Ubuntu Community Training

[Matthew East]

Hi Matthew,

On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 6:00 AM, Matthew Lye <matthew.lye at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> The Ubuntu Forums Beginners team is preparing community based training
> to assist new users in learning Ubuntu. We are going to be attempting to
> coordinate all the training currently being delivered by several
> different teams from simple tutorials on the command line for new users
> to lessons on python programing, packaging, and triaging for people
> wanting to become further involved.
>
> We are currently in the process of setting up a Moodle installation to
> host training materials to coordinate this effort and will be
> approaching members of several different teams to ask for contributions
> (many are already Beginners Team members as well). The overall intention
> of this is to provide a central repository for information currently
> found in many different wiki pages, in irc classroom sessions, and in
> the Ubuntu Forums in a manner that allows for further assistance as
> required.
>
> We have two questions that need to be answered:
>
> Can we use the Ubuntu name (as it is branded) for the name of the site?
> The planned name would be something like Ubuntu Community Training or
> Ubuntu Community Education.
>
> and
>
> Would it be possible to have a cname created such as training.ubuntu.com
> or education.ubuntu.com directed toward the server?

As you mentioned, there are already several initiatives which cover
this type of ground around, and it would probably be best if you
worked directly with those initiatives that already exist.

In particular, there is already a training team here:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Training

And the type of thing you've described sounds very much like it would
be the basic purpose of https://help.ubuntu.com/ (for user help) and
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ (for help with contributing to Ubuntu).

Creating another subdomain for this sort of activity would result in
having too many different resources around, which might end up
confusing rather than enlightening users. It's clear that that isn't
your intention but I think you should have a serious think about
whether creating a new resource is the right thing to do. I'd really
like to see you collecting information from the forum and irc sessions
and contributing it towards the existing resources.

I'm copying this message to Connor Imes because I know that he works
extensively with the Ubuntu Forum Beginners Team and also with the
Documentation Team so he is the ideal person to give you some guidance
about this.

Obviously, if you feel that I've misunderstood the idea, feel free to
let me know. But given that there is already a training team which
uses the wiki, I think it's likely that a cname for this initiative is
not going to be forthcoming.

All the above is not to discourage you at all, I'm pleased to see the
energy and willingness to improve the user learning experience with
Ubuntu, I just want to make sure that this energy is channelled in the
right direction.

(For the future, it's probably best not to send messages to the entire
ubuntumembers team, there are 460 people in that team and your mail
goes to all of them. This is an appropriate subject for the ubuntu-doc
mailing list, so I'm copying that as well).

-- 
Matthew East
http://www.mdke.org
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF