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Mailing lists and teams
Find and work with the right people by using Launchpad to build a social network of individuals and teams around projects. Each action in Launchpad — a bug reported, a branch updated, a package published — is attributed to the person responsible, making it easy to get in touch with people whose work interests you.
Launchpad also helps you organise the social structure of your community with a simple teams system, complete with mailing lists. Through teams you can share work and responsibilities, such as commit rights to a branch or supervising a project’s bug reports.
Mailing lists
Mailing lists are at the heart of free software discussion and consensus building.
Teams in Launchpad can each have their own mailing list with everything you’d expect: simple subscription management, automatic archiving and virtually no need for list administration.
Even better, Launchpad shares the burden of administration across each mailing list community by building a global picture of how each person’s posts are moderated across different lists.
Team responsibility
Sharing work amongst a group of people is easy in Launchpad.
Teams are interchangeable with individuals in just about any role in Launchpad, such as bug triage, owning a branch of code or publishing software packages through a PPA. You can create as many teams as you want and even arrange a hierarchy of teams so that all the members of one team are also automatically members of another. Launchpad’s team functionality is unique among tools for free software developers.
People profiles
Connecting with the right people is what makes free software projects successful.
When you come across work that impresses you, one click on the owner’s name lets you see at a glance what they’ve worked on, what interests them, what timezone they’re in and how to contact them.
Karma
Karma gives you a quick way to separate the heavy contributors from the newcomers!
Each person’s karma report gives you a short-hand indication of their current activity. File a bug: get karma. Publish a branch of code: get karma. Answer a support question: get karma. Launchpad distills all recent activity down to a relative karma value but you can also peek behind the headline number to see where and how frequently people have been contributing.