[Ubuntu-US-CA] Our Shared LoCo Team Identity

[Elizabeth Krumbach]

For the first three items in your email I'm not really convinced that
we need a consolidated message coming from "the team" when it comes to
specifics on marketing and whether we say "GNU" when we talk about
Linux and Ubuntu. We are a very diverse group of people, we have
different reasons for participating and different convictions when it
comes to open source. Having materials available that we can all use
to help us loosely explain the basics of open source and how Ubuntu
fits in would be great but I think it would be a mistake to force
everyone on the team into the same message with the same open source
political views. I have never seen a LoCo team do this to their
members and anticipate that it would only cause friction and
alienation.

I think it's also worth noting that there are very few teams in the
world which are actually small enough that it's easy for all the
members to get together in a physical place for a meeting, California
is the rule, not the exception, LoCo teams are big (I know you all
think New Hampshire is tiny, but it actually takes over 2 hours to
drive from south to north, that's pretty far for a bi-weekly
meeting!).

On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 6:36 PM, Grant Bowman <grantbow at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> Going back to some conversations I have had with newcomers to
> understanding our team, sometimes I have tried to say I am with
> "Ubuntu California." What some newcomers hear when I say something
> like this (I have tried several ways of stating it) is that I am a
> Canonical employee. When I try to correct the assumptions they make I
> often get looks of suspicion as if I have tried to intentionally
> mislead them.  My intentions were not to mislead. This is why I
> believe using the term "Ubuntu California" has been harmful in
> representing our team.

The difference between "ubuntu-us-ca" and "Ubuntu California" is not
going to stop people from believing Ubuntu contributors are Canonical
employees. The problem is a fundamental misunderstanding of how open
source works and how Canonical fits into the Ubuntu community and this
misunderstanding is difficult to overcome without explaining it
directly (believe me, I've tried! no, I don't work for Canonical!).



> By far the most commonly used resources of our team are the mail list
> and IRC channel, both of which are (now) named ubuntu-us-ca.  I
> recommend the use of this name for all online presences with whatever
> additional pointers may also be used to direct traffic to our team
> resources.  Consistently using the same identifiers for our team
> resources will reduce errors and confusion.

Some quick history here will probably help:

When LoCo teams started they were pretty informal, teams grabbed names
and resources, Ubuntu Pennsylvania, for example, had users in
#ubuntu-pa, on launchpad the team was simply ~pennsylvania. As LoCo
teams grew there started to become conflicts with naming - "Ubuntu
Georgia" was both a country and a state, #ubuntu-pa should actually
belong to Ubuntu Panama (for those watching at home: Ubuntu CA is
Ubuntu Canada). The community decided upon formal naming standards for
the shared resources, which meant a push to get teams to start using
the format used for lists.ubuntu.com mailing lists for US teams, which
meant using ubuntu-us-ca - a name space which would always be reserved
in official resources for California in the United States.

I don't know that it was ever really meant to be the formal name of
the team when spoken (I find it a bit unwieldy for that), there aren't
any states in the US who use a domain which is ubuntu-CO-ST - instead
you have ubuntu-fl.org, nm.ubuntu-us.org, newyork-ubuntu.com,
ubuntupennsylvania.org, similarly all the teams I've worked with call
themselves by their state names. A domain name should be easy for
people to read and remember, and "Ubuntu-California.org" fits that and
is similar to what many other teams use. This has never been a problem
for any of the teams I work with, people just follow links to
resources (or do a google search for "virginia launchpad") to find
specific things.

-- 
Elizabeth Krumbach // Lyz // pleia2
http://www.princessleia.com