Bridging gaps in the Ubuntu user base

From what I have seen going on the ubuntu community, I can divide the user base into two categories.

1. Developers
   
2. novice users
   

and the fact is that there exists a too stark contrast between the tools used by the developers from the tools used by the novice users. Hence the users who are willing to contribute to Ubuntu have to scale the big barrier of new tools and information to get into the category of developers. This task is not so easy. I recently conducted a survey on Ubuntu google plus community asking how many people are interested in development and how many know how to develop ubuntu. These are the results.

The survey is available at

https://plus.google.com/100197312857811231151/posts/isosX3xjvMu

The reason behind this is that the novice users are not aware of the existence of websites and tools. Even if they know how to do that, they are scared of the prospectus of entering the alienating environment. Furthermore, this fear is magnified by the prompts and the description provided in the website. For example, if a user wants to provide a translation and he mustered up the courage to do that, he is directed to launchpad project where the welcoming message is that you can contribute to the translation if you have good knowledge of the language. This makes him fear that the post is open only for language professors.

The people who voted "I want to do but it is not my cup of tea" are those type of people who think that Ubuntu is all about coding and I have to learn to use GTK and kernel and all of these to start contributing.

The people who voted "I am an enthusiastic novice, so no clue" are typically those people who think that one should be hired by Ubuntu to do some modification. Or there is a mysterious group of people whose identity remains undisclosed who are monitoring our progress and pick the worthy amongst us and offer us work to do ( I am just joking, but it is partially true). They expect that when a survey turns up or a simple theming or wallpaper making challenge turns up, it is surely put up on the Ubuntu google plus community. But, I know for a fact that there is no team which makes sure that every new development is posted on G+. It is people out of enthusiasm who do that.

People do not know that there exists a website called qa.ubuntu.com or atleast half the people do not know the existence of askubuntu.com. The fact is that people are ignorant and frightful of contributing something terrible which might end up being released and they being blamed for it. People make all kinds of assumptions unless they are cleared off. And one thing that developers do not realize is that the novice users have the attention span of an housefly. And this is the generation of videos.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth a whole documentation.

- Aveem Ashfaq (That's me)

People do not know about all of this and they will not make an effort to spend hours finding out everything so that they could start contributing.

So, here is what I am proposing to do. First of all, create an official YouTube channel which would explain the basics of Ubuntu, how the team is structured, how can one contribute, how to report bugs, how to do translations, what websites are available, what is IRC and explain the fact that developers hangout in IRC rather than  g+ or facebook etc.


Some video that looks like this.

I know that this is a video not at all related to this subject. But try to understand my point. The series of videos should outline things without necessarily spoon feeding the information. And it should be something like this rather than a screencast because screencast is too technical and boring.

And of course, since I spoke to David Planella and Daniel Holbach, we have come to a conclusion that modifying the websites might not be a good idea. So, instead, I propose that a new extension website is created. Something like newbie.ubuntu.com where you can create and place all this stuff. So, a website to make them confident enough. And then, they can soldier on and do things by themselves.

And one more change would be to edit the firefox start page and make the links below the search more visible and focused. And add newbie.ubuntu.com to the set of links.

If you are angry of the fact that people who can't read a man page by themselves will be the worst of contributors, you might want to re-think. Because most of the new ones come from Windows, they know that a lot of things can be done in windows. The proof that they have seen it in someone's laptop and the fact that Windows is the widest used OS in the world is a reason why they have complete faith in it. On the other hand, they keep on speculating whether things can actually take place in Ubuntu. There is no point in taking a massive quest to find out whether a thing happens in Ubuntu or not if the outcome would be "no". Hence their reluctance. We have to show that things happen and the outcome is sweet. Then, people will start doing "hijra" for Ubuntu..