Local Communities ROCK!

A topic that comes up frequently on blog posts we’ve seen and also from talking to people is the word “Approved”LoCo it doesn’t empower people at times. The feedback is that the word approved loco is not great to motivate others who have not been approved or at some point were approved and then not approved.

There are many ways to look at this, and it may not change, but if we don’t discuss it then we’ll forever seen these comments elsewhere. Currently we have the group LoCo Teams and then two subsets, Approved and unapproved. Neither of which are particularly great but do convey in all languages what they mean. We also appreciate not everyone feels this way and many like the word approved so lets see if we could possibly find something better.

Ideally the unapproved loco team would just be called LoCo Team and then the Approved LoCo team could be called or their status level could be:

* verified loco team
* evaluated loco team
* sponsored loco team
* reviewed loco team

status = Verified, Evaluated, Reviewed, Sponsored

*Ubuntu LoCo Teams ($status)* — for the team that has been recognised as a team in good standing and that receives sponsored items from Canonical

*Ubuntu LoCo Teams –* for regular teams that are just formed and have not  been evaluated.

If you have a better suggestion why not let us know. This was discussed at the last LoCo Council IRC Meeting -
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LoCoCouncil/Minutes/20130115

This has been a really amazing cycle! The Loco Council would like to say congratulations to all teams that have worked this cycle to become approved teams, in our work we have tried to help to the Loco Teams to fix any troubles and share ideas about how their teams are  and how they could encourage other Loco Teams.

We have had a lot of teams approved for this cycle (Quantal): https://launchpad.net/ubuntu-locoteams/locoteams/12.10 On this page you can see all information about the applications (in wiki format), these applications have all recent information about the status of the Loco Teams plus pictures, videos, projects and even more great items

We have also approved the following teams that were from cycles prior to Quantal:

Ubuntu Quebec: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QuebecTeam/ReApprovalApplication2012
Ubuntu Oregon: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/OregonTeam/ApprovalApplication
Ubuntu Russia: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RussianTeam/ReApprovalApplication2012
Ubuntu Egypt: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/EgyptTeam/ApprovalApplication2012
Ubuntu Belgiam: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BelgianTeam/ReapprovalApplication2012
Ubuntu Nederland: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DutchTeamApprovalApplication
Ubuntu Montenegro: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MontenegroTeam/ApprovalApplication

If interested, you can see our logs of the meetings between the LC and the Loco Teams here:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LoCoCouncil/Minutes

Salutations! The LoCo Council and I wanted to take a moment and give a quick update on yesterday’s (November 20, 2012) meeting. We had two teams go for their team re-approval, and both teams received unanimous +1′s from the LoCo Counselors that were present.

Ubuntu Asturian Team -

The Asturian LoCo has definitely done an outstanding job on spreading the word about Ubuntu, they have several projects that are geared towards reaching the youth, and have also been instrumental with helping with official agencies migrate to Ubuntu. They have done some really great translation work, and definitely harbor the Ubuntu Community Spirit! They have held several release parties and participated in Global Jams. For teams that are about to go through the re-approval process, check out their Reapproval Wiki here. We’d like to say thanks to the Asturian LoCo for doing such a wonderful job.

Ubuntu Czech Republic Team -

The Czech Republic Team has been very busy with Translations, Marketing and Advocacy, and their online forums. They have also participated in several release parties, and global events. Their roadmap looks very promising, and we are confident that this team will achieve even more during thier next 2 years of being approved. They had expressed wanting to create another published book that would be updated from 10.10, but unfortunately it is going to be cost prohibitive for them, since they no longer have a local publisher willing to reasonably take their work to print. We made the suggetion that if they really wanted to work on an updated version, to try something similar to kickstarter and see if they can raise funds in that or a similar fashion to realize their goal.
If you’d like to read more about their activities, they are spelled out quite nicely on their re-approval wiki located here.

It is very nice when teams get the chance to share and highlight all of their events and hardwork, and I and the rest of the Council really appreciate both of the teams that went for re-approval. Not only for all of the effort they put into their wikis, but especially for all of the wonderful things they have done and are planning to do for Ubuntu.

Hello Guys!

As you know this is a big date for all Ubuntu community, the reason we’re going to celebrate the Ubuntu’s 8th Birthday and the release of Quantal Quetzal. And we hope that you can join us wherever that you are, so maybe you’re thinking: “What do I need to be part of the party?” The answer is very easy:

Cake, Drinks and even more!

• Pick a date: I would recommend either Thu 18th October or the following weekend. Pick a date when you can arrange for a bunch of Ubuntu enthusiasts to be in the same building.
• Pick a venue:  this can be someone’s back yard, a pub, a university room, a school, a parking lot…wherever. They key thing is not the venue, it is the people. With a venue and date, you are all set to let the world know about it.
• Add your party to the LoCo Directory. here
• Let the world know: blog about it, make up some fliers and put them in computers shops / libraries / cafes / educational establishments etc. Encourage a stack of people to come along to your party.

If you want to use Artwork for the party like: posters, brochures, countdowns and even more, you can find a lot of these in the spreadubuntu site: spreadubuntu.org/

Will you attend the Ubuntu Release Party?

And finally, the most important, have a good time and share your experience with all the world, you can use your own blog and your social networks.

Hello everyone!

The LoCo Council would like to take this opportunity to share with you an announcement of our newest members!  A few weeks ago Paolo and Greg made decisions to step down, this was definitely sad news for us, but we understand and wish them the best. We would like to give many thanks to them both for their great work!

We needed to try and restore the team to six members, and asked the community for nominations. We received many good nominations, but only had two positions available at this time. After we received the nominations we forwarded them on to the Community Council. They have now had a chance to evaluate the nominees, and have came to a decision.

Without further ado, We would now like to introduce you to the new members of the LoCo Council:

- Efrain Valles: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/EfrainValles

- Bhavani Shankar: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BhavaniShankar

Welcome Efrain and Bhavani, we hope that you’ll have a good time working with us! We would also like give thanks to all of the nominees, as we always have great applicants. The decisions are never easy, when trying to narrow down who’s selected. We hope that those of you who were nominated will consider applying again in the future.

New Member announcement, Originally posted to the ubuntu-news-team mailing list on Tue Oct 2 15:11:58 UTC 2012 by Laura Czajkowski

I’m happy to tell you that it is time to submit requests for pre-orders of the new 12.04 Release! As always, please submit your requests via the online form at

https://forms.canonical.com/lococd/

It is vital that you correctly fill in all the required fields marked with an *.

If these fields are left empty or are incorrectly filled in, your request will not be processed successfully. It is also important to include a zip/post code if you have one as this will help us process your request faster. Zip/post code is no longer a vital field as we understand that some countires do not have one.

I would also like to remind you that only a Loco team administrator can request a pre-order for CDs. If the request is submitted by anyone else the request will be declined.

Please note that we are no longer including Kubuntu CDs in the Loco packs effective with this release. The software, of course, will still
available on-line for download.

The release goes Live on the 26/04/12, so please get your pre-orders in as soon as possible.

One of the main functions of the LoCo Council is to approve/re-approve the great LoCo teams that make up the amazing base of the Ubuntu Community. As such, having quality documentation that tells LoCo teams in a clear fashion the expectations we have of all approved teams is of upmost importance.

The LoCo Council, in collaboration with the Community Council, recently updated our approval guidelines to answer more questions in a (hopefully) clearer way. You can review the Approval Guidelines and the Re-Approval Guidelines and tell us if we got it right!

Hopefully, with these changes more LoCo teams will be able to set out a plan to be great resources for Ubuntu and GNU/Linux enthusiasts in their area.

On March 20th the LoCo Council met and had only one new LoCo team to review for approval; the Egyptian LoCo[0].

The Egyptian LoCo’s approval application[1] was a great example of a quality application as it even included nice graphs to help visualise some of the plans the LoCo is putting into place. With this and the other evidence of great work the LoCo Council voted unanimously to approve the Egyptian LoCo!

Please join us in congratulating the Egyptian LoCo Team for being a great example of a positive force in Ubuntu!

[0] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/EgyptTeam
[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/EgyptTeam/ApprovalApplication2012

During the Oneiric cycle the Ubuntu LoCo Council reviewed many teams and dealt with team issues, this post is to explain what the council has done during this cycle and to let people know how they can approach us if needs be.

Firstly we had a large re approval of teams this cycle this was down to the re approval process that was introduced three cycles ago and has proved to help teams keep up to date and let everyone know how things are progressing. So for the Natty cycle we looked at the following 26 LoCo Teams which were up for re approval having been approved for 2 or more years:

The following teams were selected for the Oneiric cycle for re approval:
Thai Loco Team
Ubuntu Venezuela Team
Ubuntu DK
Ubuntu UK
Ubuntu Team Philippines
Pennsylvania – US LoCo Team
Ubuntu-Michigan
Ubuntu Maryland LoCo Team
Ubuntu Malaysia LoCo Team
Ubuntu Japanese Team
Ubuntu Ireland
Ubuntu El Salvador Team
Ubuntu Swiss Team
Ubuntu Portugal
Ubuntu Polish LoCo Team
Ubuntu Perú
Ubuntu Norge
Ubuntu Croatian Advocates
Thai Loco Team
Ubuntu Tamil Team
Ubuntu Israel
Arizona LoCo Team
Ubuntu New York State
Ubuntu California
Georgia LoCo
Ubuntu Brazilian Users
Argentina LoCo
Ubuntu China LoCo Team

To simplify things we create a bug in launchpad for each team that is due for renewal. The text from this wiki page loco.ubuntu.com/loco-council/approved s sent to their team contact and we use the bug to keep track of progress throughout the cycle. We ensure all communication is posted to the bug report, and send reminders & comments via the bug. Finally we vote on the approval and then make the bug public after the process is finished.

This process has worked out very well for teams who are not able to take part in the IRC meeting but do want a more interactive review. We also still have a monthly IRC meetings which gives teams the flexibility to talk to us directly or use the bug tracker to manage the approval process. We have found this makes our team more accessible to LoCos around the world.

There was some initial reluctance to use the bug tracker to manage approvals, but it was quickly accepted once we explained it’s needed for us as a council to be productive to keep things on track and not let the ball drop on our action items. A by-product of this is it’s a great way for teams to communicate with the council and document information when needed in the bugs.

We keep the bugs private initially so they don’t end up being spammed with inappropriate comments and we use them to remind one another to vote or attend to items. They have worked well now in the last cycle and we will continue to use them again in the future as we do feel they have served the council well and helped up keep up to date with teams.

8 Expired ( 30% Total )
18 Processed ( 69% Total )

Unapproved: 2 ( 11% Processed )
Approved: 16 ( 88% Processed )

Total Unapproved: 10 ( 38% Total )
Total Approved: 16 ( 61% Total )

26 LoCo Teams were processed

During this cycle we were called (by IRC or email) upon by some loco team members to help in mediation or give advice to them to help their team. We often invite them into our IRC channel which while it is private as we can be dealing with people from teams in there at a given time is open to anyone who wants to talk to us all you have to do is ask to join to discuss something. We had to make it private as we had people popping in during sensitive discussions and having this channel has helped us help teams. It is also where many of us idle or log sessions so we can review the conversation and give advice.

We can invite multiple people in here and help resolve issues or bounce ideas and solutions off one another in a real time environment. We follow this up by joining their IRC Channels in some cases, in order to be there for them whenever needed idling so they can ask questions but also so we could see for ourselves how things flow as every team is so different.

We get weekly if not fortnightly requests for help with changing of ownership of a team mailing list, ownership, website and domain issues and lot regarding RT tickets, here we help where possible, logging the issues for teams on launchpad, or asking for IS help in resolving the issues.

We’ve also worked closely with the LoCo Directory Dev team and helped reporting bugs to make the Loco Directory more user friendly. We idle on IRC in #ubuntu-locoteams and we even had our own factoid created if people used it it pings the team but also tell the user how to contact us. !lococouncil lococouncil is The Loco Council is itnet7, czajkowski, paultag, huats, leogg, popey – they are there to help, just ask! You can send them an email at loco-council@lists.ubuntu.com

I am sure the Precise cycle will be just as interesting for the council working with loco teams and look forward to hearing from the ubuntu community.