Forum integration

[Matthew East]

On Fri, 2006-06-02 at 13:31 -0400, Andrew Zajac wrote:
> Any solutions to help the "mailling list" community not miss out on
> what the "forums" community is doing, and vice versa?

I'm quite interested in the question of integrating forums with the
wider community and vice versa.

There is something about a forum which creates a kind of macro-community
- it has its own community area and is generally a kind of "community
within itself".

I've seen the same "problem" on the Italian forum ("problem" is in
inverted commas because it is not really a problem, it's a positive
thing which has some effects that can be a challenge for a unified
community).

I think this is a really difficult problem to work on. It won't and
shouldn't ever be wholly resolved, because as I say, the macro-community
thing is actually a good feature, but there are a few things that can be
done to bring the communities closer.

First and most obviously is a unified forum/rest of community
authentication. It would be really great to sort out forum<->LP
authentication communication (I know this has been worked on in the past
but I don't know how far it got). A good gateway for mailing lists would
help too.

Next, working the forums into the structure of the Ubuntu community.
Right now the forum doesn't share the same design as the rest of the
Ubuntu websites ({wiki/www}.ubuntu.com - the width is different and the
tabs are related to _within_ the forum rather than the wider community.
What I'd really like to work on for Edgy are a group of websites which
are designed to be a coherent and complete system of "help". So I'd
envisage tabs like this (in brackets are the links):

| Documentation (help.ubuntu.com) | Forums (ubuntuforums.org) | Live
Chat (link to details of IRC) | Mailing lists (ditto) |

The same tabs would appear on help.ubuntu.com, with the documentation.

Another part of working the forums into the structure of the Ubuntu
community would involve the url - this should move to forum.ubuntu.com.
And the forums should be hosted on an Ubuntu server, if the software is
permitted.

Then, I think we should also try to get as much social integration as
possible. Perhaps this would mean means that forum moderators whould get
appointed in public irc meetings (held in #ubuntu-meeting, and should be
Ubuntu members before they are moderators.

Obviously, the forums provide a technical support resource as does IRC
and as do the mailing lists - there is never going to be perfect
integration and there doesn't need to be. But we can do some things to
bring the communities together.

I'd definitely be interested in working on the social side of any
initiative to integrate the forums and the wider community more during
the next release cycle.

my 2 cents.

Matt
-- 
mdke at ubuntu.com
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF
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