Community V. "Community

[Colin Watson]

On Sat, Mar 21, 2009 at 12:46:12PM -0300, Derek Broughton wrote:
> Mario Vukelic wrote:
> > Launchpad Home / Code / Bugs / Blueprints / Translations / Answers
> > 
> > Searching for "contribute" on ubuntu.com gives me the following links:
> > 1. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BuildingCommunity/Contribute
> > 2. http://www.ubuntu.com/community/participate
> > 
> > I didn't check, but I am pretty confident that blueprints or at least
> > Launchpad are mentioned somewhere there or on the pages they link to.
> 
> I did.  Neither page mentions the blueprints, except in a brief mention
> that "Brainstorm" ideas can move on to become blueprints (no link). 
> Neither page mentions Launchpad.  It sure doesn't look like the entry point
> for users to find out how to get involved.
> 
> What's more, I had a thought about blueprints. You tell me it's
> the "official" channel for announcing upcoming changes.  In that case,
> there should be a way to actually track new additions to the blueprints. 
> Sorry, can't find it.  It badly needs an RSS feed.

While I don't disagree here, sadly, the blueprints area is hopelessly
overloaded with poorly-formed ideas that stand little or no chance of
ever seeing the light of implementation, so an RSS feed would be much
less use right now than might be desirable. Brainstorm was in part
conceived to try to take some of the load off here, so that blueprints
can be software design documents written by software designers. This
part of Launchpad wasn't designed to be used as a forum for wishlist
bugs and support requests, and it can't cope with them well.

> > All I see is Ubuntu and Canonical working hard to meet their stated
> > goals. 
> 
> How can they possibly meet those goals when nobody pays any attention when
> users get really worked up about something like the laughable KDE4
> implementation in Intrepid?

The Kubuntu developers I've spoken to seem pretty well aware of the
problems and are certainly paying attention, but I gather that the
easiest way to fix it at this point is to do a much better job with
Jaunty ...

> Since when?  Yes, lists.ubuntu.com says "users and developers", but that's
> not the description that goes to news.gmane.org - which strongly suggests
> somebody added that more recently.

As a point of information, the original charter of ubuntu-devel-discuss
(https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-announce/2006-December/000227.html,
quoted on
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/Ubuntu-devel-discuss) says in
part:

 * Point of contact for Ubuntu users to reach Ubuntu developers

If people aren't honouring that, they should be pointed (politely) to
the list charter.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]