Ubuntu Wiki

When people connect to Ubuntu, their first point of contact is often the participate page at Ubuntu.com This page can be improved in various ways. http://www.ubuntu.com/community/participate

• - feel like they're not particularly representive

the fedora project has a page for likely this at: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/HelpWanted

Harvest

Different ways for joining the project in small ways - brainstorm - forums -

"Figure out their spark of interest" - lots of people don't quite know what they're looking for (eg graphics developers)

Some people get different ways -some IRC, some forums, some mailing lists, all of which can guide people to helping

• - the forums seem particularly neglected by developers - making artists use bugtrackers, for instance, scares away artists - another project has a list of contacts for relevant skills
  • - could be hooked into Open Week

Would be useful to just connect people to others to speak with that have a relevant interest

• - though this could be difficult with translations tasks - shoving the packaging guide at someone who wants to make a small bugfix is like using a firehose on a candle

Would be nice if the participate page, rather than static, had a dynamic list to particular tasklets that parts of the project want (eg Xubuntu wants artwork and puts a "buyer" notice up there)...kinda like harvest

Envisioned flow: I go to ubuntu participate page, and select my interest eg "I like writing" or "I like talking to people" -This then directs you to relevant teams (eg for writing to the doc team or for talking to the forums) -a sort of community search engine, or quick blurb -kind of like how creative commons does it: you say "I want this" and then it gives you a license -we could ask people where they're from, and then hook them to their loco team

Could have a survey type thing, especially for people from the windows world who have no concept of community with an OS -kind of like a job interview for people who want a salary but don't know their specific work -"I'm not really sure, but I want to help." -but don't call it a survey, more like a magazine quiz --like listing an item on eBay: "I want to sell a musical instrument->guitar->fender guitar -getting them to anything gets them talking, then that is the gateway to future contribution --so perhaps our magazine-quiz type thing will offer a list of useful things: eg:

• "hey it looks like there's a loco team within 10 miles of you, here's info about that"
• "also you expressed interest in artwork, here's a list of ubuntu projects that have requested some lately"
• "also you speak this language, here's some things you can help translate"

-We don't want to bombard people with a million ways they can contribute, especially ones that are really hard to use (eg packaging guide)

The language of the participate page needs to be culturally sensitive, or outright translated - eg "loco team" sounds really bad in Spanish - having partial or incomplete or obsolete translations is potentially worse than none: wait until we can translate the entire participate page into the language and then do it (sort of how Creative Commons does it)

Could write a blurb for the main teams that get pointed to

Canonical will be redeveloping the website over the coming months, but can't do the whole thing since it's simply huge - case studies would be useful so people can get an idea of what the community is about

• - should have case studies of different levels of contributors
  • - eg a motu, eg an artwork contributor, etc
  - we have that kind of content (eg behind motu) but we only show it off within the community (eg planet ubuntu and fridge) - the learning curve is currently too steep and we're attracting people (many people) for whom this is too much to help, even if they want to.
  • - attracting designers and artists in particular will be hard if we have to saturate them with the whole open source thing

Automate the conversation that happens in LUG meetings and personal conversations with Ubuntu people

If we get this right, then future things get easier too

Make a big reannouncement whenever a translation into a new language is available -eg you can now come to the participate page in French

Need an email address or something for newbies coming to these pages to ask if they get stuck eg "newcontributors@ubuntu.com" -"I'm stuck, help me learn what I can do" like how people say that at conferences "if you get stuck just email me"

Translations are very important, but we do need to keep in mind that many of the teams are english only (eg motu)

• - but some don't need to be, eg graphics contributors

Quantity of users of a language predicts new contributors from there

• - could look at popcon language packs