Google Code-In and tutorials.ubuntu.com

[Elizabeth K. Joseph]

Hi everyone,

Mostly as an FYI, since I hadn't seen discussion about these things on list.

I noticed over the holiday break that we had a lot of folks joining
the #ubuntu-doc IRC channel via the web and just saying "hi" and I at
first I assumed we'd ended up on some spam/bot list or something since
people left pretty quickly. Later, some of them started asking about
Google code-in tasks for tutorial.ubuntu.com, but leaving too quickly
for me to ask what they were talking about. No announcement had been
made here, and I was unaware of the existence of tutorials.ubuntu.com.
So the students were just left hanging with no one responding, which
seems like a really poor experience.

Here's a link to the logs the past couple days, but this goes all the
way back to before Christmas:

https://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2017/12/29/%23ubuntu-doc.html
https://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2017/12/30/%23ubuntu-doc.html

I learned a few things:

1. The tutorials.ubuntu.com site was launched earlier this year, they
seem to communicate mostly via GitHub and use GitHub-centric tooling:
https://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/01/20/tutorials-ubuntu-com-goes-live/

2. Thanks to one person who joined the channel today to talk about the
tutorials, I learned today that they're also pointing to the docs team
channel at https://tutorials.ubuntu.com/tutorial/tutorial-guidelines#9
even though it doesn't seem like anyone who works on the tutorials
spends much time in #ubuntu-doc (?) and I don't think we were ever
told about it

3. One of the organizers of the Google Code-In had listed the
#ubuntu-doc channel as the contact for folks to ask questions. I spoke
with popey this morning and he's working on fixing the tasks so the
students are instead pointed to a channel where the Google Code-In
administrators are active.

4. The Google Code-In link for Ubuntu is here:
https://codein.withgoogle.com/tasks/?sp-organization=5133577048031232
which includes a bunch of tutorial tasks labeled "documentation"

So that explains it all :) Hope this helps anyone else who was as
confused as I was. Hopefully we can get these students directed to the
right place.

As an aside, I think it's fine for the tutorials folks to use the
#ubuntu-doc channel, they just need to use it ;) Pointing contributors
there and then leaving it up to us (who they never told) is not a
great situation. This is not how I had planned on spending my Sunday
morning on NYE.

-- 
Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph || Lyz || pleia2