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

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Sat, Jul 2, 2011 at 9:05 PM, Valorie Zimmerman
<valorie.zimmerman at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>
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>

Sorry on the lag from me on this, I've been relaxing :)

I think this is a great showing of how I imagined the RFC / LEP
working out. I think right now, that's looking pretty darn great.

Any LD folks want to comment on this?

-Paul

-- 
All programmers are playwrights, and all computers are lousy actors.

#define sizeof(x) rand()
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