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Community communications are essential. So are community news. A source of news (both technical and general public) is great when you want to keep in touch with the Ubuntu world, without having to digg around in IRC logs, mailing lists, external blog posts, forum posts,…Ok, So what do we have right now?

•  The Ubuntu Fridge. Great source of various news for the general public, non-technical audience. Unfortunately, it has a bad visibility and it is not read much (based on this small poll (30 answers, 37% not aware of the Fridge, 55% not reading it, 7% reading once in a while), the fact that it is only linked from ubuntu.com,and the number of reference to the fridge I’m seeing)
• Planet Ubuntu. Source of very various things, mainly technical. Solid pieces of technical Ubuntu news are rare, and the nature of the planet needs one to read it regularly, since history after 4 days is lost.
• Ubuntu team external news (I’m not talking about intra-team news) are quite non-existent. If some exists, their visibility is so bad that I’m not aware of them. The QA and Server team have set up a news blog, but only aggregaged to the technical Planet.

The situation is not optimal. Okay, now what’s the point? I mean, for us developers and regular contributors, all is ok, we don’t see the need of more news. Yes, for people heavily involved, there is not really a need for news. But for occasional contributors, people that spend only a few hours per week due to work and others duties, the time is precious. The need has already be made known on the ubuntu-devel ML. A good source of news for the general public should also not be neglected. It would make a better visibility for teams needs (e.g. QA call for testing, 5-a-day,…), it would avoid damaging rumors (Ubuntu killing harddrive, black theme going to be default, …), it would give feedback to users expressing their wishes on Ubuntu Brainstorm, …

In my opinion, how community news could be optimally organized:

• The Ubuntu Fridge gets a much broader visibility with an inter-community-websites navigation, which is really needed for the Ubuntu websites on the overall. The Fridge get a subsection for each Ubuntu Team, so that general-public news of Ubuntu teams can be published without having the team to host their own blog/other source of news.Optionally the Fridge get renammed to something less confusing, e.g. news.ubuntu.com. This setup is clearly focused on the general public and potential contributors audience.
• A similar setup is created, but for technical news : a blog where only technical news are posted, and with subcategories for each Ubuntu teams to let them post their news. This setup is clearly focused on the developers, power users and experienced contributers audience.

And no question of merging these two sources of news.

What’s your opinion? Thoughts?