Rethinking the Ubuntu Community in Terms of LaunchPad

[Elizabeth K. Joseph]

On Thu, Dec 18, 2014 at 2:50 PM, Stephen Michael Kellat
<alpacaherder at live.com> wrote:
> Do we then look for the "fait accompli" that can be given as an up or down proposal for
> changes if somebody builds it out?  This would be moving past patches to building
> more code.

Of course not, Michael believes it is possible, though difficult, for
the community to contribute to Launchpad. In response I was backing up
my skepticism with the facts I have. We happen to mostly disagree
here, that's ok, we're still buddies :) Folks are welcome to disagree,
that's why we have a discussion mailing list that includes everyone,
from newcomers to the community who can bring fresh perspectives to
people who've been with the project since the beginning who can offer
institutional knowledge and experience.

We're all providing feedback to ideas proposed on the list so people
can choose what projects to work on as an informed contributor. If
someone wants to contribute to Launchpad and spends days setting up a
development instance, more writing a patch to improve blueprints, it
would be awful if they then learned their patch will be setting in a
queue for years, or be told features are not welcome. These are things
contributors need to know going in so they have the appropriate
expectations and ask the right questions. In this thread we've learned
that once we have a developer to work on this, their first step should
be to ask the Launchpad team again if this is something they'd
consider. Thanks!

>> At best, I think this would be a waste of energy, particularly as we
>> have so many ideas floating out there[2] already, several that we can
>> do something about, and no one has signed up to help with[3].
>>
>
> Was the hangout presented as just a meeting of "the usual suspects" to dole out
> assignments?

I don't know how it actually was (you were there, I wasn't), but the
announcement[0] wasn't presented that way, it was sent to the entire
list as a "next steps" Hangout in a different format and was described
as face time to "discuss these [etherpad] items and come up with
more". Everyone was invited to add things to the pad and participate.
I ended the email assuring folks that we'd continue discussions on
this mailing list (Hello!).

The IRC meetings we've had about these topics have been at Community
Council meetings, all of which have always been open to everyone in
the community and logs are available:

Whole meeting devoted to it on December 4th:
http://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2014/12/04/%23ubuntu-meeting.html#t17:04

A meeting topic at today's meeting:
http://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2014/12/18/%23ubuntu-meeting.html#t17:28

The first was an effort to get together and chat about some of what we
feel were the biggest challenges, the one today resulted in Daniel's
email earlier today about focusing on putting together action
items[1]. There's already been criticism that we're just talking and
not doing, so the CC is working to make sure we have a path and don't
end up with a pile of valuable discussions that don't result in any
real change.

[0] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-community-team/2014-December/000325.html
[1] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-community-team/2014-December/000371.html

-- 
Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph || Lyz || pleia2