ForumAmbassadors

Differences between revisions 16 and 17
Revision 16 as of 2006-11-07 01:49:04
Size: 7312
Editor: 207
Comment:
Revision 17 as of 2006-11-07 17:00:48
Size: 7389
Editor: 207
Comment: + CommunityBugReporting
Deletions are marked like this. Additions are marked like this.
Line 67: Line 67:
  * File bugs (Good bugs, not just follow either, is it a feature or a bug? They need to be able to contact people who are willing to contribute.)   * File bugs (Good bugs, not just follow either, is it a feature or a bug? They need to be able to contact people who are willing to contribute.) (''see'' [:LoCoTeamsUDSMVSpecs/CommunityBugReporting:CommunityBugReporting])

Please check the status of this specification in Launchpad before editing it. If it is Approved, contact the Assignee or another knowledgeable person before making changes.

Summary

This is a placeholder for a discussion about how to improve communication (bugs,ideas,forum users feedback) between the forums and the developers. The idea is to elect Forum Ambassadors and/or have a special forum for this to help to improve communication. There is a brainstorming discussion on ubuntuforums about this.

the forum thread : http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=1708930

Forum Ambassadors might become a team like : http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=289810

  • Summary - Subforum on the forums where people have opinions and ideas. Make a team that connects to the developers to facilitate communication.
  • Use ambassadors to collect ideas,bugs and feedback from users.

TODO: improve the spec and make it more clear

Rationale

Currently there's little communication between the forum users and the developers. We should try to improve this.

The proposed Forum Ambassadors Team should try to improve the information flow between the forums and the developers. This information flow should be bi-directional.

It's undoable for the developers to spend too much time hanging out at the forums. The amount of information between the ambassadors team and the developers should be a lot more easy to handle for the devs than the huge amount of posts on the forums. Instead of waiting for developers to come to the forums let's take a more active approach and create this team.

Use cases

  • Right after Feisty's release there's a big thread on the forums about the breakage of a certain important package. Paul, a forum ambassador, contacts the maintainer of this package to let him know about this.
  • Karel, a forum user, creates a new thread with some nice workarounds for certain problems. Paul, a forum ambassador, discovers that a couple of these problems are unknown to the devs and encourages and assists forum users to report these problems as bugs.
  • Bug Reporting:
    • "Someone on the forums find a bug, want a way to quickly get that information to developers."
      • Mako: It would be nice if people who represent others know how to file good detailed bug reports.
    • Someone needs to collect information from the forums, it's unreasonable to expect all users to register with launchpad, etc. etc.
    • Very often forum users post their opinions (requests, problems, desires, etc.) in the "Ubuntu Development" section of the forum thinking that the developers would see their posts there.

Scope

This spec is focused to create a Forum Ambassadors team which should provide a bi-directional communication interface between the forum users and the developers.

The focus of this team should not be to try to educate every new user about stuff, although the team would assist communication between forums users and developers. We shouldn't make the scope of this spec to broad. (For example there is a new team on ubuntuforums.org for helping absolute beginners.)

* The Forum Ambassadors won't be responible for resolving inter-user and user-staff grievances. We have a resolution centre for that (possibly also FC and CC in the future).

Design

Possible tasks for the Ambassadors Team :

  • To encourage and assist forum users in bug reporting, wiki usage and other community tools.

Types of relevant information : bugs, specs and ideas, priority of specs as felt by the forum users.

  • Purposes of ambassadors:
    • Communicating ideas to developers (gists and zeitgeists)
    • Some people are comfortable collecting information. (Collector)
    • Some people are comfortable diseminating information. (Disseminators)
    • Two way communication. (Bidirectional)

    • Triaging people and volunteers (being in touch with the interests of users)
    • File bugs (Good bugs, not just follow either, is it a feature or a bug? They need to be able to contact people who are willing to contribute.) (see [:LoCoTeamsUDSMVSpecs/CommunityBugReporting:CommunityBugReporting])

      • Integration of projects that start on the forums into the distribution. (Inviting people into the greater community.)
      • Involve other active members of the forums that don't yet contribute to the organization. (Get the active members to join the project)
      • "I've stopped using Ubuntu because XXX is, or works better, in Some Other Distro" <-- high priority

      • Recognition of forums contributions
      • Integration of other forums (all the LoCo forums and other languages). How do we get their feedback integrated? (Tough, this will be another spec).

      • Ambassadors from other forums?
      • Launchpad team for Ambassadors

Implementation

  • Document HOWTO be an ambassador
  • create ambassador team leaders
  • set criteria that we want to see from members
  • howto file a good bug report
  • asking good questions
  • submit submittor to bug report.
  • create special forum section dedicated to make it easy for forum users to contact Forum Ambassadors
    • Two way street. Developers and forum users.
    • Central point of contact? Or distributed by team? How do you get decent coverage?
    • Existing staff too busy to do be ambassadors?
    • Don't need to be staff, but if they're contributors, then do it.
    • "How to be an ambassador"
    • Nominations (one or two), then elections. (Coleadership)
      • Set of criteria of contributions.
      • List of volunteers.

Evaluation

  • ambassadors + dev teams should know each other
  • ambassadors should know what's going on (#ubuntu-devel, ubuntu-devel, mailinglist, developer forum section)

Code

Data preservation and migration

Unresolved issues

  • It's not possible to create a bug in the name of someone else.
  • Need feedback from developers on what they would like to see in this spec.
  • need feedback from Forum users
  • Centralized team leader or should each team member have a point of contact.

BoF agenda and discussion

  • Currently this spec is in drafting.
  • There will be another BOF about this on thursday or friday. Interested forum members should try to attend.

Brain Dump

  • expand to other forums
  • offtopic : all ubuntu forums linking to eachother (for example forums for different languages)
  • bi-directional
  • communicate / relay ideas : gisting + zeitgeist??)
  • prioritization of specs,etc
  • What do other distros do regarding ambassadors ?
  • Communicate what users like in other distros
  • file + follow up good bugs / inital triage / judgement calls
  • integration of code into community + core distro/repos
  • invite forum members into Ubuntu project + recognition of forums contributions
  • use launchpad

Comments

  • I think this is a great Idea. From a forums perspective at least the English one it will be really simple to allow this to be setup as a team with the option of users to request to join etc. I would like to see this implemented for sure. Ryan Troy


CategorySpec

ForumAmbassadors (last edited 2008-08-06 17:01:37 by localhost)