[RFC] LEP#2, Local Community Teams vs. Locale Teams

[Chris Johnston]

Proposed-By: Chris Johnston <chrisjohnston at ubuntu.com>;
 Paul Tagliamonte <paultag at ubuntu.com>
Scope: All LoCo Teams, Worldwide
Status: Draft
Rational: Local Community Teams vs Locale Teams

Greetings,

Before we start, I'd like to make clear that this is in *no way* a
critisism of how steller teams, such as Ubuntu France or the Catalan
team are run.

We both have the utmost respect for how well-managed and run the teams
are, and look forward to their continued success. This is more of a
philosophical guideline on how it "should" be.

I would like to propose that we define what is already said in that a
LoCo Team (or Local Team) is a location based team (as meant by local)
and not a locale based team. It seems as though groups are forming
language based teams, and treating them as local teams. The scope of
the LoCo Team, and the LoCo Team Directory is that of users in a
common location getting together as a community, and doing things as a
community. The point of a locale based team is not properly able to
support having events and gatherings under the scope of the LoCo
Community.

The proposal further states that locale based teams be moved into
teams of their own, which can be made into a parent team of the LoCo,
if all members of the LoCo are engaged in such activities.

Teams like ubuntu-eo and ubuntu-fr seem to cover all countries that
speak a given language, however, I'd hardly call an activity in
Belgium local to an activity in Canada.

In short, I'd like to propose that LoCo teams try to stay within
geopolitical bounds.

As a solution, it would be nice to have "super-teams" that allow
cross-team collaboration for LoCos, and LoCo Teams be members of this
"super-team." This would look something like:

ubuntu-language-XX
  +-> ubuntu-NN
  +-> ubuntu-MM

With ubuntu-language-XX being the "super-team" and "ubuntu-NN" as well
as "ubuntu-MM" being the LoCo Teams.

In this situation, the orginizational unit "ubuntu-language-ISO_CODE"
would not be a LoCo Team it's self, but would allow teams to share
resources, such as support channels and support forums, while not
trying to tackle more then one country per ISO code. This should
actually provide a higher level of support from both the community, as
more people will be focusing in one area, rather than a few people
focusing on multiple different areas, as well as from Canonical, in
the form of 6-month CD allocations, and other LoCo team care packages.


Respectfully Submitted for comments,
Chris Johnston and Paul Tagliamonte