Ubuntu Community Hub

[Alan Pope]

Hello.

*brushes dust off the mailing list*

You (may) have already seen this announced elsewhere, apologies so,
but I want to make sure everyone is aware of what's going on :)

A while back I blogged [1] about changing the Community part of
ubuntu.com (which lived under community.ubuntu.com). The goal (in
short) was to improve communication of what's going on in the
project(s) and make onboarding for new people easier. While many of us
love mailing lists and IRC, it's not a super experience for new people
who want to join the team. We want to expose more of the conversations
we have to the wider world, making it easier for others to get
involved easily.

So with that in mind we created the Ubuntu Community Hub [2] which
replaces the old site. I wrote up a follow up blog [3] which covers it
in more detail. Essentially it's a Canonical-hosted discourse instance
which uses Ubuntu SSO for signup/login. It's not designed as a tech
support site, as we already have great resources there.

I migrated the content from the old static site over under the
documentation category. They're now all wiki posts which means they're
editable easily. Last week at the Ubuntu Rally in NYC, Nathan Haines
helped review the pages, and made some updates, which was most
welcome. We may have missed something though, and more eyeballs would
be great, for refreshing the content. Although I still envisage that
part of the site to be relatively static, compared to the dynamic
nature of regular conversations and time-sensitive calls to action.

Having them as wiki posts should enable us all to update them as
necessary. The one thing I didn't move over is the find-a-task part of
the site. I think perhaps a new version of that could evolve on the
hub when/if someone wants to take that on. I anticipate more frequent
calls to action in this single place may render the 'find a task'
solution redundant though, we'll see.

I also created a few basic categories, with more coming as and when
required/desired. I haven't created a bunch of empty ones in
anticipation of this, because it doesn't look great having a pile of
empty categories. We can enable those as needed. instead.

I can envisage conversations about event planning, new community
initiatives and leadership topics happening there, in the open, where
others can discover, join in and help. Other teams will be encouraged
to use the site also. The desktop team are first to start moving
conversations and announcements over there. Others will follow.

I'd love to hear your feedback, and welcome you over there. I look
forward to the next generation of people joining the Ubuntu community.

[1] - https://popey.com/blog/posts/ubuntu-community-hub-proposal.html
[2] - https://community.ubuntu.com/
[3] - https://popey.com/blog/posts/new-ubuntu-community-hub-launched.html

All the best,
-- 
Alan Pope
Community Advocate

Canonical - Ubuntu Engineering and Services
+44 (0) 7973 620 164
alan.pope at canonical.com
http://ubuntu.com/