In accordance with our mission statement, the Ubuntu Belgian Team wants to grow the local ecosystem of individuals, companies, non-profits and governmental and intergovernmental institutions in Belgium working (or wanting to work) with Ubuntu. We want to do that by organizing and supporting promotional, educational and community activities.

Because Belgium is a small country with 3 official languages (and many other spoken by immigrants and expats), and all those languages are primarily spoken outside Belgium, we work together with the respective LoCoTeams of those languages (currently mainly ubuntu-nl & ubuntu-fr) so that their and our efforts aren't split up. Many Belgian Team members are also members of their respective language-related teams, e.g. to give support and/or to help with translations or writing documentation.

Key Details

• Date - 2012-02-16

• Team Contact - Jan Claeys <ubuntu@janc.be>

• Membership

  • 86 volunteers listed on https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-be as of 2012-02-16

  • 359 people subscribed to the mailing list as of 2012-02-16

• Mailing List - ubuntu-be on lists.ubuntu.com

• IRC - #ubuntu-be on Freenode

• Web - http://ubuntu-be.org/

• Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/groups/87950312093/

Roadmap

• Improving the organization of the Be LoCo Team to work more effectively in short and long term

  • Implementation of an elected Belgian LoCo Team Council

    • Planning (issued from the 24th April 2011 meeting (see below), elections for a new council should be organized in April 2012. This new council should be in place on 1th of May 2012.

  • how to to organize ourself more effectively

  • Activation of the Ubuntu Belgian Events Team

    • should be in charge of initiating and coordinating activities and events
    • activities and events should be organized by more active members

  • Improving the coordination within the Belgian LoCo Team

    • improve the communication through the IRC #ubuntu-be and other channels with weekly and dedicated meetings https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BelgianTeam/IrcMeetings,

    • development of local teams taking initiatives of events,

  • Look in to the possibility of becoming an official non-profit organization.

    • Pros and Cons

• Promotion

  • Presence at more (computer and other) fairs

    • Ubuntu-be.org volunteers will participate with booths in most of the Dipro computer fairs (Micro Mega Markt) in Belgium

    • 2012 Planned Schedule : https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BelgianTeam/ComputerFairs

    • More about the fairs at: http://www.dipro.be/

  • Looking for opportunities to promote Ubuntu through participation to local initiatives

    • the yearly Digital Week (Genk, Middelkerke, Ostend, ... ),
    • support install parties and presentations to local communities ( ...),
    • education : increase presence in school to present Ubuntu ...
    • meetings with local authorities and other groups.

    • working together with EPFSUG (European Parliament Free Software User Group) to see were Ubuntu-be can help deploying open source software in the parliament.

    • working together with festival organisations to get public ubuntu computers.

  • Exploring the possibility of making all our social media channels work together.

    • So an event invitation gets send out to all of them, rather than only 1 of them

  • Making an Ubuntu-be respin (of 12.04)

    • Since it won't fit a CD anyway, yet we don't want to add a lot of stuff to the ISO
    • Offering full language support for all official languages in Belgium by default
    • Booting up by default in either German, French, Dutch (or English)
    • Including native support for our electronic ID.
    • Possibly adding a PPA of our own. (limitations and boundries for this are yet to be set)

  • Promotion Material

    • Getting new hardware for our EventTeams

      • and possibily for the educational project
      • First steps in this are already taken, we found a company that will donate about 20 fairly recent computers somewhere in the first semester of this year
    • Ubuntu(-be) branded USB sticks
      • Ideal to put our respin on it
      • A lot faster than Live CD's
      • After 6 months CD's (and DVD's in the future) aren't up to date, people might not even use them, usb keys are 'always' usefull
      • Even without a live version of Ubuntu on it, the person owning the stick is still promoting ubuntu by the logo on the drive
    • Getting new posters

• Website development

  • Making our website more dynamic (blog?). (getting rid of the static homepage)
  • Making it easier to find things.

  • Making our agenda work with the events page on the site loco.ubuntu.com

  • Rethinking our planet. Developing a system that plays nicely with: Twitter, Flickr, our Facebook group, G+, identi.ca,...

• Wiki

  • Continuing the clean up!
  • Setting out guidelines what should go on the website and what should go on the wiki.

Experience