[RFC] LEP#1, Standardize the LoCo Team Display Names

[Alan Bell]

On 30/06/11 17:48, Paul Tagliamonte wrote:
> OK, So, let's clarify and get back on track:
good idea
> Who's got more to add to this?
> -Paul
me!

ok, so that is some objections and some solutions, what I was missing 
was the problem. After making a complete and utter idiot of myself 
whilst trying to find out what the problem was I now think I do 
understand it better.
It *isn't* just about un-uglifying http://loco.ubuntu.com/teams/ because 
even if that was perfectly sorted it would still look like an ugly huge 
page of links to read.
It *isn't* about an obsessive compulsive need to rename everything in 
line with ISO 3166-1-alpha-2 country code elements (although I would 
totally sympathize if it was, hence me being rather pedantic about "UK" 
vs "GB")
It *is* about helping people new to Ubuntu to find their local team.

I didn't get this until I read the UDS session notes here:
http://summit.ubuntu.com/uds-o/meeting/community-o-loco-directory/
and listened to the audio of the two sessions here:
http://mirrors.tumbleweed.org.za/uds-o/2011-05-09-09-55-community-o-loco-directory.ogg
http://mirrors.tumbleweed.org.za/uds-o/2011-05-10-09-55-community-o-loco-portal.ogg

As an aside, there are a few different use-cases for loco.ubuntu.com 
that I didn't know about before listening. I originally thought it was 
just supposed to be a series of microsites for the LoCo teams, and I 
didn't think it did this particularly well because I kept ending up on 
global lists of events and meetings, I was always accidentally 
"escaping" from the team I was on. However some people really do want to 
browse it and see events and stuff going on everywhere in the world, 
this is totally cool, I just never realised that was the point. The new 
"my teams" page http://loco.ubuntu.com/teams/me goes a long way to 
improve my "microsite" use-case for the system.

So the point of this exercise is to allow better navigation to "your" 
LoCo team from a starting point of *not* knowing what it is called and 
there are exceptions and complications all over the place which make 
that harder than it sounds. I don't know who organised the planet into 
countries, but they didn't do a very good job of it.

I think the map on the home page of loco.ubuntu.com is a great start, it 
allows you to visually select where you are in the world, but then it 
falls down as it just links to an anchor on the big /teams page and 
doesn't really filter out any of the stuff I don't want to see, 
furthermore it basically dumps me at a list of 46 teams in Europe to 
trawl through, what I want it to do is give me a map of my continent, 
then I click my country and it tells me what is going on there. Having 
the 46 teams in a slightly more logical order (ISO codes are not 
massively intuitive) really won't make a heap of difference, I still 
want a map.

Making 5 clickable maps that shows 152 teams in the right countries and 
maintaining it could be quite a bit of work, but in the words of Bob the 
Builder and Barak Obama "We can do it!"

I have been messing about with a prototype here 
http://libertus.co.uk:8000/europe/ (running on my laptop at the wrong 
end of an ADSL line so it will seem slow - and might be turned off)
It uses an SVG map from wikimedia commons which has all the country 
objects with the id matching the ISO code (except it uses "uk" when it 
should use "gb" technically . . .) I hacked together some code that 
displays a popup window with some HTML for the country listing the 
relevant teams, which might include nearby teams or language specialist 
teams as appropriate to the local situation.

The thing is a bit hard coded and experimental at the moment (view 
source or grab lp:~alanbell/loco-directory/maps to see how it works) I 
need to add a field for the ISO country code to the country object in 
the loco directory to get this generating the per-country information 
directly from the database. The thing would need a full list of the 
teams below the map for accessibility reasons and those using browsers 
that don't do SVG (I have no idea if it works in Internet Explorer).

I think there are probably maps on wikimedia commons appropriate to the 
other continents, (please go find them) I am going to focus on getting 
Europe near-perfect, if other people want to join in, especially to fix 
the rest of the world then lets collaborate on it in the #ubuntu-website 
channel on freenode.

Even if we can make this work it doesn't mean that tidying up the LoCo 
names is a bad idea in itself, there is a lot of inconsistency there and 
consistency is good. I just think this is a more useful way of solving 
the underlying problem that has been identified.

Alan.

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