LoCo Teams and Developers

[Martin Owens]

Hey Jono,

On Wed, 2009-08-19 at 22:30 -0700, Jono Bacon wrote:
> Hi Everyone,
> 
> As part of my team's work, we are really keen to encourage more people 
> to get involved in Ubuntu development, and we are really keen to focus 
> on LoCo teams as a potential source development talent.

Local Community teams could really do with the development talent
themselves. Lack of developer time has contributed to
wiki-organisational-mania and a devaluation of the time people spend
working in them. Unless a team has full time members (mostly the
unemployed) or has some highly skilled social/administrative members,
it's not likely to get anywhere.

If we do manage to train up some developers, some of the first tasks
that need doing are improvements to local community services such as
offered by launchpad.

> From what we can tell though, not many developers are 
> participating with their LoCo teams. 

I can see this, we get a lot more systems administrators and general
folk that help out. Programmers are fairly rare, even the one's outside
of the Ubuntu community. It's hard enough just getting Canonical
developers to come and join the local community team.

But then is that not a problem with culture? I'd be interested to know
how to get more developers involved in the LoCo network.

Anyway, just some thoughts from my experiences running a team.
Programmers and Local Community seem like oil and water.

Martin,