AU LoCo.

[Melissa Draper]

> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: 	AU LoCo.
> Date: 	Mon, 3 May 2010 10:17:14 +0100
> From: 	Alan Pope <alan at popey.com>
> To: 	Melissa Draper <melissa at meldraweb.com>
> CC: 	loco-council <loco-council at lists.ubuntu.com>
> 
> 
> 
> Hello Melissa,
> 
> We have a few questions regarding the Australian Team before we can
> finish the Re-Approval process.
> 
> In the past there were meetings very often ( monthly ), and in the
> last two years, it looks like you have had three. That's less one a
> release. As a sidenote, you should also edit the main wiki page to
> reflect that you no longer have meetings on a monthly basis.

The team has an agenda page to which agenda items can be added to at any
time by any person. Meetings used to be called regularly, even if there
was no agenda.

The members who frequented these meetings began to get bored with them
and some began hijacking them to discuss things like the latest sporting
event, and so they were put on hiatus and never really took off again
even though the hijacking members have moved on.

We do have small bursts of enthusiasm for meetings occasionally and one
gets called but for the most part they have not tended to be much more
than casual discussion by people who were around at the time discussing
things casually anyway.

> This is usually an indicator of members loosing interest in
> contributing to the LoCo. One way this happens is when people feel
> that there is a lack of activity in their area. Another way is
> personal conflicts on the team.

Yes, to a degree there has been a of loss of interest, as demonstrated
with the hiatus of the meetings, but I feel that in reality it is more a
migration of interest to being a primarily social group, rather than one
of flurried activism.

Speaking for the broader Linux community in Sydney specifically, since
moving here a few years ago and becoming involved in the LUG, I have
seen a rapid departure from a participating audience to a primarily
consumer audience, which has made a huge difference to the dynamic that
group, with a dramatic decrease in financial membership and speaker
availability but essentially a plateau of attendance.

Australia doesn't have much in the way of appropriate activities when
compared to what the EU and US have; and we are a long-haul flight from
everywhere. We have 2 major open source events for the whole year; LCA
and OSDC. Non-open source events at which promotion of Ubuntu would be
appropriate have been incredibly scarce over the past 2 years. The
Australian CeBIT did not hold it's OpenCeBIT exhibition last year due to
the GFC, and for the same reason, an Education Expo which normally
provides 3 opportunities nationally was cancelled. 

There has been a small amount of conflict in the past few months, almost
exclusively since the ReApproval process was initiated; I believe this
was because some felt that the ReApproval process in and of itself was a
sign of team failure. A couple of people began campaigning for a
national 3-tier council structure; a national council, state councils
and city councils. The consensus was that such a restructure was not
feasible or appropriate, and the campaign was withdrawn.

> Your membership is also on a slow decrease
> 
> 2006 - 81
> 2007 - 46
> 2008 - 38
> 2009 - 38
> 
> So far this year:
> 
> 2010 - 13

I believe the term "decrease" is a little bit disingenuous here. To me,
the numbers above indicate a plateau as the prior 2 years stayed steady.

>   * In what ways are you reaching out to other population centers? Have
> the other population centers remained active?

Assuming you mean locally rather than internationally; Sydney, Melbourne
and Adelaide have traditionally been the primary areas for activity.

Releases tend to coincide with the Sydney LUG monthly meetings (last
Fridays of the month), which have made it difficult recently to organise
release parties and the LUG meetings themselves tend to be the release
party in a rather loose definition of the term. The Sydney exhibitions
have been fairly hard hit in terms of cancellations meaning there has
not been much in the past year or so.

Melbourne Ubuntu folk seem to be quite involved with Computerbank (an
org that recycles old PCs) and have in the past handed out large numbers
of CDs for Software Freedom Day. 

Adelaide has over the past few years seen activity with Paul Schulz
promoting at a variety of smaller community events within the Mawson
Lakes region.

Over the past year Brisbane has seen a surge of activity with a few
social events occurring there. I anticipate that as LCA will be there
next January the Brisbane LUG in general should see a surge of interest
that should drive some activity towards the Brisbane Ubuntu community.

>   * In what ways have you adapted the way you lead this team to
> Australia, in particular?

As a broadly distributed and sparse population, the primary activities
of the team are the mailing list and IRC channels where the focus is
socialising. The past few years with the GFC impacting on potential
events has seen the team drift organically to being a primarily social
group. Small pockets of members in the capital cities gather for
releases.

>   * Are there personal conflicts on the team, and if there have been,
> how have you resolved them?

I do not believe that there is an exceptional amount of personal
conflict within the team. There has been the occasional troll primarily
within the IRC community that has caused issues but firm moderation has
typically been successful in moving them on.

The recent debate about the 3-tier council proposal got a bit heated but
I do not believe it was a personal conflict at heart. People disagree
about things, and it was an incredibly ambitious proposal.

>   * In what ways are you attracting and maintaining new members to the LoCo?

This has been hard to do with a decrease in the opportunities for
attending or assisting with exhibition resources for LUGs and so forth.
Our membership, I believe, is stable but could benefit from an increase
in event attendance. I am hoping that the recent spurt of discussion
surrounding this ReApproval process translates in to this sort of
tangible activity.

Some LoCo members run a few CD distribution initiatives which help
members who still have atrociously low (as per .au standard) Internet
download quotas. Peter Baker burns and distributes at cost of materials
and P&H and has done so for a number of years now. Recently Jared Norris
has been offering to send folks CDs for free immediately following the
release of 10.04.

The expos that were cancelled last year seem to be happening this year,
and indeed I have been asked for help in acquiring pressed CDs for the
Sydney Education Expo which will be an inter-group collaborative booth
with groups such as participation from groups such as the Sydney LUG and
OLPC Australia. So... um... it'd be rather handy if we stayed approved
long enough to be able to do this for them :D

>   * How are roles shared out, and are they changed often enough to let
> others try the roles?

Privileges are given out as needs present themselves according to
enthusiasm and whether or not the volunteers have earned the trust
required. Those who show up out of the blue and ask for posting rights
to the site or demand operator access for the IRC channels because
someone in them ticked them off tend to be disappointed with the answer.

Anyone is able to call a meeting as I've regularly stated publicly to
the occasional person who has asked for meetings. A handful have
resulted from this so over the past few years, but the novelty seems to
wear off after the first try.

Our mailing list moderators have had a majority turnover in the past
year or so.

We have quite a number of people who are able to post to the website,
including 2 new admins within the past 6 months, and our google group
(which ties in to the mailman mailing list) has new moderators as of a
few weeks ago.

Our infrastructure is all Canonical hosted so nobody gets to try out
administering anything server related.

> Thanks Melissa!
> LoCo Council
> 


-- 
Melissa Draper

w: http://meldraweb.com & http://geekosophical.net