LaunchpadAndUbuntuCommunity

LaunchpadAndUbuntuCommunity

Status

Introduction

This BOF discusses the relationship between the Ubuntu and Launchpad communities and how we can make that relationship more harmonious.

Rationale

The Ubuntu community is becoming increasingly reliant on Ubuntu and this will only accelerate. However, the LP development community remains largely disconnected most Ubuntu hackers and the ideal modes for communication and collaboration are unclear. This BOF seeks to describe the most critical problem areas and brainstorm some ideas for how they can be addressed.

Current Situation

Currently, we have the MOTUs using Malone and anyone doing application translation using Rosetta.

Because LP is closed and people can't get involved in development without going through Mark or others and/or signing a non-disclosure agreement, we need to be more careful about the way we separate certain types of conversation than we are on the Ubuntu related lists.

Problem Breakdown and Solutions

We've broken down the modes of communication in terms of Launchpad into a few separate areas and given ideas for how we can handle each of these.

Webpage

There is a problem with perception in that people have a hard time grokking how the different components of Launchpad are a single application or even how they are related as a set of applications. The new URL scheme that Carlos described could be used as an opportunity to solve this problem. The new homepage should do a better job of describing what Launchpad is and how it is developed.

IRC

Currently, there is a #launchpad channel that is open and should be could be for support. We recommend that it is. #launchpad-devel is used for development and it is closed. The #launchpad channels gets very little traffic.

We should make the #launchpad channel more visible and we should document this channel prominently within the system and in the help and support pages and elsewhere where appropriate. We should require launchpad developers to idle in the #launchpad channel. If possible, we should ask the Freenode administrators to alias #rosetta and #malone to #launchpad so that people who join these channels get in there automatically.

Mailing Lists

There is a launchpad@lists.ubuntu.com email list which is a closed and private development mailing list. There is also a rosetta-users mailing list at lists.ubuntu.com and it gets a modest amount of traffic. There has been a malone-users mailing list created, for which an announcement will be made in the near future. BradBollenbach will help organize this. There are unused and deprecated lists for rosetta, malone, and Soyuz.

It may be useful to eventually create a launchpad-users mailing list, to provide help to users with more general Launchpad issues, or in case they're not exactly sure where their question belongs (as may particularly be the case with newer users.)

We seem to have committed to the idea that keeping the app-specific lists separate concerns is a Good Idea. In the common case, for example, most people that take an active interest in Malone, discussions with MOTU and Malone developers, etc. probably won't care to have the mailing list flooded with Rosetta-specific questions as well.

Outstanding Issues

We should think about some sort of integration between launchpad and mailing lists as people within certain subprojects within launchpad may very well want to communicate with each other on a list. In particular, we are concerned about connecting groups of translators working on similar sets of translations.

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UbuntuDownUnder/BOFs/LaunchpadAndUbuntuCommunity (last edited 2008-08-06 16:23:37 by localhost)