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

[Valorie Zimmerman]

On Sat, Jul 2, 2011 at 2:52 PM, Alan Bell <alanbell at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> 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.

+1 Alan! A picture is worth a thousand words, no matter how they are sorted.

Valorie, Ubuntu-US-WA team