An Overview of LoCo Guidance
Aloha!!
Welcome to todays topic in the Ubuntu Community Week schedule. An Overview of LoCo Guidance
My name is Laura Czajkowski and am a member of the Ubuntu LoCo Council. I’m Irish, living in London at present and currently looking out at the London Eye while it is raining in July! so much for summer eh! Lets get cracking!
So we’re going to start with a little back ground and history on the council and then teams as it has come to light that not everyone is sure of what the Loco Council (LC) do and how they can help you and your team.
There are 6 of us on the council Laura Czajkowski / czajkowski Alan Pope / popey Christophe Sauthier / huats Chris Crisafulli / itnet7 Paul Tagliamonte / paultag
Leandro Gomez / leogg and we are elected by the CC for a 2 year term. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LoCoCouncil/
We are elected to help you loco team members help your team be as active and prodcutive as possible.
You can find most of us on irc either on our home team channels or hanging out in #ubuntu-locoteams
If you join that channel and need help or want our attention or find out how to contact us you can use the command
!lococouncil
< ubot4> 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
You can send them an email at loco-council@lists.ubuntu.comPlease be patient , we may not be online and only some of us run screen sessions, you can always email us
Emails are moderated so don’t be alarmed we will get back to you, and you don’t need to suscrbibe to the list.
Each month we meet, mostly to work on approvals and re approvals, but we also encourage team members to add items to agenda so we can disucsss them.
If you have an issue in your team, or want to discuss something that could be benefical to other teams you can add this to the agenda up to the day before the meeting.
Each team should have a TEAM CONTACT some call this a TEAM LEADER and some teams have a TEAM CONTACT *AND* a TEAM LEADER
If a team has an issue they can contact their team leader/contact and get them to contact us so we can step in and help
There is no shame or issue or anything to be worried about if people contact us to help.
We encourage teams to contact us, it’s what we are elected here to help and do so don’t be shy and please don’t be annoyed with members who do contact us.
So how we can help:
1) Guidance
Sometimes people are in charge of a team where they don’t know what to do either it’s a new team or a team that needs a bit of revamp and that is not a bad thing.
It can be a case of never having led a team before or working with a diverse team spread over some distance.
We can help!!
We do Encourage teams to have some formal ways to operate but do realise this may not be suitable for all teams, however we see it as best practice.
To make this easier on teams and people if you break it down into a cycle based way to get a team into shape it helps.
Nothing can be done in one week, one month or even one cycle, just remember that
Some teams are extremly formal, and it works for them, but it’s a case of trial and error, if you are a small team, do you need a council? or are you better off with a team contact and people to help you informally?
If a team has a monthly meeting, that lets people know how they are doing, create an Agenda page, let ANYONE add items to it, either nominate a set chair for each meeting or have one per cycle or in some cases this is the team contact who chairs the meeting.
Simple thing many people forget to do is let the people who cannot attend know what is going on this also works by A) letting them know what’s going on in the team B) encourages them to possbly get involved if possible.
I cannot stress how important it is to keep a wiki page with the mins and logs of the meetings, this will help you and your team when it comes to approval or re approval. The council will be able to see how active you are.
Keeping a monthly team report is a really good idea also, as this helps show you your team how you are doing, if you’re going from having 5 events a cycle to 1, then there is something up, but also it helps again when it comes for approval and re approval.
A suggestion to make it easy is nominate one person to create the wiki page and add the basic content such as IRC team meeting or meet up, the post to the mailing list
anyone else then did any Ubuntu work or work the team may be interested in can add it to the wiki.
We have seen people get cranky over wiki edits, it’s a wiki, anyone can edit it, add content to it. Let’s all try and get along and work together with one another
The next thing you can do is set down the goals you want to do each cycle.
It doesn’t have to be something massive like a conference, if it’s an outing that’s not even geeky related, have a talk something that the team can get behind and work towards.
*SHARE tasks*, but also remember this is a voluntary work you are doing the same as your team members so if things are slow in happening, offer a hand or suggest they team up with someone else so they can help.
We have made up a page to help teams and encourage teams to use it and TRANSLATE IT https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LoCoCouncil/LoCoTeamsBestPracticesandGuidelines/
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LoCoCouncil/LoCoTeamsBestPracticesandGuidelines/If you create an event use the http://loco.ubuntu.com/ Loco Directory, we want to make this place the home of loco teams where all the contact information is one place.
PLEASE ENSURE Team CONTACT is listed for your team as this is how we contact you.
Ok, any questions so far?
2) Be the bridge if you log RT tickets
From time to time teams have to log RT tickets, if you do, and need a hand with them, and there has been no movement in them, just ask us to have a look and we will try and see if we can help but also note Canonical IS are busy people who do a great job so we all need to be patient.
Ok, any questions so far?
3) Mediation
From time to time we are called upon to be the middle person, the unbiased person who can help if there are issues in a team.
Firstly, there is no shame in this, and it often helps to call us in sooner rather than later as we can help resolve the issues.
This can be from us idling in the team IRC channel, adding ourselves to your Team wiki page meetings agenda, talking to members and it is ok to email us if you have concerns.
We have bee known to be called in to settle issues and mandate teams to elect team leaders where teams were in need of an outside team to step in, then get a monthly report
from the contact so we know things are improving.
At all times remember, we have the Code of Conduct, and everyone should sign it and if you are on Mailing lists you are already bound by it, the same goes for Ubuntu channels.
We also have a private channel so if you are on IRC and need to talk to us, we invite people in there to talk to us and this helps resolve issues. Just ask us in #ubuntu-locoteams that you want to talk to us and we’ll invite you in
4) Bit of advice
When you organise events, vary it, don’t always have them soo geeky, try and have non geeky events, people will come along more often than not if they feel they don’t have to be a technnology expert, and it also means people can bring along families so vary your venue
WE can only guide you so far, it’s up to each team how they operate, some things do work and somtimes teams need to realise when things are not working and need to step back and look at how they can change.
A LoCo team should have one goal, promote Ubuntu where possible without being over bearing and over powering to people.
We are an international community with so many teams and we are fortunate to have some fantastic people in them.
Remember that LoCo Teams are in many ways the opening into the Ubuntu Community, be welcoming and friendly and we’ll get more people on board.!
If you’re not sure if you have a team have a look at http://loco.ubuntu.com/
That’s all for me now
A log of the talk is HERE which has some questions and answers from the presentation and here is my Collectors Card
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