Communications 2.0

[Tim]

Many people over recent times have complained about our communications channels. It seems the established staple diet of IRC and Mailing lists,
that just about every established FOSS teams use doesnt work so well, particularly for the newcomers in our community. I am hoping to create a
UOS[1] session to discuss some of these things, but lets get the discussion started before that.

Apparently every time we raise this stuff on the list, it gets taken way off topic by trolls and their politics. So let me start with a little
warning, if anyone tries to derail this thread with proprietry vs FOSS politics, I won’t hesitate to ban you from the email list. This is about
finding solutions that work for improving communications for our users and core teams.

The current situation is basically:

IRC – Real time messaging, it is great in that everyone is there (most ubuntu/GNOME/debian developers etc), but it can be hard for people that
aren’t used to it, timezones are a challenge, particularily when you cant stay connect 24/7. Also so far no one outside of our development/qa
areas has really embraced IRC

Mailing Lists – Generally work well if you constantly follow the messages, many complain about it being hard to catch up with past discussions,
which I guess is particularily true if you use the web interface.

Launchpad – Bug tracking, it handles tracking individual bugs really well, but the shear volume of bugs makes it hard to track/find specific
bugs. We are not about to move away from that, but we could find better ways to tag/track Ubuntu GNOME specific bugs in a centralised location.

Wiki – has lots of useful information, but many find it hard to navigate. Also generally most people are too scared to try and edit it, since
MoinMoin markup is a bit of a learning curve.

Blueprints – This about the only tool we have for Collabrative planning and in my opionion it is aweful for that. You can’t actually even
comment on a blueprint, and the email notifcations when multiple people start editing them are probably quite confusing. Not to mention, they
are undiscoverable, the average user would never even find them unless they hit one in a google search or saw something linked in a mailing
list. We also havent even really used them in the last couple of cycles.

*So what can we do to improve on these, without further fragmenting the eco-sphere!*

We have been trialling slack, and while its been popular with our core team members, not many other community have jumped on board (or maybe
they are just lurking like many on the IRC channels). It does have the rather large limitation of requiring an invite (although any member can
invite anyone else) to join unless you have an ubuntu.com email. However it has helped somewhat with the timezone issues, and easy sharing and
commenting on files etc. It is however still a High-volume, discussions of the now and hard to find much useful in the history, things just get
lost!.

I think we need a better seperation of information between the wiki and the website. The wiki has loads of useful information on it, but
newcomers find it hard to navigate. The website is really meant to be the portal for new users, but largely just links to the wiki. Of course we
will try improve this with the new website, once it arrives, but either way the wiki could use some improvements. I did a little experiment
today pretending to be a new user, and think I got up to about 10 links without my questions answered (simply what is involved in testing Ubuntu
GNOME)!

I think some sort of central hub for planning would be useful, maybe that would just be a page that aggregates information from the various
existing channels or an entire new platform. We are very much lacking in the collaborative documentation section and in particular that is
discoverable. Blueprints cover things to an extent, but not that well. Maybe Discourse would work here, though we would need to make sure it
doesnt get overrun with support/general questions otherwise it seems it would be pretty ineffective. We need an easy way for teams to manage
release planning, TODO lists, track release notes etc

I have wondered if simplifying the team structures would help, I know Ali went to a lot of work to setup all the different sub-teams, and it
seemed like a great idea at the time, it just hasn’t worked out that great. In my opinion, sandboxing users in micro managed teams, limits their
contributions to that niche. We already merged a couple of teams recently, however I think we should strip it right back to about 3 teams,
Technical (dev/qa), community and marketing or something like that.

Anyway these are just some ideas towards improving the current situation, and to spark some discussions on the topic. That we can then discuss
at the pending UOS Session. I have not really investigated suitable platforms*, it just needs to be easy to use and at the end of the day any
solution we come up with is only good if the majority of our community use it! And of course nothing will probably ever happen if some of our
community step up and help in implementing.


[1] http://summit.ubuntu.com/ (session will be outside the core hours if approved)

* SaaS, FOSS, custom spun, whatever suits our needs best