You would think making contact with a loco team contact would be straight forward, turns out it’s not. In fact today I spent almost 4.5 hours trying to get a hold of people.  That is crazy amount of time that should have been straight forward and simple.

Going by the list on the LD of teams I click on a team.  Looking at Team Contact many if not most are BLANK! If they are not blank and I click on them  I get their launchpad page, which in turn again in most cases does not display a public email address.  Not making things very easy to in contact.  So if you’re a new user to Ubuntu and want to get in contact you now have to create a launchpad account just to be able to log in and send the contact an email address. Frankly if I was a new person to the community I’d have left by now!!!

Yes you can argue why not ask on IRC, again new people may not know what IRC is all about, you’re forcing them into unfamiliar territory we’re meant to be making this easy to get people on board.  Why not get them to sign up to a mailing list, again more hoops, they just may have a simple question, could be shy and don’t want to seem foolish, surely the Team Contact is the person to whom people should be able to ask these questions.

So when team contact is blank I look next to TEAM ADMINS and try and get an email address from them, many teams list many people (it’s been a long day and I’ve a lot of sent items)  Again I click on trying to email them once again not public address ok fair enough they are the team admin, so then I face the problem of contacting them via Launchpad, back to having to create an account and sign in.  In my case I used up my contact 5 in one day within 2 teams!

Then there are also teams who have a council as a team contact, I’ve no idea who that goes to or who replies, or how they manage who replies when and to whom. Lets make this simple folks please! For everyones sake!

LoCo Team Contacts please for the love and honour of my sanity and all future Ubuntu community people who would like to get involved please update your Team contact information on http://loco.ubuntu.com/teams if you’re hiding your address I really would love to know A) Why you’re doing it B) Why you’re Team contact as you’re making it really difficult to contact you surely you want more people to join your team and be able to ask for help.