Loco Council, or an alternative idea of what it could be :)

[Jan Husar]

Hello,

just a few thoughts and hints,

I run a NGO focused on FLOSS for 3+ years now, and we indeed founded our 
LoCo and support the localization (l10n) into our language, same as in 
other projects.



A) some new ubuntu non for profit,

I can say that this is clearly a bad idea for couple of reasons, first 
the guys in canonical are paid to do the job, since most of the people 
are satisfied with it, I see no reason why to found a new thing. Second, 
  yo won't get recognition, since you will be something second in line 
and most of the supporters if any will go to the bigger "proper" 
community. Third, creating a lot of NGO and legal bodies about all of 
the projects won't help, I explain this later on

B) Materials, CDs etc,

Yes it's true that in some cases (maybe in a lot more than I know of) 
you have problems with the materials, which you think you should produce 
  yourself and then complaing about the financial issues. It is still 
possible to these, by national support for example my NGO made a good 
deal with local corporation office (like Sun and Ibm) and from this 
support we also promote Ubuntu (which Sun and Ibm won't do on the 
corporate level), since they are satisfied with our other works they 
don't care if we promote some other FLOSS related project.

C) NGO about floss

If you are truly ready to form and lead and NGO, then you should do it 
in couple of steps

  1. focus on FLOSS and make Ubuntu as huge part of the promotion and 
support. This way you can get a way more national support, maybe even 
international. If you are an EU country you should be able to get some 
financial support by community fund or FP7 by European Commission. If 
you are in US, you can for example try to get some help by the digital 
government society, http://www.dgsociety.org/newsletter_vol_10.php#grant
they are mapping fund raising and grant activities. If you are in some 
other countries you are able to get some fund raising and grants from 
number of project, for example transparency international or the Open 
Society Foundation. There are low of ways how to get some funding into 
the effort.

  2. Be part of the wider international community, and as well you can 
get a lot of support both in people and finances. As stated before I 
work in this sector for 3+ years and with the international effort there 
are projects who invites us into financial cooperation since they care 
what we are doing and what is happening here.


just a few thoughts


Jan