Community

I use Publer to post identical content across Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky. Same words, same time, same bloke. It’s a massive time-saver, and means I can reach people wherever they happen to hang out online without having to faff about copying and pasting between apps.

I wasn’t running some grand social media experiment. I was just having a moan about Windows updates like any reasonable person would. But the results were so stark they opened my eyes to exactly what these platforms reward - and it’s not what you might think.

Ubuntu - the Linux distribution - has been around for 17 years. Over that time many projects and initiatives have been started, some successful, others less so. Not everything we try can work out, but as a group, we should feel empowered to try.

The Ubuntu community isn’t quite the same as it was back in 2004-2010, and nobody I know argues that it is. People who were keen and active contributors may have had circumstantial changes which meant they moved on. Some took on new responsibilities, work, or started family. Some, sadly, have passed away.

In the mid-90s I was an avid user of online conferencing system called CIX (Compulink Information eXchange). CIX was built using the CoSy Conferencing system from the University of Guelph, which has since been open sourced. Think of it like a dial-up or telnet-accessed forum or message board with a nerd-heavy userbase.

Each day I’d dial-up to download messages, then read & respond offline. Later in the day I’d re-connect to send my responses and download more messages. The graphical desktop application AMEOL (A Most Excellent Offline-Reader) presented the topics and threads in an easy-to-read way.

A while back I proposed that we replace the old static Ubuntu Community site, which looked a bit like this, with something a little more dynamic.

So today we are replacing the static site with an instance of discourse, which looks a bit like this

You can go back and read that blog post for the full rationale but essentially it boils down to two aims:

Status Quo

For over four years now, the Ubuntu Community Portal has been the ‘welcome mat’ for new people seeking to get involved in Ubuntu. In that time the site had seen some valuable but minor incremental changes; no major updates have occurred recently. I’d like us to fix this. We can also use this as an opportunity to improve our whole onboarding process.

I’ve spent a chunk of time recently chatting with active members of the Ubuntu Community about the community itself. A few themes came up in these conversations which can be summarised as:-

Ubuntu Artful Desktop July Shakedown

We’re mid-way through the Ubuntu Artful development cycle, with the 17.10 release rapidly approaching on the horizon. Now is a great time to start exercising the new GNOME goodness that’s landed on our recent daily images! Please download the ISO, test it out on your own hardware, and file bugs where appropriate.

If you’re lucky enough to find any new bugs, please tag them with ‘julyshakedown’, so we can easily find them from this testing session.