Ubuntu Wiki

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• Launchpad entry: https://features.launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/ubuntu-participate-webpage-update

• Packages affected:

Summary

This spec seeks to update the participate page of ubuntu.com and the team pages in the ubuntu wiki to be more useful as points of entry into the Ubuntu community for new contributors, and to make the team structure more coherent across the Ubuntu community.

Rationale

The current Ubuntu /community/participate web site has gone without an update for quite some time despite the continuous growth of the project. It is now poorly coordinated with the individual team pages which it links to for better understanding of the individual teams and partner projects such as Kubuntu, Edubuntu and Xubuntu.

Use cases

Joseph would like to get involved with the Ubuntu marketing. He has lots of great ideas for cool T-shirt designs. But from the Participate page there is no mention of the Marketing Team, and after a confused search he ends up on the Ubuntu Artwork page instead, which he doesn't find very helpful.

Margaret wants to hack on the kernel that ships with Ubuntu, and she has already made a few patches, but she has some questions about the format. She needs to get in touch with the kernel maintainers, and she goes to the Participate page to find the relevant contact info, there is none, and she ends up sending the unfinished patches to the ubuntu-devel list instead.

Fridolino is a brand-new Ubuntu-user, impressed with the whole free-software spirit he wants to get involved, but he knows nothing of IRC or wikis and only a little of mailing-lists. He finds his way to the Participate page, but finds little hand-holding in how to get use these electronic means of communication properly to get involved.

Scope

Updating the main community/Participate page and making it coherent with the relevant team pages linked from it.

Design

There are two main approaches:

• 1) Extending the Participate page detailed enough to contain the relevant ways of participating and contact info directly into that page, thus making it relatively big, but leaving the teams to keep whatever page design that they currently have. 2) Reorganizing and updating the Participate page somewhat to make it contain clearly labelled links to the various team pages, thus giving a better Bird's Eye View, but which also requires a restructuring of the team pages to make them conform to some standard structure to make it easier for the casual browser to find the relevant information.

Implementation

ad Approach 1: the ContributeToUbuntu document which is now included in the shipped documentation for Edgy Eft is an attempt at a monolithic document describing the various teams in detail.

ad Approach 2: the HelpingUbuntu document is an attempt to distill the central information from the monolithic document, and just provide minimal description and contact information for each team. In that way a more modular approach where the team pages are much more important. To ensure some coherence between the team descriptions, there is a suggestion for a common structure for team pages.

BoF agenda and discussion

• - Picking an approach for the Participate document: Modular or Monolithic? - Discussion of the role team pages in the wiki: How to best make them useful internally (between members) and externally (in getting new members)? - How do the different requirements of involvement in the different teams (eg. becoming a MOTU vs. becoming an art team member) shape the way teams recruit new members? - Can this be improved? - ...?

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