LoCoTeams

Revision 10 as of 2006-04-03 09:59:17

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Ubuntu Local Community Teams

We have several local community teams that have emerged spontaneously. This page attempts to document the best practice for a new community team. If you want to start a new team in your local area or language -- we want you too! --, the next step is to read the LoCoTeamHowto.

The full list of community teams is on the LoCoTeamList page.

Team Leadership

Leadership is a contentious issue. Some teams work quite well without a formal leader; others have problems finding a structure that works for them. The most important thing is that the team as a whole be comfortable with the current leadership of the team, and that the Ubuntu Community Council be happy that the team is accountable to the broader Ubuntu Community.

Sometimes, the right person to start a LoCo team and get it off the ground is not also the right person to administer the team once it has grown past a certain size. We ask that LoCo teams stay aware of the need to have the right leadership in place as the team grows.

You can find more information on the LoCoTeamLeader page.

Team Contact

Every team needs at least one Team Contact. This is the person who serves as the interface between the local team and the larger Ubuntu community.

See the LoCoTeamContact page for details.

Wiki

You need to have a page in the main Ubuntu wiki that describes your team and links to activities -- who on your team is doing what -- resources -- forums, web sites, mailing lists, Rosetta translation team pages etc. Examples are DutchTeam or KoreanTeam.

It's also a good idea to setup your own team wiki. We can provide a Moin wiki for teams that don't have their own servers.

It's not a good idea to translate Ubuntu's Wiki pages directly into other languages, because they change fast. It's better to setup relevant pages in your own team's wiki. Any Ubuntu wiki content that is stable will eventually be moved to the main Ubuntu web site, and appear in the Ubuntu Documentation, and can then be translated. In this case, the translated page will automatically be sent instead of the original language page when a user has browser languages configured for their preferred language.

Mailing List

We can set up a mailing list for you. In general the convention is to call the list with your country code in the name, like "ubuntu-es" or "ubuntu-nl". These are often also language codes, which works quite well. If not, we can think of something.

IRC

Generally, local community teams create an IRC chat channel on irc.freenode.net with the same name as the mailing list. A good idea is to register the channel with chanserv: to do this try "/msg chanserv help" for instructions while logged in to irc.freenode.net. You should have a nickserv-registered nick, and be logged in to the channel.

Your IRC channel will have a logging bot on it ("LoCoBot") -- if not, ask MatthiasUrlichs to add your channel to the list. Logs are available at [http://netz.smurf.noris.de/logs/freenode/]YYYY/MM/DD/#ubuntu-CC.html; they're updated often.

Web Forums

It would be a great idea if you are able to set up a web forum. We don't have any centralised server infrastructure for web forums but you can contact the ubuntuforums.org guys to see if they can host a forum for you. The ubuntu-es.org web site has a great forum based on Drupal technology. If you plan to set up your own site, please contact trademarks@ubuntulinux.org before registering a domain.

Web Sites

Your team is welcome to have its own web site, and we can link to that site from the main site. We will make ubuntu-CC.org available to you (where CC is any country code -- for teams which are not country- or language-centric, we can easily set up similar domain names). For any other websites, please contact trademarks@ubuntulinux.org before registering a domain.

For active teams we can also provide hosting for LoCoTeam websites. See LoCoHosting for details.

Translations (Rosetta)

The best way for teams to collaborate on translation is to use Rosetta, a web translation portal. Check out https://launchpad.ubuntu.com/rosetta and get in touch with DafyddHarries if you want to setup your language or a new application for translation.

Input method documentation

One of the most important things to get right is the "input methods" that work best for your language and character set. It's worth including that information on your web site and wiki for users in your language, and please let us know if the main ubuntu distribution needs to be updated to work better for you. We are very happy to include additional input methods to make it easier to support users in any language. The best contact for this is BenjaminMakoHill.

Regional Meetings

We want to be able to direct people to regional contacts / meetings. To that effect, we would like the Team Leader to add a list of local regions / main cities to their Wiki page, so that people living there can add themselves as a contact person.

Ubuntu Advocacy

Computer-related fairs and exhibitions can certainly benefit from an Ubuntu presence! The Team can organize a booth, volunteer staffing, et al. Canonical can help with CDs, and in the future hope to have a conference pack with posters and related materials.

Another possibility for advocacy is to help ensure that Ubuntu gets coverage in your regional press. There are Linux magazines all over the world that highlight and review distributions in every issue, sometimes even distributing CDs. Help us get Ubuntu in the magazines you read! Those magazines also sometimes want to interview local people who are using the distribution - share your success stories.

Specialised imagery, desktops, branding

We are happy to include a package that has specialised local imagery, desktop images, or other documents that are related to a specific community. Feel free to raise that on the CommunityCouncilAgenda. However, we won't take national imagery that would be controversial with regard to disputed territorial claims. For that, please see derivative distributions below.

Derivative distributions

The easiest way to include your own national imagery and language details is to have a package in the main Ubuntu distribution, but it's also encouraged to set up your own version of Ubuntu. We have tools that make this a bit easier than it is with most distributions, and are working to make it even easier for you to do this. We are happy for national teams to change absolutely any aspect of Ubuntu, including the name and branding and (gasp) the desktop colour scheme. It's yours to modify and update as you see fit<!-- workaround to prevent fit warning, fixed in zwiki 0.38 -->.

Specialist LoCo Teams

Both Edubuntu and Kubuntu have large numbers of advocates and users, and you are welcome to setup a LoCo team that is "specialised" and focused on one specific distribution in the Ubuntu family. We do require the highest level of collaboration and cooperation between overlapping LoCo teams, so please ensure that you stay aware of what other LoCo teams are up to and look for ways to work together.

Distribution Point

Maybe it would be wise to ship cds to form a locally available cd distribution stock per each country, that might take some load off the shipit system and we can try have those cds produced locally, taking off some of the shipment expenses.


CategoryLoCoTeams