“I’m interested in Ubuntu and the cloud, how do I get involved” is a question I got a few times already. I thought it would be a good idea to answer this as a blog post. I believe one of the very first things you’d want to do, is to make sure you’re on the main communication channels, talking to the community, asking questions, seeing other questions being answered, trying to answer some yourself, sharing opinions and generally “connecting” with the rest of the community. That is a great first step. So I’ll highlight the main communication venues for the Ubuntu cloud community, as well as way to get kick-started.

Places to be

• Ubuntu Cloud Forums, while pretty young, there has been some pretty good stir in the forums. While IRC and mailing lists may be more focused on “asking questions”, the Forums are a great way to get in touch with other community members. To share your experience building your private clouds, the hardware used, software configuration, tuning and optimization, challenges faced …etc. Come join in, if you would like to ask questions, or if you would like to share opinions, tips or tricks, get on the forums and make some splash 🙂
• The Ubuntu-Cloud mailing list is a great technical resource where most of the experts and developers are subscribed. For very technical discussions, questions, feature suggestions, RFEs, development discussions the mailing list is a great resource.
• The EC2Ubuntu mailing list is a great resource that focuses on running Ubuntu in the Amazon EC2 public cloud. This list is active with a wealth of info on the topic
• IRC chat has long always been a primary real-time communication tool used by free software enthusiasts. The Ubuntu cloud IRC room is (surprise, surprise) #ubuntu-cloud on Freenode. Jump in, and engage

Once connected, things you can do include playing with the latest technology such as creating yourself a private UEC cloud, verifying latest features work as advertised, report and fix bugs, suggest features, design and implement new projects to advance the state of Ubuntu on the cloud. While the community is very welcoming, I definitely understand we need to create better new-comer friendly engagement paths, more hand-holding if you will. A better mentoring program from senior members as well as low hanging fruit are things the Ubuntu cloud and server communities need to identify and improve to make it easier to attract and engage fresh talent

Originally posted by Ahmed Kamal here on Friday, October 29, 2010 at 6:04 PM