Country Teams

Improving the contacts and resources that are part of LoCo teams and the countries that house them.

• Spec: https://features.launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/country-teams

• Discussed: 06 Nov 2006

Comment from MarkShuttleworth 10-11-06:

• Currently this spec is not approvable, we asked the Launchpad team to participate in this discussion in order to build a more rigorous framework for keeping track of LoCo teams. This spec should link to a discussion of the plans to do so, including:

• what data needs to be stored about each LoCo team

• what the "lifecycle" of a loco team is so we can track their formation and approval
• how we will track membership of teams
• what "roles" people will have w.r.t. teams

• what reporting we expect from LoCo teams

• whether we will track information about, for example, media contacts from LoCo teams

• how we will deal with teams that want to identify themselves as "Edubuntu" or "Kubuntu" oriented rather than general Ubuntu project LoCo teams

Please address these issues before clearing this comment and approving the spec. LP details can be stored in the LP wiki, this spec should include the objectives and the plans for what needs to be achieved.

Summary

Right now resources (such as press contacts) and representatives (such as education focused community members) are not formally organised, and this makes it difficult to have a consistent method of identifying specific people and resources in teams.

To solve this problem we need to:

• Engage LoCo teams to nominate contacts for particular activities and initiatives such as education and marketing.

• Create a centralised list of these resources and representatives, first organised by LoCo but possibly later organised by country.

• Encourage LoCo teams to store their resources and contacts in this centralised resource, using influencial teams to kick the process off.

An additional problem cited in this spec is how to get information out of LoCo teams and into the press. This task will be made part of this spec so as to improve the ability of LoCo teams to make use of their resources. As such:

• Improve how LoCo teams feed information upstream to groups such as the Marketing and Press teams.

Part of this discussion was how Loco teams are categorised by region, state, country or other such criteria. It was decided that there is not one-category-to-rule-them all, but categorisation should be a consulted process on loco-contacts, Jono Bacon or the Community Council.

Rationale

Although the LoCo community is well established in many parts of the world, each team largely works at a team level when it comes to certain activities such as education, marketing, translations etc. At this team level, resources and those who are committed to certain action are typically limited to the context of the team, and these resources and contacts are not seen outside the team.

Another issue is that these contacts and resources are often at a LoCo level instead of a country level. So, as an example, a USA based team may have contacts and representatives at a state-wide level, but it would be good if we could access an aggregated list of contacts and representatives at a country wide level.

Use Cases

• ubuntu-moon did a great roll out of Edubuntu to some local schools and wants to ensure that they can get it publicised. The team get their 'marketing contact' in the group to push the news up to the Marketing Team who help roll it out on the fridge, news sites and other resources.

• Richard is working on lots of education initiatives and wants to be able to talk to education enthusiasts in the LoCo community. He accesses the central list of LoCo contacts to get their feedback.

• Roald wants to produce CDs of the latest Ubuntu and give them out to people, but has run out of CDs. He looks on the central resources list and finds CD duplication services that have been recommended by the LoCo.

• Jono wants to talk about how awesome cool the Ubuntu community is and he would like to show some maps and visual indication of the size and scope of the community. With Launchpad storing the location of team members, it could generate a map of team members that Jono can show off in his slides.

Scope

We will build a central list of LoCo contacts and resources and work to get the LoCo community to use the list as part of their teams. The list of contacts and resources will be limited to set categories and will be categorised at a LoCo level. This work will take place in the Ubuntu wiki.

Implementation

Implementing this spec involves three primary tasks:

• Creating a central resource where LoCo teams can store details of their resources and representatives. This should take place on the Ubuntu wiki.

• Get LoCo teams to use this resource as part of their operations. Being an approved LoCo team should involve making use of this centralised resource.

• Develop functionality in Launchpad to store this information.

Here is the list of specific actions to achieve these goals:

• Develop a document that outlines what kind of information lives in the central repository - i.e. no private information, the kind of resources etc - Jono.
• Create a document about how to push success stories upstream - Rich (Nixternal).

• Create a document to clarify exactly what approval means, and how it can benefit a LoCo team - Jono.

• Work with key LoCo teams to add their details to the centralised system - Melissa, Mark, Joey, Nik.

• Country-wide coalitions (such as an ubuntu-usa group that encompasses each of the state wide groups) does not make sense right now, until we have lots more teams in a country.

The Launchpad integration enables the following to happen:

• Provide geographical reporting of our worldwide presence and the spread of LoCo teams.

• Effectively track LoCo status, and better understand which teams are working well, which can result in better directed resources.

• Better categorisation of LoCo teams, performed at a LoCo and country wide bases. This provides the ability for information to seep up to a country level.

• A strong structure to merge in our centralised directory of representatives and resources.

One of the items discussed was merging the centralised list of LoCo resources and representatives in the wiki. It was discussed to first establish a base of resources in the wiki, and then look at implementing this into Launchpad when the above structure is in place. This also helps get teams into the habit of documenting their resources and representatives.

In the meantime, and while the above Launchpad functionality is developed, we will ask LoCo teams to provide the following content on a wiki page, ready to merged into Launchpad:

Launchpad integration

Launchpad is a critical component in virtually all Ubuntu development, and this should be no different in the case of Loco teams. In fact, Launchpad provides an ideal infrastructure to better categorise, measure and track LoCo teams and their process.

The Launchpad integration plan is as follows:

• Each country will have a countrywide LoCo team with an associated country contact.

• Each country will have a number of sub-groups which will be the main LoCo teams. The owner of the LoCo team will be the team contact/leader of the team. Each LoCo team will have information associated with it, including:

  • team name

  • title

  • status - can be either pending, approved, active or dormant

  • country --- can this be gathered from the parent country team?

  • distro - this points to the distro product on LP

  • location - the location in the word where the team is based

• For each LoCo team, individuals can then be part of the team. Each individual will also have the following details associated with their account:

  • home location - the long/lat of their home. This is their primary residence.

  • current location - the current location of the user - particularly useful if a GPS to LP interface was created.

  • homepage

• A language contact for distro translation should be included in Launchpad too.

Outstanding Issues

Some outstanding issues occur with this effort:

• Wiki based centralisation. Although the contacts and resources will be based on the wiki, this makes it more difficult to search this information.

• Be prudent in deciding what's a country or what's a language region. Examples: Is Taiwan a country?, What part of the island Cyprus is a(the?) country?, What about the Basque in France/Spain, what about the Kurdish in Turkey/Iraq, what about multiple languages in a country (Belgium, Switzerland) which are also spoken in neighbouring countries? Probably best to leave the decisions up to the LoCo teams... and not force to have a LoCo team for every country...

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