A little bit of history

The Argentinean Team was started on June of 2006 and became an official team on May 15th of 2007. It has been pretty active since then. As the decision structure in the group we have a meta mailing list (launchpad) where everyone who wants to collaborate with the organization of the group can join and subjects are discussed among the subscribers. We have designated moderators in all our communication channels and rules in place to make sure every member follows the CoC while participating.

Our focus

Since day one, our focus has been providing strong online support for new users. For that, we took advantage of the communication infrastructure the Ubuntu Community provided at the time: mailing list and the forums basically. We eventually added an official site, a planet

Our Team in numbers

Ubuntu Members

We have 5 ubuntu members in the team:

Marco Antonio Hoyos (mhoyos) since 2009-11-18

Guillermo Lisi (unimix) since 2009-11-18

Miguel Sajnovsky (sajnox) since 2008-11-18

Mariano Mara (marplatense) since 2007-09-06

Martín Albisetti (beuno) since 2007-03-20

Official Site

http://ubuntu-ar.org/

Our site where're we post all news and announce our support channels for every person who is seeking for help.

Mailing list

https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-ar We started the official Argentinean mailing list in December, 2006 (after a few months using googlegroups). With the forums is our main venue to provide support. It has more than 950 members and it's pretty active as you can see in the following chart:

The high and lows have an explanation: people goes on holidays on january and february and there is not really a lot of action in those months. We have a lot of new users subscribed around the month after a new release. Besides that you will notice a descent of mails starting on 2009: it has to do with a change in the moderators, the original moderators were not too heavy on the OT subject whereas the people who started doing it in the final months of 2008 imposed a stronger policy of enforcing the mailing list netiquette. Although this reduced the quantity of mails, it helped reducing the noise in it too.

Netiquette (in spanish): https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ArgentinaTeam/EtiquetaML

irc: #ubuntu-ar

We use the irc channel as part of our organizational channels. There isn't a lot of people hanging there on daily basis and we rather want folks seeking for help to try the standard #ubuntu-es channel. Of course if somebody shows up and asks a question we gladly help but we never really found someone available to take the job of moderate the channel and make sure it stays on topic. Because of this and because there a is plethora of fine spanish-speaking channels in freenode, we never really make it the strong way of communication other LoCos successfully did.

Forums

Official Loco Forum: http://ubuntuforums.org/forumdisplay.php?f=189 Up and running since November of 2006. One of the main venues of communication it has more than 6915 threads up to this moment. It's divided in four sections: general, hardware, software and community.

Forums sticky thread about rules in the forums:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1301226 (Forums rules and CoC)

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1303425 (Leadership rules)

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1222572 (Forums FAQ)

Launchpad

Loco Team LP group created on September of 2006 and it has currently 144 active members (plus 199 inactive ones). The main use we give to the LP group is as the meta group where all organization related things (about the group, events, etc) are decided. We use the LP mailing list (https://lists.launchpad.net/ubuntu-ar/) for this purpose. All members in the mailing list have voice and vote and things are decided by simple majority after discussion (we are argentinean and it means we like to argue a lot). Every user of the other communication channels (support ones) are encouraged to subscribe to the meta mailing list and participate in the organization of the group.

Argentina Planet

http://ubuntu-ar.org/planet/ Any loco member can submit her/his blog to be syndicated and we try to get them published as soon as possible. We do of course a bit of moderation to be sure no posts are against the general rules that apply to the other channels.

Events

Flisol Events

* 2010

• * Buenos Aires City - Universidad Tecnologica Nacional

• * Gonzalez Catan City - Blaise Pascal Institute

* 2009

• * FM La Tribu - Buenos Aires City

• * Universidad Nacional de Quilmes - Berazategui City

* 2008 Universidad de Palermo - Buenos Aires City

* 2007 Colegio Francesco Faa Di Bruno - Buenos Aires City

Release Party

* Lucid Lynx at Dr. Mason Pub - Buenos Aires City

* Karmic Koala at Dr. Mason Pub - Buenos Aires City

We're sorry, no photos this time

* Jaunty Jackalope at Tazz Palermo - Buenos Aires City

* Intrepid Ibex at Dr. Mason Pub - Buenos Aires City

* Intrepid Ibex - Cordoba City

* Intrepid Ibex - Tucuman City

* Hardy Heron at Dr. Mason Pub - Buenos Aires City

* Gutsy Gibbon at Buller Pub - Buenos Aires City

Global Jam

* March 27th 2010 at Dr. Mason - Buenos Aires City

Ubuntu Day

* September 26th 2009 - Conference day at Globant - Buenos Aires City

Other events

Conferences

* Security Forum 2010 conferences - Carlos Casares - Buenos Aires province (Marco Antonio de Hoyos)

* March 25th 2010 - AFCEA 2010 Free Software conferences - "Escuela Superior de Tecnologia del Ejercito Argentino - E.S.T." - Buenos Aires City

* November 14th 2009 - Conurbania conferences - Universidad Nacional de Quilmes - Buenos Aires province

* 2009 - GLUCCEN (Facultad de Ciencias Exactas de Buenos Aires) Conferences - Buenos Aires city

* 2009 - PyCon Conferences Days - Universidad de Belgrano - Buenos Aires city

* November 28 and 29th 2008 - WhyFLOSS Conferences - Universidad Tecnologica Nacional La Plata - Buenos Aires province

* July 2008 - 8vas. Jornadas Regionales de Software Libre - Universidad de Belgrano - Buenos Aires City

Support Labs

* November 21st and 22nd 2009 - Fabrica de Fallas (Bugs Factory) 2009 - FM La Tribu - Buenos Aires City

* November 15 and 16th 2008 - Fabrica de Fallas (Bugs Factory) 2008 - FM La Tribu - Buenos Aires City

* October, November & December 2008 - Equidad Foundation - Medium term training course for technician personnel of Equidad Foundation - Buenos Aires City

Other casual meetings and events

* Barbecue

* Friendly meeting at Buller Pub

Future events

* We plan to keep a strong support presence with the mailing list, the forums and any new channel of communication.

* Ubuntu members in the group are not getting any younger so they're constantly evaluating the potential of members in the group to guide and to start delegating tasks in them, trying to help them become valuable members and, when the time is right, ubuntu members.

* Ubuntu Day Argentina: we are currently organizing our second Ubuntu Day and we plan to make it a recurrent event to be held yearly.

* We used to have a strong presence in the Flisol Events (we participate in everyone since 2007) but their organization has decided not be installing Ubuntu any longer to any new user (a problem other Latinoamerican LoCos are suffering too). In spite of our best efforts to change this decision, since the 2010 event we cannot participate as official loco. LoCos members are encouraged to participate as individuals but we also took another measure: find cities with no LUG or with LUGs willing to accept out LoCo as a community participant (e.g. Gonzalez Catán 2010) and held the event in those places.

* Until the last Global Jam we never really participate in it as a community. This changed in 2010 and we plan to me it a regular event in out schedule.