LoCo council and loco teams resurrection

Community Local Communities
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#1

Hello All,

I am Bhavi, a former loco council member and a former Ubuntu developer and a returning community member now :slight_smile:.

When, I was in Prague for the Ubuntu summit 2022, one of the most common feedback I got was how to keep a loco team active and how to involve women in the local community ecosystem. Also, the feedback was, is there any council like the community council to guide the teams at a local level aka the locos.

As i see now the loco portal is outdated and loco council not active. So I want to know anyone has any ideas to rejig the loco council and the loco ecosystem again so that we can have a council and strive towards betterment of local communities in the Ubuntu ecosystem and I am ready to work and contribute again in this regard :slight_smile:

Any thoughts and discussion appreciated.

@kewisch: Would love to have it on the agenda of community council meeting perhaps after a discussion :slight_smile:

Regards,
Bhavi

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LoCo Reverification... still no answers?
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#2

Bravo!! I am a member of the Ubuntu-US-AZ LoCo Team. We have been faithfully submitting our information to the Portal since July 2011, https://loco.ubuntu.com/events/ and submitting reports since March 2015. Not sure if the information is of value to anyone other than our team members but it exists and is accurate. In the past we have attempted, without much success to assist in the resurrection of the New Mexico Team. Without assistance from a LoCo Council for guidance it is of course extremely difficult to get any LoCo active again so the first step is to re-activate it. There are tons of Ubuntu users out there and to have a place where they can go for local assistance or just Ubuntu fellowship is a tremendous advantage.

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#3

Thanks @rexbouwense :slight_smile:

In my mind, as a former council member for 2 terms, I am thinking of the below steps…

  1. Resurrect loco council and take a note of all pending issues or leave an open forum for feedback within a stipulated time frame and prioritize the feedback and start working on the same by point 2 below

  2. Reactivate loco contacts who are interested and split up work to be done equally amongst interested people which leads to point 3 below

  3. Redefine the charter and relaunch the loco portal as per the charter.

Please feel free to add anything you like :slight_smile:

Regards,
Bhavi

3 Likes
#4

Hello! I’m also interested to join if we got the LoCo council revived again.
I’m currently on Korean LoCo and also UbuCon Asia team. While I’ve been working on UbuCon Asia since 2021, I see there are many LoCo around Asia whether they are active, inactive, or was active before (but not now). I saw there were always many numbers of Ubuntu users on each region no matter if LoCo on each region was active or not.

With some efforts of past 2 years on UbuCon Asia, I now see there are some LoCo trying to revive or become active again. Indonesia LoCo for example, there are some new folks who trying to work together with previous organizers to rebuild their website and revive their community again.

So, I’m just thinking it would be nice if we can revive LoCo council and provide some guidance for LoCos like that.

By the way, I think I remember that there’s a Community portal is being built as replacement for LoCo portal. anyone knows if there’s any progress on this?

3 Likes
#5

@sukso96100 agreed with you… btw I guess the community hub or portal active in Ubuntu community right now at a general level is this discourse platform as the Ubuntu forums is also not maintained actively at present I guess. (For instance, a search of Ubuntu community portal on the internet, leads to this platform) :slight_smile:

Perhaps @kewisch can throw some light on this.

1 Like
#6

Hi All,
I’ve seconded @bhavi triggering the revival of the loco council since we re-met at the Ubuntu Summit 2022.

I do agree with @rexbouwense , It’s quite a lengthy process if the loco council going to re-verified (either the loco team needs to re-submit the application by listing all the loco team activities or there will be an easier way to verify) all the loco teams listed at the current loco team portal.

Maybe we can start with these steps first then once we have the loco council back in action, we will go from there …

just my 2 cents

Regards,
fenris

3 Likes
#7

@fenris second this completely…

Since this discourse platform is active… how about creating a separate category for loco team verification and once the loco council is reinstated work on a project like locolint or something to automate approvals on agreed guidelines?

Awaiting your views :slight_smile:

3 Likes
#8

First step is obviously to re-instate the Local Community Council.
They, with input from those LoCos that are active or relatively active, need to establish some simple guide-lines to get a team verified, establish guide-lines for submitting reports if that is indeed desired, and decide what they can do to assist LoCos in running events. We at the LoCo level have been running our events without guidance. Perhaps there is something that other LoCos are doing that could be of interest.

3 Likes
#9

Regarding feedback: I saw a post in this section about local communities research committee. Wanted to know if it’s active and if yes, where can we find the reports?

#10

The report page on the Ubuntu Wiki, https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TeamReports, hasn’t been updated in years. We have kept filling reports in the hope that they would be added to the page. Each Team (including the LoCos) was supposed to have a report page on their own Wiki and that information was to be gathered to create this. I have found no evidence that this has been done in a long time.

#11

Got it… agreed…

Since this platform is active, we can have a separate team category as loco team reports where people can submit and collaborate i guess…

Just my 2 cents here…

By the local communities research committee, I am referring to the below threads

Does anyone know how can this team be contacted if it’s present now?

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#12

Hi folks, I’m super excited you’re getting together to help restart the LoCos, I think this is super valuable and would help one of my goals, showing more activity in the Ubuntu ecosystem. The current loco portal seems largely abandoned, while there are certainly folks still very active and doing amazing things. I’ve also been in touch with a few groups that might be good candidates to reboot certain LoCos.

A few related efforts:

  • @aaronprisk is working on moving documentation away from the wiki and onto our new documentation site. This is narrowly scoped to documentation about the community (e.g. governance structures, contribution opportunities, etc), so it might not be a one-size-fits-all solution for the LoCos, especially since there is a dedicated LoCo Platform
  • We’ve spun up an Indico instance at https://events.canonical.com/ which I’d like to make more use of, and might be a great way to show what events are happening around the world while giving organizers some tooling to be well organized.

Diogo and Tiago I have talked to more recently, the others in that research committee I’ve not had the pleasure. As we have a new Community Council it might be worth inviting their opinion in this thread, and then maybe setting up a call with a few interested parties to see how we can accelerate this.

I’m also happy to help you with any requests you’ve made in the past that have remained unanswered.

3 Likes
#13

(There’s an issue with my Ubuntu SSO for Indico which is pulling in my old work e-mail address, which obviously isn’t valid anymore. Any help on that would be welcome!)

Would it be possible to deprecate/archive the old portal and build something newer, either with Indico or another software that allowed the community to organize themselves and their own events - and of course, have links to resources? it might be worth thinking broader - maybe having US LoCos be regional, for example, and to have groups that could be based on interests (robotics, data, flavors, etc.). I think we have the chance to build on the LoCos that have stayed active, but make something that can be more flexible and adaptable that won’t just become static and outdated in a few years.

3 Likes
#14

Thanks @kewisch for the response… very much appreciated as we got an idea of the efforts in concise form :slight_smile:

@madhens I was also thinking about the same thing as broadening out the aspects of loco ecosystem… in my mind the thoughts are running as below:

  1. Add this discussion to the community council agenda and have a call for members to join the loco council (requirements being only 2 of them broadly, one being an Ubuntu member and two having interest in local communities)

  2. Once the loco council is reinstated have a loco council research committee active and solicit feedback from the larger community as well as open up discussion on updating and migrating the now unmaintained loco portal.

  3. Once that’s done evaluate the feedback and also migrate the loco portal to indico or any other thing suitable, and launch it with a new charter.

  4. Create a new category in this platform like loco teams where experienced users can create their own team topics, upload reports, hold discussions etc.

  5. Regarding loco team verification or reverification process, once the loco team is verified, launchpad sends out an email every 2 years to self extend themselves and once the mail is triggered, loco teams would start a thread of why they are self extending and what are their next 2 years broad plans.

The loco council will do a cross verification by:

  1. Contacting the loco team 1 month after they are self extended

  2. Run an automated health checker script to get an overview of the compliance of guidelines 1 month before self extension and 1 month after self extension… (drawing my inspiration from lintian here :slight_smile:)

Just my humble opinion here. :slight_smile:

1 Like
#15

@madhens originally when the loco concept started US loco was regional with different teams encompassing inside the US loco team umbrella …

@rexbouwense and his Ubuntu Arizona team is an example. :slight_smile:

The other team which was like this was the Ubuntu India loco team and unfortunately right now it’s no longer active.

#16

@madhens we can have a specific interest group as a loco too, interesting idea :slight_smile:

In the same way as Linux user groups regionally.

@tcarrondo, @torsten.franz would love to have your opinion on this discussion as an active locos at present as I remember there was Ubuntu-eu team when ubucon Europe was held in 2018.

#17

We started the Research group because almost nobody wanted to join the Loco Council. We thought that something new might have to be started. Unfortunately, the group never really got into productive work, which is why no report was produced.

If there are now enough people who want to take on the task of the Loco Council, then this is very welcome from my point of view. Then we should continue. The role of the council can also be changed if needed.

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Local Communities Research Committee
#18

@torsten.franz totally agreed… like the loco research committee being an extended arm of the council.

Well, regarding interest, i am sure there are more people interested in the loco ecosystem like me :slight_smile:

Btw does anyone know when is the next community council meeting scheduled?

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#19

At the moment we have no meeting scheduled. But we can put it on the Community Council mailing list so that we can make a decision there, if that is what is wanted.

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#20

@torsten.franz

Yes, thanks, I had already mailed the community council regarding the same. Will bump the mailing list thread now!

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