That would be great. I’d like to help and finally also get Ubuntu Mauritius as a verified LoCo team.
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@ishwon CC mailing list is here
community-council@lists.ubuntu.com
And the archives are available to the list members here
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Aargh! I subscribed… only to realise minutes later that it is a private mailing list, then I read more about the Council here: What is the Ubuntu Community Council
I have taken up the matter on the loco-contacts mailing list too here:
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Have bumped up this bug and added ubuntu locoteams as an affected project and have assigned it to myself.
Any comments or suggestions are welcome 
For anyone who is interested in automated scripts of verification/reverification process and general loco council process automation below is the code of locolint or lintco started 10 years ago
https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-lococouncil/locolint/trunk/files
Greetings @bhavi,
I wanted to inject some energy into this discussion as the revitalization of the LoCos is a major focus of our team as @kewisch noted. The LoCo portal is quite old and has definitely become a bit of a ghost town. It has also been tagged by our IS folks for decommission later this year as it’s running on dated infrastructure.
As you and the other folks in this thread have mentioned, a lot has changed since the portal was first put into place. Discourse has become the de facto Ubuntu conversation space and Indico is quickly becoming the go-to event planning spot. I’m in agreement that we can very likely provide the same resources as the old LoCo portal and more using the tools we currently have in place.
I think now is the time to act, so I’d love to hear everyone’s thoughts and start some conversations on what we’d like the future of the LoCos to look like! 
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thank @aarinprisk for adding energy to the discussion and offering the existing or new tools for loco portal.
@bhavi maybe we can have a session/workshop at our next coming Ubuntu Summit in Riga to discuss and summarize it with the Community Council?
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Hello
I have a question for you, do you know anything about the LoCo Teams re-approval process? I see that this was what I was mentioning to you, since 2019 the process stopped and we did not see any more reapprovals from the LoCo Teams
I was checking the Wiki but I see that there is nothing new since then, in Colombia we want to apply to the renewal of the LoCo.
Do you know what we can do?
The Ubuntu-US-AZ Team required a re-verification in December of 2021. I got the ball rolling by sending an E-mail to the Community Council (community-council@lists.ubuntu.com) requesting guidance. We eventually got re-verified. Since there is still no active LoCo Council, and we need to be re-verified in December of this year, we will follow the same procedure. I am not sure how many active LoCo Teams there are waiting for re-verification, but if enough LoCo Teams start prodding the Community Council perhaps we can get some action.
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I second this… we can have a workshop on this in Riga and have all like-minded people at one place to discuss while liasing the community council to create a charter and start working on this as I personally believe local communities are the lifeline of any opensource community at the grassroot level.
+1 for this…
@aaronprisk: Thanks for keeping the discussion alive…
Personally I feel we can take down the loco portal as the legacy one and move it to here in a structured manner like how the ubuntu membership board handles the membership applications at present.
Just an idea… so it’s imperative that we need to have a session in Riga for brainstorming
Would welcome your thoughts on the same.
Regards,
Bhavi
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Hola!
En este momento, lamentablemente el equipo ya no está activo 
Puedes contribuir con tus ideas a esta discusión para reiniciar el consejo de LoCo
Saludos!
Bhavi
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A start point would be to get the feedback of existing active loco teams as to how would they like to see the loco ecosystem evolve and the loco council evolve and then go further.
Just an idea.
@fenris @sukso96100 @diogoconstantino @jhosman @rexbouwense and other loco team members watching this discussion…
As active loco teams in the Asian European and the American region would like to ask you a set of questions as below
-
What do you think about the existing loco team structure and the ecosystem before the loco council got inactive?
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Do you think loco teams should be based on interest groups like LUGs for instance or a more regional approach would do?
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As an active loco team what are your major pain points in reaching out to the community and how do you think an active loco council can help in this regard or do you prefer having a decentralised board like the ubuntu membership board which is based on region wise supervised by the community council?
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What are your thoughts for improvements on the loco portal which is already unmaintained? Is it possible to use this space in a structured manner to evaluate loco teams and other related work as the membership board does at present?
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How should the loco team verification process be in your point of view? Autorenewal after every 2 years with the council doing regular health checks or something else which is more effective as a process?
This is just a start and a suggestive questionnaire with open endedness.
Everyone is welcome to pitch in with their thoughts on the same
Regards
Bhavi
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Excellent place to start. Things have long passed the patch or band-aid stage and probably require a major overhaul. A LoCo Council that meets 2-4 times a year can still oversee regional councils if that is decided to be the way to go. I am not sure that you want to put that responsibility on the Community Council. It could still set minimum standards and provide guidance to the LoCo’s. If a LoCo meets that minimum standard it should be automatically verified. Regular health checks could be performed by the regional council eliminating the requirement that the LoCo prepare and submit a re-verification application every two years. Not sure what the standards should be (so many team meetings and so many events conducted in a time-frame to be determined.
The Ubuntu-US-AZ Team is still using the LoCo Portal and of course is willing to use any format that is decided upon. Since it is not maintained and has some bugs, something new is required. However, we do not need something that will require additional work from the LoCo’s. We have two meetings, 4 separate Ubuntu Hours, and two plus Installfests/Workshops per month. All of these are put in the Portal and all of these require input for our monthly report which we have been saddled with as well.
Comparing LUG’s and LoCo’s is like comparing apples and oranges. LoCo’s promote and attempt to expand the use of Ubuntu in their area as well assist Ubuntu users with their problems. LUG’s do basicly the same thing but their interest is in Linux OS’s not just Ubuntu. At least that is how I understand it.
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Good food for thought here… thanks!
Firstly regarding the unmaintained loco portal… how about shifting the entire ecosystem to a platform which is regularly used (like this platform) where one can discuss about things to do with other team members, roll out the minutes of meeting, schedule events etc?
Secondly the monthly report can be published internally on your team’s mailing list with a link to the regional team council and the loco council when a health check happens…
I like the idea personally, of having one’s own council (like the ubuntu Italian council) for autorenewal and the team council would then report to the loco council which would meet once in a month minimum to oversee (taking some load off the community council) and helping in other community reach out activities too, so that everything would be on autopilot mode (definitely would take some time to get there as of now )
Whilst i agree on the LUG based approach, how about having locos in a region based on specific interests focussing on application of Ubuntu in that specific field of interest? Just throwing some weight around here as I feel people would be motivated more in that sense that they can work on something that interests them using ubuntu whilst being in a specific region. One classic example that comes to my mind is the local ubuntu translations team for instance
Lastly, to wrap up a good start, do you think that all loco teams should be moderated instead of being open teams and the team council would decide to let an applicant join his team based on some minimum criteria, just to ensure that the loco team stays active?
Thanks!
Bhavi
Hi @bhavi Thanks for asking, I think thoes are great questions to think about. Here some of my thoughts
For the team structure, I think i haven’t been much interested in that. So I would skip on that…
If ecosystem means some online places where LoCo folks uses like LoCo portal, Ubuntu Wiki, I think it needs some change. It would be better if we can adapt other platforms that we’re currently using actively. such as…
- Discourse(where we’re now discussing about LoCo)
- Indico (events.canonical.com) - I think one of main LoCo activities would be their local in-person events. I’m trying out Indico for UbuCon Korea for now, and I think it can replace current LoCo Portal’s event feature. Although it has some legal issues to be reviewed by Canonical (mostly data privacy issues i guess) and needs some guidance on using the platform - as it has preety a lot of feature then we might think.
Form of LUG or Ubuntu User community would be something easy approach for new or resurrecting LoCo. Then if they want, they can try to expand area to technical or no-node contribution and career realted sutff. Guidanced would need to be provided if they needs some help on that.
One thing I’ve been doing for few recent years was reaching out other LoCo’s in Asia. What I first tried reach folks out was contacting them with email found on LoCo portal. Which was pretty difficult there were mostly no response when i tried to reach out people via email, because most contact info on LoCo portal or LoCo’s Launchpad was outdated or LoCo folk’s inbox were already full of other mails and spams. I was able to reach out folks in alternative communication anyway. Which was usually Facebook, Twitter or Telegram. - So What active LoCo Council would need to do or help with would be at least keep the contact info of LoCos updated. and with some alternative contact info other then email and IRC would be also glad
I think we would still need LoCo portal to provide a place for people to find their LoCo in their region. But, It does need some update or even rebuild. Current LoCo portal isn’t just outdated, But it’s also not really easy to add some entry or make some changes. (such as when adding new event and its venue entry)
I think the verification would still need some process to review and approve LoCo’s application. So that for new LoCo, LoCo Council can check if they exists, active, who’s in the team and what they do. And for existing LoCo, We can keep in touched with them and keep their informaiton updated.
But, I think the LoCo verification/recerification process also needs some change. Just like the current latest Ubuntu Membership application process, We can consider using discourse to let LoCo folks submit their application much easier. And if we can also do reviewing application and making decision on discourse. That would be also great, because we can do the process with asynchromous way. and it’s easier for LoCo organiers then IRC interview or submitting application through Launchpad Bug.
And for the form of application. I think we can keep using the same form for LoCos applying verification for first time. But for re-verification a simpler questionnaire with some couple of questions would be good (such as Contact person update, LoCo organizer list update, links to past activities, overall plans for next 2 years and more if we need) - During reaching LoCo organizers in Asia, I found that most folks are busy with their work. If we can make the process easier and straighforward, It would be helpful to less burden them.
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Thanks @sukso96100 for the detailed thoughts
Regarding ubuntu user group, it’s a great idea and I have a question here
Does the ubuntu user group represent a loco team or will it be a part of the loco team?
Also, i agree on the loco portal to be a self managed restful interface and the first job of the loco council would be to mine the existing data and update them 
Also +1 for using discourse for reverification purposes but I still believe once the loco council verifies a loco, the reverification can be automated.
Please add any more ideas if you have
That brings me to another question. What do you think should be the motivation behind a loco team applying to the loco council to be a verified loco?
@aaronprisk @kewisch @torsten.franz we would love to hear the community council/canonical point of view also on the above question regarding the what should be the motivation for a loco team to get verified.
Regards,
Bhavi
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