Creating a Community for the Ubuntu Websites

History

The Ubuntu website management tasks have historically been dealt with by one person, the Ubuntu.com webmaster. While there will, for the time being at least, be just one person ultimately responsible for the website, this is a plan for moving to a system where a team of people can work together to keep the website fresh and find new and interesting ways to communicate the exciting Ubuntu story.

Goals

• Help keep key areas of the Ubuntu website fresh
• Accept the invitations of people who want to contribute and allow them to do so in a meaningful way
• Enable community accountability and collaboration on key areas of the site such as the start page
• Ensure people have demonstrated a level of trustworthiness before being able to edit parts of the main ubuntu website

What we will do

We will invite the community to participate in maintaining and improving the Ubuntu website in the following ways:

• Create a localized page for their language or loco team
• Freely edit a copy of the community section and community support sections of the website and have changes manually pushed out to the ubuntu.com website - initially by the Ubuntu.com webmaster, but as people demonstrate ability and trustworthiness then they will do this themselves
• Contribute graphical elements such as countdown banners
• Consider and facilitate new ideas suggested by the community

How we will do it

• Create an area on the wiki where content that needs to be modified can be mirrored
• Anyone in the community can modify these pages and propose changes
• After people demonstrate good work they can get access to the appropriate area of ubuntu.com and make changes directly

Notes

Regarding localizing, I had a plan that may or may not work in the long term - to have the website detect the user's language and if their preference isn't English but *is* a language used by one of our loco teams then add a link to the top of the page offering the user help in their own language.

If we have just one page per language and listing all of the loco teams there who speak that language it makes this possible. We can't detect what country they're in (reliably) so if we have one page per country we wouldn't be able to help them as much.