We (the Ubuntu Community team) are delighted to invite you to the UbuntuOnAir YouTube and Twitch channels! These particular airwaves will hold community-focused Indabas, office hours, highly requested community interviews and will deliver Ubuntu/Open Source related workshops, host special events, and, hopefully, yes, play games.

You can go over there right now to see what we have scheduled. In the spirit of ‘release early and release often’, there’s not much there yet, but there’s more in the pipe. So far we’ve got:

• Desktop Indaba live stream #1 April 23 (Available now)
• Community team office hours May 27th 
• Desktop Indaba live stream #2 May 28th learn more 
• Ubuntu on Raspberry Pi discussion June 1st 

Context

UbuntuOnAir is a YouTube channel that was once the place for Ubuntu Test Days, Docs days, and other community-related events. With the (re)introduction of a community team at Canonical, Community Representative Monica (@madhens), completed a retrospective report titled ‘The state of the Ubuntu community’. In the report (coming soon) numerous things were identified that led to the decline of the Ubuntu community, and of course, numerous things that the community enjoyed but were hurt but disappeared as the community fizzled. 

What we want to achieve

In an attempt to give community projects and contributors a platform to talk about their work and interact with the community, we are restarting UbuntuOnAir as a community project. While we are Canonical employees, and the first x streams will predominantly feature Canonical people, UbuntuOnAir will only feature people with Ubuntu contributor hats on.  

For newbies, we want UbuntuOnAir to be a way to find out what’s going on and how it’s going. If one person interested in Ubuntu sees the channels, watches a stream, clicks a link, and starts contributing, we’ve succeeded. 

Get involved

Obviously what’s there so far is pretty green and relatively little. We’re still in the getting start-up phase. But, there is always something you can do to help. The easiest thing is to come along to the streams that do exist and participate in the chat. If you have any thoughts or ideas about things we could stream about or ways you’d like to contribute you can head over to discourse and let us know.

And if you’re interested in learning more you can read Monica’s summary over on her blog, or this article itself was condensed down from my personal blog that goes deeper into the why, the how, and our plans for the future.