Tag Archives: LoCo Council

Jul21

An Overview of LoCo Guidance

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An Overview of LoCo Guidance

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!
London Raining - London Eye in background
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
Please 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/
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 :)
Aug24

New Conference packs for LoCo Teams

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New Conference packs for LoCo Teams

I am very pleased to announce the new Conference packs for LoCo Teams, this came from a session at UDS-M in Brussels of this year but also was something we’ve been looking at for a while.  So it’s great to see an action item marked DONE (which makes bacon happy) but also has a positive effect for a lot of people.  We wanted to encourage teams to become and stay an approved LoCo Team and how we could possibly help. With that in mind we looked what was currently available, we talked to many people on what they thought might be helpful to them. When you attend an event you are representing your team and Ubuntu, so to present yourself in a professional manner we looked at things like a banner for teams.

The LoCo Council would like to thank Jane Silber for this as she was one of the people in the session who encouraged us to bring this action item to light and also we’ve had great help from Cezzaine Haugh and also Canonical for making this happen for all LoCo Teams, thank you very much!

The following has been approved for conference packs, and the wiki has been updated to reflect this

Once off gift to approved loco teams
When a LoCo Team is approved, part of what they need to do is nominate someone to receive and manage their LoCo Welcome Pack, which Canonical will provide.

  • x1 PVC banner – (one design only)
  • x1 Table cloth – (one design only)

Pack A – Approved loco teams

  • x55 Lanyards
  • x2 caps
  • x25 mixed sticker sheets
  • x25 pin-badges – (These have yet to be produced)
  • x2 t-shirts (release t-shirt) for give-away/booth staff
  • x1 Official Ubuntu Book (prize/give-away) – (Only while stocks last, we will not produce anymore than the amount received after each release)
  • CDs (250 Desktop, 25 Server, 25 Kubuntu) – (To be requested via shipit as per usual process)
  • Name badges (Loco to produce their own)
  • Ubuntu leaflets (Loco to create a project to produce their own ideas)
  • Ubuntu video (Canonical to provide – will be available for d/l on wiki once completed)

Pack B – UnApproved loco teams

  • x25 mixed sticker sheets
  • x55 Lanyards
  • CDs (75 Desktop) – (To be requested via shipit as per usual process)
  • Name badges (Loco to produce their own)
  • Ubuntu leaflets (Loco to create a project to produce their own ideas)
  • Ubuntu video (Canonical to provide – will be available for d/l on wiki once completed)

Also discussed and decided last week on was:

  • Ubuntu leaflets – not relevant in most countries due to various languages. Loco council will introduce a community driven project for loco teams to design their own Ubuntu leaflets based on brand guidelines and access to assets. Assets for these can be found at: http://design.canonical.com/the-toolkit/ubuntu-brand-guidelines/
  • Name-badge designs - this is mainly when hosting their own events. Again Loco’s to create their own using assets and brand guidelines.
  • Ubuntu video to run on machines at events – Canonical is currently working on a generic Ubuntu video in English and a few other languages – this will be added to the wiki page once completed.
Jul22

Approval and Re Approval Process

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Approval and Re Approval Process

I’ve had some time recently to review a lot of wiki applications for LoCos.  It is truly amazing the amount of work some teams do and is a great source of ideas to try for other teams.

With that said, I’ve also seen some wiki pages which are less than clear on what the team is doing which makes it very hard to judge. So I thought I’d put down some best practices to make it clearer what is expected.

So firstly let’s recap:

The LoCo Council has been tasked with identifying Approved LoCo teams which were approved over 2 years ago and thus are due for re-approval. The criteria for re approval is the same as for approval which is outlined on the getting approved instructions and the LoCo Council guidelines can be found at the team approval guidelines.

It should be noted that from the day your LoCo is approved, you should continue to document all events and history of your LoCo for this re approval process to make it clear and visible to all.

Now it is safe to say some teams do not continue documenting their work so when it comes to re approval time it’s panic stations, all hands on deck!  Things you can do to help elevate this are the following

  • Use the LoCo Directory to log all of your events it will make it easier to write up about them and possibly in the future link to past events
  • MONTHLY Reports folks, only a handful of teams use them and there are more teams there that SHOULD be writing monthly reports, list your IRC meeting, any real life meet up, projects people are working on in relation to Ubuntu.
  • Take photos of your events it’ll help in the long run, assign someone at each event to take photos and even create a gallery in one place to link to them

When it comes to the creation of the Application be it for Approval or ReApproval it’s the same thing just NAMED DIFFERENTLY.  You just need to document it. LOTS OF DETAILS PLEASE! We’d rather have too much then not enough details as the meeting is short and we have a lot of teams to get through.

What is expected of a LoCo Team

  • All teams must provide the Council with a wiki page (in English preferably) with details outlined in https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LoCoGettingApproved.
  • The team should have demonstrated a significant and sustained contribution to the Ubuntu community, from participating in a ubuntu-related project, documentation, localization, development (bug reports and packaging, marketing, participating in FOSS events, release parties. All of these abiding the Code of Conduct and following the LoCo team project’s policies.
  • The team should have public wiki pages and an open public mailing list set up, these initial resources indicate open participation and they provide the Council with a log of the Team’s activity.
  • The team should have an entry in https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LoCoTeamList.
  • The team should have been running for at least 4 months and have had a consistent set of interactions with each other (council members should look at mailing list activity to assess how much activity there is) – you should also assess IRC activity where applicable.
  • The team should have a good roadmap and a good set of goals that they want to achieve, The Approved status is only a confirmation of their effort and it is also a commitment for further community activity.
  • Leadership within the team must be build upon fairness and openess. The team must be in agreement with the fair apointment of a leader. This leader must represent the team in different situations in an efficient and effective manner, so the leader’s commitment towards the team is paramount.
  • Has there been much conflict in the team, and if so, has it been resolved?: This is a very important sign of a team that is mature enough to face further situations in the future. Resolving issues is definetely a learning experience for LoCo Teams.
  • Do the council feel this team could be trusted with additional resources such as additional CDs and being sent equipment for use?, Extra resources encourage more participation therefore, Being able to administer their resources is paramount, making sure that the team has what they need to promote ubuntu locally .
  • Is this team setting a good example to the community? The Team must serve as role for new teams. The teams participation in LoCo team communication channels (Mailing list and IRC) is also encouraged, this way the team can be sure of that the great work done by this team gets shared with the whole LoCo Team community.

We also know that from time to time things don’t run smoothly, but how you cope  resolve and work things out is what we would like to know about.  It’s not a bad thing unless you hide it.  On the wiki page tell us how many is in your TEAM, IRC Channel, Mailing list, Forums and link to them.  We need the details, please don’t expect us to go looking for them, your team is one of a number of teams being reviewed.

When it comes to the IRC meeting if you are called for one, don’t come alone.  You are not in the team alone.  You don’t run the team alone.  BRING PEOPLE  TO CHEER THEIR TEAM ALONG!  It’s a team effort remember this when doing the application ASK FOR HELP, ASK  FOR CONTENT, you may miss something when someone else has blogged or taken photos of something.

Remember the LoCo Council idles in #ubuntu-locoteams if you want us to look over your application to give you some pointers just ask.  Remember being called for reapproval is a normal procedure and do not panic :)

Finally some really good applications just to give you an idea of what we’re looking for are the following

  1. Colombian LoCo
  2. Italian LoCo
  3. French LoCo