Re-Energizing LoCo Teams

[YoBoY]

Hi Everyone,

I'm not perhaps the right person to talk about locoteams here because 
everyone thinks my team is not like the others (French team). But we are 
a normal locoteam, we are the team for all the French users.

You are right, lot of people from my team are demotivated. Why?

Canonical/Ubuntu is focused on Ubuntu Phone this year, we can't promote 
that, it's not for the average users. And how can we talk about 
something we can't even try. It's not like we have all a spare phone or 
tablet to play with it.

Canonical added Amazon last year, we can't promote that, and we have a 
hard time to try to explain why you have done that. You can't imagine 
how many motivated members we have lost with that.

Canonical/Ubuntu wants new developers and contributors for the project, 
we can't help you on that too. Actual French developers and contributors 
don't participate on our locoteam, don't register to our mailing lists. 
To have some of them (thanks to the past real UDS for letting me meet 
them) on our events I always have to ping them, mail them, call them, 
and it's time consuming and very frustrating.

Now, we don't have enough people to lead, to organise events, to make 
things work. New members want to participate but don't want 
responsibilities.


## Re-energizing
You want to re-energize LoCo teams. Thank you for that, we clearly need 
help and new motivated members.

You can start by a call to all the actual developers and contributors to 
join the locoteam near them, on internet or in real life, and to help 
them organize some events (virtual or real) like the next global jam, 
localised open weeks,….

You can also give us some food, some premium news, some press release. 
When ubuntu announce something we are on the front line for the foreign 
media, and we don't have clear answers to give them.

You can fix the amazon-gate to regain the confidence of lot of people 
(and mine). I don't expect you to remove it, but a proposition is to 
just add a clear notification (translatable) for a new user to force him 
to read and accept the online searches.

You can help us with material too. I don't ask to give us this material. 
But for example, the great tablecloth, why can't we buy more of it. Or 
the lanyards, why can't we buy some at a better rate than the canonical 
shop. Same thing for the stickers. Having to make our own material is 
time consuming, is not always with the best price for the quantity 
needed, and we surely can do better on that.

You can showcase more all the great work done by the locoteams on the 
*.ubuntu.com domains and not only the events who already are on the loco 
portal. For example, the foreign resources offered by the locoteams who 
have to take in charge the support in their language, why these 
resources are not presented to a visitor coming to help.ubuntu.com or to 
community.ubuntu.com on a side box for example. These resources for my 
team represent the biggest part of our work, and they are so hard to 
find on the ubuntu.com domains.


I stop here with my non-constructive email, and I hope I have not hurt 
someone’s feelings with my criticism. I'm sorry if I have.


Best regards.

Philippe
-- 
http://ubuntu-fr.org/
Communauté francophone des utilisateurs d'Ubuntu
Président de l'association ubuntu-fr