Time to regroup and move on.

Wed May 25 08:09:07 UTC 2005

executive summary:  It's time to wake up this group!

I was at the Ubuntu Community Council meeting earlier today, and the
first portion of the meeting was done by some LoCo team contacts
people and it was really nice to see what some other groups are doing.
 And it got me mad:  as an Ubuntu Canadian user to think that after
many months we haven't really done that much, haven't managed to even
make it as an official recognized  LoCo team
(http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/LoCoTeamList  clearly shows that we
are not in the top table yet).  Personally I find this kind of
pathetic considering the number of Canadian users I see in the  Ubuntu
community, including some rather high profile ones.  And here I'm NOT
pointing fingers at anyone:  I think it is clearly a group failure,
and I will take the blame as much as anyone.

With that said, it's time to move on and get our collective butt in
gear.  I'll list in this e-mail various aspects to the Canadian Loco
effort.  For each of them, it would be nice if people who are or have
been involved to raise their hand and tell everyone what's going on. 
The point of the exercise if to put everyone on the same page to get
us moving forward and to understand exactly who is doing what, and who
can do what.   And if I forget something, please don't hesitate to add
it.

By the way, as a starting point, here is what officially is a Ubuntu
LoCo team based in UDU discussions a few weeks back: 
http://udu.wiki.ubuntu.com/LoCoTeamProcess

So here we go with my list:

1)  mailing list (http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-ca)
  Obviously it is working :)  Who has administrative access to it? 
And out of curisity, how many users do we have?

2) IRC channel (#ubuntu-ca)
  Also working; but awfully quiet most of the time I'm on it (but I
tend to be on it late evenings west coast time). Who is channel op? 
It's nice to see the logger is running
(http://threeducks.net/ubuntu-ca-log/).  Who is doing that?

3) Contact person.
  We need one, period.  This is the person that represent us to the
Ubuntu world, and on the other side, the person the "world" talk to. 
Important point: it is NOT a leader job; it is just the contact person
to make sure information flow in and out between the LoCo team and the
rest of the Ubuntu community.

Right now we have a voting page, with one person on it (Alex):
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/CanadianLocoContactVote

Alex?  Do you still want the job?  Anyone else wants to throw their
hat in the ring?

As long as we don't have a contact person, from an Ubuntu point of
view  we simply show up as a very disorganized bunch of people.

4) Leader.  Do we want one?  Do we need one?
The wiki page is :
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/CanadianTeamLeadershipVote

With 2 names on the voting ballot: Andrew and Alex.  Once again, what
are your status you two about this?  And anyone else wants to get in
there?

Personally I don't think we need that job, but that's only my personal
opinion. A community leadership  for a group like this one is not a
function of a specific leader, but is very much a function of various
individuals putting the effort into the portions of the community and
getting things done. It should pretty clear to anyone what needs to be
done.  It's not rocket science here, but only a Canadian LoCo team.
But maybe people feel more confortable with a "leader", who may or may
not be the same person than our contact person.

5) The web site.
 Right now we have two:  ubuntu-ca.org (using Mathias's server), and
ubuntu.ca.  We cannot go on with 2 web sites.  We are a small enough
group, we simply cannot waste our energy into 2 sites;  we got to
channel our effort into one, and have the DNS entry of the other url
point to it. It look kind of amateur to have 2 web sites.   Beside
figuring out a team contact person, I personally think that's should
be our 2nd main short term goal to get our house into order in the
eyes of the world.

So who is behind, and have access to the content of both web sites? 

Looking tonight at both sites, they are both very much "work in
progress", but it seems ubuntu.ca has had work done on it recently,
while ubuntu-ca.org pretty much look like it has been stale for all of
May.  I was talking recently to Myles Braithwaite about the "not being
updated" planet-ca, and it seems that recently he was still waiting to
have access to ubuntu-ca.org to update the planet.

Personal opinion:  at this point in time ubuntu.ca seems to be more
"alive" and seems to have more potential; but ubuntu-ca.org is on a
server maintained officially by Ubuntu which could be nice on the long
run (and could be cheaper financially for some individual in the
group).

6) Ubuntu-ca French/Francais?

  I see that most of the Canadian wiki pages have been translating in
french; nice job!   I have a vague recollection of someone offering
his service to the list way back when.  Anyone has anything to add?

7)  UbuntuInuktitut
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/UbuntuInuktitut

  anything else to add?  The wiki page seems pretty complete for the
status of this project.  I still think it is a crazy project, but in
my books it gets top mark for originality and canadian content :)

8) Wiki
 Probably the most visible aspect of the Canadian effort up to now. 
Appears to be in pretty good shape.   And since it is a wiki, anyone
can help making sure on a semi-regular basis that things are correct
and in order.

9)  Contacting LUGs
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/ContactingLUGS

bare on details and volunteers, but should logically be a large
portion of the job of a Canadian LoCo: to promote the distro at a
community level starting with the LUGs; that's why we are here.

Ok, it's getting late, and this e-mail is getting long.    Let's talk
about all this, let's get ourself in gear to make it an active
community once again.  And let's keep it simple for now concentrating
on a small number of core activities/services so that we do a good
active job at them before we start expanding into other activities.

And very soon  we should once again advertize ourself to various
Ubuntu outlets (forum, mailing list).  I wonder how many Ubuntu
Canadians users out there don't even know that they have access to
this community?   And to bring new blood in here could be a very good
thing for the level of energy of the group.

We have a good foundation for this LoCo group, with a lot of the major
pieces already in place.  Personally I think we just need to get
things moving in the right direction to make it officially an active
(and useful one!) part of the Ubuntu community.

Daniel

-- 
Daniel Robitaille