Approved, contact the Assignee or another knowledgeable person before making changes.

BoF agenda and discussion

  • Currently this spec is in drafting.
  • There will be another BOF about this on Thursday or Friday. Interested forum members should try to attend.
  • Many of the current comments are things that should actually be bullets, as they're valid points and ideas, not just comments. Before the next drafting, this should be amended. I'll work on it, so help me Smile :)

Summary

This document specifies how to improve communication (bugs, ideas, forum users feedback) between the forums and the developers. The idea is to elect Forum Ambassadors and/or have a special forum for this to help to improve communication.

This idea originated on the forums. It was originally by Aysiu but many people have contributed. The current discussion is here : the forum thread : http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=1708930

Forum Ambassadors might become a team like : http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=289810

  • Summary - Subforum on the forums where people have opinions and ideas. Make a team that connects to the developers to facilitate communication.
  • Use ambassadors to collect ideas,bugs and feedback from users.

TODO: improve the spec and make it more clear

Rationale

Currently there's little communication between the forum users and the developers. The forums can be a great resource for developers that are looking for bugs, testers, or improvement of useablity -- but not in a way that they have to spend too much time browsing the forums. The idea is to bring the forums to the developers with this team.

The proposed Forum Ambassadors Team will improve information flow between the forums and the developers. This information flow will be bi-directional.

It's not practical for the developers to spend much time monitoring the forums. The amount selected by the ambassadors team for the developers should be a lot easier to handle than the huge amount of posts on the forums. Instead of waiting for developers to come to the forums let's take a more active approach and create this team.

It also provides a sense of entitlement to the users at Ubuntu Forums. They will feel represented, involved, and perhaps be able to take a larger part in making Ubuntu better. True this is definetely good for improving the integration and communication of the forums with the rest of the community.

Use cases

  • Right after Feisty's release there's a big thread on the forums about the breakage of a certain important package. Paul, a forum ambassador, contacts the maintainer of this package to let him know about this.
  • Karel, a forum user, creates a new thread with some nice workarounds for certain problems. Paul, a forum ambassador, discovers that a couple of these problems are unknown to the devs and encourages and assists forum users to report these problems as bugs.
  • Joe, a forum user, posts with annoyance at how a certain package is not compiled with options to perform something he wants, for example ipod support for a music app. The ambassador informs Joe he will pass on his request by filing a bug to the right package.
  • Traci, a Forums Ambassador, creates a thread asking for suggestions regarding ideas for improved usability, new things that don't ring very true with the users. Traci summarizes the discussion, filters out trivia and senseless complaints, and forwards the good ideas and suggestions to the developers in the following way : first create specs for these ideas, secondly send an e-mail to ubuntu-devel for discussion and thirdly attend the next UDS to discuss these specs.

Scope

This spec is focused on creating a Forum Ambassadors team which will provide a bi-directional communication interface between the forum users and the developers.

The focus of this team should not be to try to educate every new user, although the team would assist communication between forums users and developers.

  • The Forum Ambassadors will also not be responsible for resolving inter-user and user/staff grievances. We have a resolution centre for that (Also FC and CC in the future).
  • The only purpose of this project is to gather feedback and input from the users and convey it directly to the developers, and to convey the intentions/thoughts of the developers back to the users. The Ambassadors team's responsibilities will not extend beyond that.

Design

  • Goals to achieve
    • To encourage and assist forum users in bug reporting, wiki usage and other community tools.
    • Communicating ideas to developers (gists and zeitgeists)
    • Two way communication. (Bidirectional)

    • Integration of projects that start on the forums into the distribution. (Inviting people into the greater community.)
    • Involve other active members of the forums that don't yet contribute to the organization. (Get the active members to join the project)
    • Recognition of forums contributions
  • Things ambassadors will be doing
    • Some people are comfortable collecting information. (Collector)
    • Some people are comfortable diseminating information. (Disseminators)
    • Triaging people and volunteers (being in touch with the interests of users)
    • File bugs (Good bugs, not just follow either, is it a feature or a bug? They need to be able to contact people who are willing to contribute.) (see [:LoCoTeamsUDSMVSpecs/CommunityBugReporting:CommunityBugReporting])

    • Report on the team's work and achievements over a timeframe... monthly?
    • Forum Ambassadors should be active mainly in the Forum Ambassadors subforum. In this way most of what they do is transparent to the forum users. They could also submit interesting stuff to Ubuntu Weekly News in interesting cases. When we grow bigger we might report in a more official manner to the Forums Council.

Implementation

  • We would like to jumpstart this new Forum Ambassadors team with a small set of some interested people such as interested forum staff and interested people in the FA threads. We should encourage these people (who qualify for the criteria) to nominate themselves. The final decision of who gets on this team should be made by the FC or admins.
  • When the FA runs for a little while and someone (who qualifies for the criteria) wants to join the current FA team can advice the FC or admins whether they would like this person in the team. The final decision should be made by the FC or admins.
  • Everyone who puts himself forward and meets the criteria will be considered as a candidate to be member of the Forum Ambassadors Team.
    • - UbuntuDemon : we have to write out the criteria like : following the CoC, being an active member of the forums and having showed capable of respectful behaviour, having some technical insight and be willing to learn

    - everybody happy with this ? let's define the criteria later--yup, good idea. thats why i marked it as a comment for now
  • Create Launchpad team for Ambassadors
  • Define types of relevant information : bugs, specs and ideas, priority of specs as felt by the forum users.
  • Document HOWTO be an ambassador
  • create ambassador team leaders
  • set criteria that we want to see from members
  • How to file a good bug report
  • this ties in with this spec about documentation to report bugs : https://features.launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/community-bug-reporting

  • Submit submittor to bug report.
  • Create special forum section dedicated to make it easy for forum users to contact Forum Ambassadors
  • Two way street. Developers and forum users.
  • Forum Staff and Forum Ambassadors are two seperate things. But it's possible for a forum user to be both. Some Forum Ambassadors might make good Forum Staff. Some Forum Staff might make good Forum Ambassadors.
  • Set of criteria of contributions.
  • It's important that people know that they don't have to be developers to talk on a developer level - it's not like the developers are unapproachable, nor that they need to be talked to in a weird language - they do understand day to day English. I suspect there are a lot of people who think "I cant do this, I'm not skilled enough to." If you have a reasonable knowledge of what is feasible and isn't, we need you!
  • It's also important that we don't nagg too much about obvious stuff. This takes too much time of the developers.
  • We have to make sure we can post to ubuntu-devel , edubuntu-devel and kubuntu-devel.
  • regarding Kubuntu : Jonathan Ridell suggested to have some FA member come to the Kubuntu Council meeting and report there.

Evaluation

  • ambassadors + dev teams should know each other
  • ambassadors should know what's going on (#ubuntu-devel, ubuntu-devel, mailinglist, developer forum section)

Unresolved issues

  • It's not possible to create a bug in the name of someone else.
    • -MikeBasinger But you can subsubscribe other people to the bug

      • - Hobbsee : Only if they have a LP account

        • -ManiacMusician : I think that if they're not going to file their own bugs, they might not need (or deserve) to take the credit for it. So, does it really matter whose name the bug is created in?

          • - Hobbsee : No, karma doesnt really apply to forum people anyway*de

  • Need feedback from developers on what they would like to see in this spec.
    • - Hobbsee : Devs probably need to wait for the forum half to get more organised before we can say much about it. However, we can try to help point out what is feasible and what isn't

      • -ManiacMusician : I think everything in this spec is pretty reasonable; especially since most of the work is not being done by the developers. They basically just need to agree that they want to hear users' opinions. On the forums themselves, it'll be the job of the ambassadors to weed out the unfeasible.

        • "-Hobbsee - Yes, and figure out how the communication will happen. -Hobbsee

          • "-ManiacMusician : I think an Ambassadors mailing list would be reasonable. People who care or are integral can subscribe, and the rest don't have to.

  • need feedback from Forum users
  • Centralized team leader or should each team member have a point of contact.
  • I, UbuntuDemon, have been doing some talking with some devs and stuff. I'm going to do some informal talking about this Forum Ambassadors stuff to developers. I have been getting good feedback.

  • Central point of contact? Or distributed by team? How do you get decent coverage?
    • -ManiacMusician: I feel it should be a combination. A central team that coordinates the movements of all the teams, and then separate teams of 3 to 5 people that cover special areas or branch out in some way

  • Existing staff too busy to be ambassadors? -ManiacMusician : For the most part, yes

  • no leaders ? one or two leaders ? (depends on the role of the FA leaders)
  • we need to clarify what exactly the FA leader(s) should do
  • need to clarify appointment process. Maybe something like : people can nominate themselves and be appointed by FC.
  • The issue of electing forum ambassadors is still open. We can't accept every volunteer...it's a demanding job, and we can't afford to have people that may quit after a little while of doing it. it's a team-based effort. We have to formulate a way to accept members without being too elitist
    • - PriceChild : Who has final say on Ambassadors? - Forums Staff? Admins or FC?

      • - Hobbsee : Forum council, i guess. Which will mostly be the forums staff, i thought?

        • - PriceChild : Nope, starts with 3 admins, will change. How about the entire staff team with final decision by FC? - Hobbsee : Sounds sane to me. That's what we do for kubuntu, but it's not my decision"

          • -ManiacMusician : Not sure how I feel about external influences in this. I was kind of hoping to keep it inside the forums, because that's where the community is...those are the people that will have to be represented and they'll probably want to know or have a say in what's going on. What would the FC know about users on the forum?

            • - PriceChild: Forums Staff & FC are all in forums. FC HAVE to be a good member of the forums to be selected. i.e. admins to start with, maybe with the most experienced staff. - Hobbsee : Seeing as the FC is made up of all/mostly staff - a lot. No one's out to get anyone else.

              • -ManiacMusician : Didn't mean to imply that. Just wondering about the what the reaction will be at the forums.

                • - Hobbsee : Presumably it'll be made very clear on the forums who the members of the FC are, and so users can easily see that they're well known forum people.

Brain Dump

  • expand to other forums
  • offtopic : all Ubuntu forums linking to eachother (for example forums for different languages)
  • bi-directional
  • communicate / relay ideas : gisting + zeitgeist??)
  • prioritization of specs,etc
  • What do other distros do regarding ambassadors ?
  • Communicate what users like in other distros
  • file + follow up good bugs / inital triage / judgement calls
  • integration of code into community + core distro/repos
  • invite forum members into Ubuntu project + recognition of forums contributions
  • use launchpad
  • "I've stopped using Ubuntu because XXX is, or works better, in Some Other Distro" <-- high priority

Future work

  • Integration of other forums (all the LoCo forums and other languages). How do we get their feedback integrated? (Tough, this will be another spec).

  • Ambassadors from other forums?

Comments

Archived comments: [wiki:ForumAmbassadors/Talk Talk page]

  • I think this is a great Idea. From a forums perspective at least the English one it will be really simple to allow this to be setup as a team with the option of users to request to join etc. I would like to see this implemented for sure. Ryan Troy
  • I think its a great idea to really well thought out. if its implemented right will work out great. zenrox
  • Bug Reporting:
    • "Someone on the forums find a bug, want a way to quickly get that information to developers."
      • Mako: It would be nice if people who represent others know how to file good detailed bug reports.
    • Someone needs to collect information from the forums, it's unreasonable to expect all users to register with launchpad, etc. etc.
    • Very often forum users post their opinions (requests, problems, desires, etc.) in the "Ubuntu Development" section of the forum thinking that the developers would see their posts there.
  • Asking good questions / good documentation
    • - PriceChild: There's a good thread on the forums, i believe by aysiu. -Is this part of our implementation? - UbuntuDemon : I think we should make at least three documents : 1) HOWTO Forum Ambassador .. howto help, what to do and stuff 2) some addon to jono's spec on forums specific stuff (for example things that forum userstend to do wrong .. we should communicate it back to jono when this happens ofcourse.3) when to approach a forum ambassador. Developers made it clear to me that they like the idea but they wouldn't like to see us spamming them with every idea some user has. Some are really obvious .. others are more suitable to post as a feature bug ... we can help users with this ofcourse. We should educate users a little bit on what type of stuff is interesting for developers.

      • -ManiacMusician : Of course we wouldn't spam them. It's our job to filter out the feedback we're investigating. It's okay to educate users but the fact is, most of them won't read. And, I thought the idea was for them to write what they wanted the developers to know. - UbuntuDemon : All I wanted to say was we should make it clear what kind of things developers are interested in so 1) we can do a bit of pre-filtering and 2) users become less dissapointed if we don't act on their wishes

      • - UbuntuDemon : IMHO we can put it under future work. under a bullet called documentation

        • - UbuntuDemon : what do you think ?

          • -ManiacMusician : It's a good idea. Definitely too much work for us right now though, so we do need to put it innn the future work section like you said

            • - UbuntuDemon : No IMHO it's part of implementation. It's not that we can't start without it though Smile :)

            • - PriceChild : I'm thinking it'd be better to educate what is NOT wanted by the devs.

              • - UbuntuDemon : that might be easier :). nice idea. But we should also use Use Cases to show what might be interesting for devs.

            - UbuntuDemon :IMHO we should ask Aysiu to help us write the HOWTO Forum Ambassador. IMHO we should also invite him to the team.

            • - ManiacMusician : He has already publicly declined to be on the team. But I'm sure he would be willing to help write the HOWTO. -UbuntuDemon : he publicly declined but the spec has progressed and is somewhat different from his initial idea

              • - ManiacMusician : Well the reason for his declination was that he said he wouldn't be able to be impartial like Ambassadors should be and that it wasa too huge a commitment - UbuntuDemon :IMHO everyone should decide how much time to spend on this themselves. We should make this clear in the HOWTO.

                • - UbuntuDemon : we can slowly grow the FA team. Lots of people dedicating a bit of time is a lot of time together.

      -UbuntuDemon :let's tag these comments and move them to discussion. Okay ?


CategorySpec

ForumAmbassadors (last edited 2008-08-06 17:01:37 by localhost)