Area 51 – Ubuntu presence
Posted in Personal, Ubuntu on 07/21/2010 09:37 pm by Laura CzajkowskiWho knew in a short space of time we could go from 24% - 92%
So I’ve been listening to people talk over the last week about this proposal, why they are for it and for others why they don’t support it. I do support it and it’s very simple why.
A lot of people use IRC – But some don’t
A lot of people use the forums, but they can get noisy and hard to follow a topic – But some don’t
Many people use Mailing lists, but finding an answer in a thread can get convoluted and hard to process – But some don’t
Some folks use launchpad Questions and Answers – But some don’t
We cover all of these areas and have a presence in them, here is another avenue people chose to use and we should try and help them there also if we can. I am not saying abandon the above ways we communicate but lets be open to looking at new alternatives. We are now one of the fastest growing proposals on Stack Exchange. We’re ahead of Apple, we’re ahead of the Advanced Unix and Linux group and I think that’s something we can be really proud of in a short space of time we’ve accomplished this much!
I found out about this from Evan who works on the design team and he’s been pushing this with Jorge to make sure we have a presence there. Hence this post in the hopes we can get more to push us closer to 100%
07/21/2010 at 9:55 PM
What a great idea. Personally I have no idea what a stack is, or why I would want to exchange it for another one, but if this helps more people be more happy with their Ubuntu install then that is great. I note that all the content of the site is creative commons licensed which is fantastic so great answers arising from the discussions there can be put on the wiki and in the manual etc. for ongoing maintenance and updates of the information.
07/22/2010 at 6:06 AM
Some people, including me, think that a Linux distribution should make use of websites that use an open source code base. Ubuntu Forums and the advocates for StackExchange apparently don’t.
As I understand it, there are open source alternatives to StackExchange out there that have feature parity. I’m not sure they haven’t been considered.
07/22/2010 at 9:08 AM
Robert while that may be true, look at it from the non open source side of a geek, one who is just learning about Ubuntu and open source if they are already used to area 51 that’s likely the place they’ll go to first to get help.
sometimes we need to be more open minded about these ventures
07/23/2010 at 9:04 AM
I understand that, but as I’ve said elsewhere, there isn’t really an existing community using StackExchange that want an Ubuntu one. The vast majority of people voting on this proposal are first-time users that only vote for the Ubuntu proposal. This is not so much a case of Ubuntu reaching out to a population as us looking for a new support venue and choosing StackExchange for reasons that aren’t entirely clear.