On Sat, Jul 2, 2011 at 2:52 PM, Alan Bell <[email protected]> wrote: > On 30/06/11 17:48, Paul Tagliamonte wrote: >> >> OK, So, let's clarify and get back on track: > > good idea >> >> Who's got more to add to this? >> -Paul >! > me! > > ok, so that is some objections and some solutions, what I was missing was > the problem. After making a complete and utter idiot of myself whilst trying > to find out what the problem was I now think I do understand it better. > It *isn't* just about un-uglifying http://loco.ubuntu.com/teams/ because > even if that was perfectly sorted it would still look like an ugly huge page > of links to read. > It *isn't* about an obsessive compulsive need to rename everything in line > with ISO 3166-1-alpha-2 country code elements (although I would totally > sympathize if it was, hence me being rather pedantic about "UK" vs "GB") > It *is* about helping people new to Ubuntu to find their local team. > > I didn't get this until I read the UDS session notes here: > http://summit.ubuntu.com/uds-o/meeting/community-o-loco-directory/ > and listened to the audio of the two sessions here: > http://mirrors.tumbleweed.org.za/uds-o/2011-05-09-09-55-community-o-loco-directory.ogg > http://mirrors.tumbleweed.org.za/uds-o/2011-05-10-09-55-community-o-loco-portal.ogg > > As an aside, there are a few different use-cases for loco.ubuntu.com that I > didn't know about before listening. I originally thought it was just > supposed to be a series of microsites for the LoCo teams, and I didn't think > it did this particularly well because I kept ending up on global lists of > events and meetings, I was always accidentally "escaping" from the team I > was on. However some people really do want to browse it and see events and > stuff going on everywhere in the world, this is totally cool, I just never > realised that was the point. The new "my teams" page > http://loco.ubuntu.com/teams/me goes a long way to improve my "microsite" > use-case for the system. > > So the point of this exercise is to allow better navigation to "your" LoCo > team from a starting point of *not* knowing what it is called and there are > exceptions and complications all over the place which make that harder than > it sounds. I don't know who organised the planet into countries, but they > didn't do a very good job of it. > > I think the map on the home page of loco.ubuntu.com is a great start, it > allows you to visually select where you are in the world, but then it falls > down as it just links to an anchor on the big /teams page and doesn't really > filter out any of the stuff I don't want to see, furthermore it basically > dumps me at a list of 46 teams in Europe to trawl through, what I want it to > do is give me a map of my continent, then I click my country and it tells me > what is going on there. Having the 46 teams in a slightly more logical order > (ISO codes are not massively intuitive) really won't make a heap of > difference, I still want a map. > > Making 5 clickable maps that shows 152 teams in the right countries and > maintaining it could be quite a bit of work, but in the words of Bob the > Builder and Barak Obama "We can do it!" > > I have been messing about with a prototype here > http://libertus.co.uk:8000/europe/ (running on my laptop at the wrong end of > an ADSL line so it will seem slow - and might be turned off) > It uses an SVG map from wikimedia commons which has all the country objects > with the id matching the ISO code (except it uses "uk" when it should use > "gb" technically . . .) I hacked together some code that displays a popup > window with some HTML for the country listing the relevant teams, which > might include nearby teams or language specialist teams as appropriate to > the local situation. > > The thing is a bit hard coded and experimental at the moment (view source or > grab lp:~alanbell/loco-directory/maps to see how it works) I need to add a > field for the ISO country code to the country object in the loco directory > to get this generating the per-country information directly from the > database. The thing would need a full list of the teams below the map for > accessibility reasons and those using browsers that don't do SVG (I have no > idea if it works in Internet Explorer). > > I think there are probably maps on wikimedia commons appropriate to the > other continents, (please go find them) I am going to focus on getting > Europe near-perfect, if other people want to join in, especially to fix the > rest of the world then lets collaborate on it in the #ubuntu-website channel > on freenode. > > Even if we can make this work it doesn't mean that tidying up the LoCo names > is a bad idea in itself, there is a lot of inconsistency there and > consistency is good. I just think this is a more useful way of solving the > underlying problem that has been identified. > > Alan.
+1 Alan! A picture is worth a thousand words, no matter how they are sorted. Valorie, Ubuntu-US-WA team -- loco-contacts mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/loco-contacts
