Connecting users to LoCo's via IRC

[Jonathan Hitchcock]

Hi,

Firstly, the Ubuntu-ZA loco team had a meeting on IRC this morning,
and we came out very much in favour of automatically redirecting South
African users to #ubuntu-za. We have built up the channel and the
community around it, and we feel we would be able to support and
"conscript" newbies to the LoCo if they did come in there: something
that is less likely to happen if they go to the big nameless #ubuntu.

On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 1:18 PM, Jorge O. Castro<jorge at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> I've been mulling ways on implementing this. Someone kindly reminded
> me to consider the ramifications of this to the IRC team, etc. so I
> think proposing to autospawn channels for every country code would get
> me killed.

We discussed this, and one idea was to have some sort of registry for
LoCo teams?  Basically, certain locales can be mapped to the IRC
channels for the relevant LoCo teams, and any unmatched locale can go
to a catchall (currently #ubuntu, but maybe #ubuntu-welcome or
whatever?).  Another advantage of this is that it gets around any
assumptions about where the LoCo team lives, or wants newcomers.  For
example, if a LoCo team's #ubuntu-CC channel has evolved into
something other than a support channel, they wouldn't want newbies in
there - they would be able to register #ubuntu-CC-help as their
locale's default channel.  Another use-case would be for locales with
a very high population:  if the overflooding of #ubuntu *is* a result
of it being the default channel (although it's not conclusive that it
is), then setting a locale's default channel to their own one could
have the same effect on them.

-Jonathan