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 <[email protected]> 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 -- Ubuntu-us-ca mailing list [email protected] Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-us-ca
