My view on governance and all the allied activities

[Nathan Haines]

On 12/12/2014 08:33 PM, Aveem Ashfaq wrote:

> I am sorry that I have not been active in the past weeks when the crux
> of this issue was being spoken about. I had my end semester exams then.
> I did not watch the hangouts session. I will be watching it shortly.
> Here are my views on various things that can better Ubuntu. It was too
> long. I had to write a blog.

Thank you for putting down your thoughts, Aveem.  I read the blog post, 
and I can see that you spent a lot of time on it.  I see a pattern 
forming and I find it very concerning.

There are a lot of calls for action and changes, but it's clear you only 
have a surface level understanding  of the way various part of Ubuntu 
works.  And this is a problem, because suggestions start to look like 
"I'm not a part of your community but everything you're doing is wrong 
and you should take my advice instead."

I'm going to take a single example and dissect it before going a little 
broader.  I want you to know that I'm choosing a single topic to go very 
in depth on because I want to examine of the assumptions behind your 
point.  I'm not attacking you but I want to take a deep look to 
illustrate why it's important to understand both sides of a topic that 
you dismiss pretty quickly.

Declining to participate on the mailing list and trying to take 
discussion to your blog is one example.  Mailing lists are time-proven 
methods of communicating with other people.  Here are some advantages of 
mailing lists:

* Anyone can join a list on a specific topic and become involved.
* Ubuntu mailing lists are public and all messages are archived and 
available online.
* These archives are searchable and show up in Google results.
* All replies are very clearly threaded and the relationship to other 
posts are clear.
* Everyone has an email client and is automatically notified of new 
messages in one place without having to remember to check some random 
website and try to remember the last message he read.
* At any time for the rest of human existence, someone can return to the 
mailing list archives in one place and see what discussion occurred and 
when.  It's not scattered over hundreds of undocumented web pages and blogs.

Mailing lists also predate web forums by what I assume is 3 decades, but 
in any case, web-based message boards have only been around for about 19 
or 20 years and I still dislike them.

There are two problems.  One is that there is a massive amount of 
collaboration and development going on, and you're chastising us because 
it's not happening where you want.  But it's working fantastically for 
those who are doing a lot of the work presently.

The other problem is that the way things "have always been done" might 
be able to be improved in some cases, or made more accessible.  But 
that's not going to happen by throwing existing infrastructure out.

I'm also concerned that you identify only the three groups to consider:

1) People who have never used Ubuntu or heard of it.
2) People who are functionally expert Ubuntu users.
3) Programmers.

First of all, there is no reason to expect that most users should 
contribute.  Many are happy to use computers as tools, and that's fine. 
  But considering only these three categories of users leaves out novice 
and intermediate users, plus every contributor who isn't programming. 
It's a huge oversight, and disenfranchises a lot of contributors.

You keep suggesting sweeping changes across the entire project, but 
you're not really identifying actual problems, or explaining *why* they 
are problems, and often are not identifying solutions or explaining why 
they are better solutions than what's out there.  I think it would 
probably be a lot more effective if you picked some small part or aspect 
of the Ubuntu community you want to change and spend some time getting 
to know how it *really* works.  It's good for us to know how things 
appear to new users but that's not always enough to change things.

Then, remembering how things appeared and what the challenges were to a 
newcomer, and understanding how things are actually working right now 
for hundreds of contributors, you can start to suggest changes that are 
both founded in how the project really works and that will introduce new 
users and familiarize themselves with how contribution works.  If no one 
uses web forums to collaborate, then building a web forum won't make 
collaboration suddenly happen there.  It'll just give interested new 
users a place to gather that is a ghost town.

For example, Ubuntu has web forums, and we also have a Discourse forum. 
  Why aren't you leading any efforts there instead of proposing new 
resources?  Because you're not familiar with the existing ones, I imagine.

So that's just taking one of your points (mailing lists are stupid) and 
saying that no, they're a very practical technology that had a lot of 
very solid features that led to their being chosen.

And while you are upset about multiple websites, a single Ubuntu One 
account logs you into the Ubuntu Forums, Launchpad, and Ask Ubuntu.  The 
Google+ communities are completely unofficial and used more for 
announcements.  It's the IRC channels and mailing lists which are the 
hotbeds of activity.

To sum up, the reason that changes are complicated is that Linux 
development stretches back to 1991, GNU userspace development stretches 
back to 1984, and that's rooted in computer science going back to the 
mid 60s.  It can be quite complex, and this is not a failing of Ubuntu 
contributors.  It's a product of working on an incredibly sophisticated 
operating system.

And I am excited that you are interested in helping us to make things 
easier for new users to approach.  I hope that as you gain experience 
working with other collaborators that you're able to help shine a light 
on areas that can be improved.

-- 
Nathan Haines
Ubuntu - http://www.ubuntu.com/