Ubuntu Wiki

This is a page that will explain how developers can notify other developers of small things, such as upcoming transitions, new tools, changes in practice, where the item doesn't warrant a mail to ubuntu-devel-announce on its own. The items will be collected and sent on to the announce list every so often. This is inspired by Debian's DeveloperNews service that does just this.

The items will come from various sources, notably direct submission, and being picked up from mailing lists and IRC. Anyone is free to submit an item, and everyone is encouraged to pass along things from other channels that they think would be appropriate.

The aim would be to aid people in keeping up with Ubuntu development when they do not follow every source of information slavishly. The wiki page would also serve as an archive so that if someone takes a break from development they can use this page as a starting point when trying to catch up with the changes.

There are competing proposals for how this process should work, so until that is decided this page will document the proposals and provide a place for discussion of how this will work.

The way to proceed will be decided by looking at the comments on this page at the next MOTU meeting, on the 28th Nov 2008.

Proposal 1: collect items on the wiki page

This proposal follows that of Debian's DeveloperNews.

This wiki page would be the place to collect the items. They would then be sent on when there were a few outstanding, or some amount of time had passed since the last mail.

Anyone would be encouraged to submit items by adding the text to the page, and anyone could send the mail when needed.

The wiki page would naturally form an archive of old items for people to easily browse.

Proposal 2: Use the ubuntu-news-team mailing list

As there is already a news team interested in collecting news items and sending them out, information of interest to developers could also be handled by this group.

To avoid adding an undue extra burden on this team, it would be appropriate for developers interested in administering the developer news to also participate in the news team (note that the news team has yet to be asked about this).

The advantage of such a system would be that the UWN, Fridge, and developer news announcements would all be sourced from the same base of information.

The disadvantage of such a system would be a need for greater editorial review of presented items, and active filtering so that editors could best direct things to the audiences most likely to be interested.

If this proposal is selected, this wiki page contains only the set of procedures for such postings, and does not contain an archive of previous postings.

[No-one has approached the news-team about this proposal as yet]

Comments

Please add your feedback here.

About sending the new items from the wiki page to the list in proposal one: At the same time, we need to make sure that people will actually do this, it could quickly fall into disuse unless it has some sort of editor/champion (maybe along the lines of LWN? Let's see what the news team says). -- yasumoto7

I like the idea of using the wiki for it. You need to write down the facts anyway, so write it on the wiki. This also doesn't hammer the news team with small bits here and small bits there. -- dholbach 2008-11-21 05:55:27

I am also in favor of the wiki page proposal. No charge addition to the news teams. This idea is very great: for instance, even if I read mailing list information, and I feel a litlle cut from developers without having access to an IRC window for 3 weeks. didrocks