On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 10:44 AM, Daniel Holbach <daniel.holb...@ubuntu.com> wrote: > Hello everybody, > > with only a week to go until 12.04 is released, it might be a good time > to think about what MOTU is to you and what you feel it should be in the > next few releases. > > This team has been existing for as long as Ubuntu has been around and > one thing we've been doing since the early days is: being there for new > contributors and bringing them into the fold. In my mind this is (among > many others of course) the most important thing MOTU has contributed to > Ubuntu. > > Not limited to my personal assessment above, I'd still like to hear from > you (no matter if you're a MOTU old-timer or a new contributor) is what > do you feel we do well and what do you feel we should change?
A lot of time has gone by with no response to this thread. The silence in both this thread and this list in general saddens me a bit. For myself, and I imagine for at least some others, the lack of response hasn't been because I don't care about the future of the MOTU. It's that over the past few cycles the team has dwindled to the point where it is hard to see what it even does. Much of this is of course due to many of MOTU's traditional responsibilities having been superseeded by newer institutions and norms: archive-reorg/package-sets, the Developer Membership Board, a stronger emphasis new packages going through Debian. A lot of this is "a good thing," but I feel that we've lost some of the social cohesion that the team used to bring to Ubuntu development. More developers are now scattered about their smaller teams focused on their particular package-sets or pluging away alone on the few packages they care about. As Daniel mentioned, one of the most important contributions of this team has been bringing new contributors into the fold. While things like per-package upload rights are great for getting contributors with a very narrow interest to help directly in Ubuntu, in the past I think there was some value to the social pressure to help with package outside your specific interest in order to get upload rights. Lowering barriers to entry is extremely important and I wouldn't want us to move backwards on this, but I wonder if maybe we could come up with ideas to assert some sort of positive social pressure (in contrast to the negative/restrictive pressure of saying you can't work on what you want until you help with other things) for contributors to participate in the maintenance of unseeded packages? Another place where MOTU was valuable in the past that we seem to be missing a bit now was as a kind of catch all team for pursuing random bits like the Packaging Guide, training sessions, etc... Maybe these things need to be pushed to ~ubuntu-dev? It just seems to me that these kinds of things are less and less taking place/being planned in public and more so by smaller groups of people. One of the last discussions on the future of the MOTU defined the team's mission as: * Maintaining packages that do not belong in any package-sets. * Providing guidance and training for new generalist developers. * Extended Quality Assurance functions. Are we living up to this mission? Does this still make sense for us? Has the MOTU simply out lived its usefulness? > The feedback should be a good preparation for a MOTU session at UDS. I haven't found a blueprint for this yet. Does it exist yet, or should I file one? Thanks! -- Andrew Starr-Bochicchio Ubuntu Developer <https://launchpad.net/~andrewsomething> Debian Maintainer <http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=a.starr.b%40gmail.com> PGP/GPG Key ID: D53FDCB1 -- Ubuntu-motu mailing list Ubuntu-motu@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-motu
