Could we make easier for contributors to get involved in the release preparations?

[Sebastien Bacher]

Hey Release Team,

First congrats on getting the new Ubuntu release out!

I'm writing there because I had hoped that having the release sprint a
virtual event instead of an in-person one would be an opportunity to
make possible to better include others (the persons not at the organized
event). In practice it feels like there was not much difference compared
to previous cycles and I found that a bit sad.

Probably the release-people-are-in-the-room got replaced by
release-people-are-in-the-same-hangout but #ubuntu-release on IRC got
little attention (I personally asked some questions and pointed out some
uploads but got no reply or comment about, I noticed it was true for
others as well).

The team used a discourse post for status updates, while it's nice to
have an idea of where things are it's not a communication channel for
the actual work being done on issues.

I've personally tried to help with some flagged problems. I debugged a
bit lightdm-gtk-greeter segfaulting and discussed that on IRC (got no
traction or reply) and tried to help with an audio issue which was
flagged by the team by doing some testing and sponsoring a fix which was
made available, to realize that others from the in-real-event had been
doing the same work, not commenting in public on IRC or updating the
launchpad bug status which did lead to a duplicate upload and a rejection.

I find the experience quite frustating and at this point I wonder if
it's worth for people out of the release team to be actively involved in
try to resolve issues or if the team simply prefers to focus as a small
group on debugging and fixing things? If outside help is welcome I would
suggest we try to make possible for others to stay in the loop, maybe by
making the hangout public so it's possible to really join the
discussions or by moving things a bit more on IRC?

Cheers,
Sebastien Bacher