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Archive for February 21st, 2007


Posted on February 21, 2007 - by jono

New Ubuntu community toys

I have always believed in open community processes. As I have banged on about in How To Herd Cats, those companies who have shown a commitment to open processes have been more successful in the Open Source and free software world. Here I am thinking of companies such as Red Hat, Novell and Canonical. Companies who have been less open have struggled.

Creating an open community is only half of the challenge though – an open yet disorganised community does no-one any favours, so I am keen to ensure that we have a well organised community that is adept at sharing best practise and knowledge and working hard to do things the right way. I am keen to achieve the dizzy heights of open and effective community.

With this in mind, I have two things to announce that I have been working on for a little while:

  • Community Question Time – in a similar vain to Prime Ministers Questions in the UK, this will be a session in which I will answer questions from the community in a public and open meeting. I hope to hold these sessions monthly. This will ensure the community can gather together for the questions. The first session is pencilled in for 1st March 2007 at 3pm UTC.
  • BuildingCommunity Portal – this is a collection of pages on the Ubuntu Wiki in which I am documenting best practise when running community teams as well as building an extensive FAQ. Its still very new and minimal right now, but I am keen to see the site grow and cover a range of different areas. I am particularly keen to see the Knowledge Base be filled with lots of best practise articles, the FAQ cover a huge range of questions and more. If you want to help with this effort, see the Contribute page.

I believe that building effective community is about lots of little steps, and getting everyone involved in a mindset to achieve, document and share their experiences with their and other community teams. Its incredible how much can be achieved and learned just by talking to each other and sharing experiences.

As ever, feedback always welcome, and Ubuntu people, lets get these resources up to full speed ASAP! :)