Improving LoCo participation in Ubuntu Open Week

[Jorge O. Castro]

Hi everyone!

At UDS we had a session on how to improve open week, and
overwhelmingly we decided that we're not making open week as
accessible to Local Teams as we should be. So this time, we're
announcing the dates for Open Week way earlier than before. The next
open week will be right after the Karmic release, from 2-6 November.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuOpenWeek/

One thing that has always bugged me about open week is that it's very
much me running around for a week finding people, filling up a grid,
and then that's it. Open Week has been very successful, but resting on
our laurels is never good, so I want to totally "open up" open week to
way more ideas and people.

We now have tons of time to get more new people involved and try out
different things. For example, right now the times picked for sessions
are very European/US centric, it would be cool if we could rally Local
Teams to have sessions in your own timezone, in different languages,
covering a vast array of topics. Remember that open week is meant for
normal users, so perhaps we can have more tutorial sessions, etc. etc.
Maybe your LoCo can run it's own open week as part of a greater
effort. We could have different workshops for people to concentrate
in, and generally become more involved instead of sitting in IRC
listening to someone drone on for hours. I would also like to see new
presenters and people to run sessions.

Since there are 24 hours in a day I have no doubt that for an entire
week we can have some one, some place, doing a session. The challenge
for us will be to keep it all running and maintain the high quality of
presentation that our users have come to expect from us.

Ideas and brainstorming place is here:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuOpenWeek/Prep

Feel free to start throwing all your crazy ideas in there. If you want
to be deeply involved in planning, holler at me. Please keep
/UbuntuOpenWeek untouched, let's do all the work in /Prep, and then
push out to the main page when we're ready. Rock on!

-- 
Jorge Castro
jorge (at) ubuntu.com
External Project Developer Relations
Canonical Ltd.