I'm completely biased, that is why I'm not going to say much. I'm just the moderator and I think we should just kick off with a quick introduction. We have different people here representing different projects and each of them is supposed to introduce their project within

say three minutes each or say five minutes, but we really need to hurry up because after that we want to have a discussion say around table where we discuss the things that work well in the one or other project and the things that don't. So I think we should just kick off with a brief introduction. All the people introduce

themselves quickly and then we get right into the distribution introductions. All right, ladies first. Good morning everybody. I'm Laura Tchaikovsky. I'm from Ireland but living in London at the present and I'll be representing the Ubuntu community.

Hello, I'm Kostas Koudaras. I'm here to represent the Open Source community, that's all. Hi everybody, I'm Stefano D'Acchioli and I represent here the Debian project. My name is Oliver Borger and I represent the Magaia project.

Hello everyone, I'm Beth Teradion. I'm from Zhenzhu. Good morning, I'm Jörg Simmon. I represent the Fedora project.

So go ahead, do you need your slides? So I'm going to talk about the Ubuntu community. For those of you who don't know about us, we're

pretty much large enough community at present. We're full of loco teams, it's how the community's broken up. So there are over 152 loco teams worldwide. That means every country or every city in the States has a loco team.

There's two ways of doing communities for us. We do it virtual way and real life way. So the real life way for us is through loco teams. The loco team's main point for their whole purpose is to do advocacy, translations, bug triaging, documentation or install fests or global jams. So they take part in local events, they organize their own events,

or they take part in the greater global community for the Ubuntu. So this is actually a community project that was totally driven by us. It's called loco.ubuntu.com and on there is a purpose resource for loco teams. They can put all their information, the wiki contact, the website information, forums, and we also put all of our events onto the next page.

So there's over 140, 152 teams worldwide. This was developed by Ubuntu loco team members and this was a feature that was added for us because people want to put all their resources on one page. So if I was traveling to France or Italy, I could look on the loco team page

and see what kind of events they're holding. We put local team events on there. We put international events. So we have an international event called an Ubuntu Hour and many teams meet up once a month for an hour in a coffee shop just chatting about Ubuntu. And it's quite nice and it's very friendly and very laid back. It's different from actually having a conference.

The next slide there is another event. We have global jams. We hold them twice a year in between our release cycle just before the next release candidate. We get together, we do translations, bug triaging, and just taking part in reporting bugs and getting people more involved in the Ubuntu community. So yes, that's what I actually aim for. We basically then approve them or unapprove

teams. They come forward to the local council, which I sit on, which is a board made up of six people and we're elected for a two-year term. This is my second term for being elected to it. And we basically help and guide teams if they need merchandise from Canonical. We have set up that they can get a conference pack if they're approved or unapproved they get

different gifts. Something we worked on about two years ago was to get them a gift, a once-off gift from Canonical that when they're approved they get a banner and a tablecloth, which may not seem very much but it makes them really kind of professional looking if they're going to conferences and taking part, which is quite nice. And finally, I think, yes, those are just

some links that I just said I'd put up that would help people if they were looking for things later on. And we basically get local team members to introduce the rest of their community into the greater global community. So we have Ubuntu learning, beginners teams, open days and user weeks where members from the local teams take part and maybe give a session how to get involved in the community, how to do bug documentation or triaging,

and they show that to their members because all our sessions are logged on IRC. And then we can send that link out to our members and say this is what was taken part if you couldn't make the IRC session. And we try and get people more and more involved in the greater global community. That's for me and I'll pass it on so you can get going.

Okay, so

I'm here to talk about the Omasusu ambassador program. Our program is not as well as developed as the other projects like Budur Fedora. The facts about the ambassador program is that we

have 165 ambassadors in 51 countries. We have a mailing list, but most of our ambassador issues are discussed in the marketing meetings. It's pretty easy to become an Omasusu ambassador

and that's something we would like to fix nowadays. Also, one of the bad things, fairly bad things that the program has is that unfortunately many people nowadays use the ambassador program in order as a starting point to enter the Omasus community.

The goals of the ambassador program. The goals of the ambassador program are very specific. The current goals act as an evangelist of the Omasusu

project to the public and actually you don't have to be an ambassador to do that. Mentor new users and contributors. Support Omasusu local events. Promote Omasusu

and contribution to the Omasusu project. Also having a lot of fun. Nowadays, me along with Richard Brown are working in reconstructing the Omasus program since we believe that we can make great improvements and make too much coffee and make this a better project so that people actually contribute more than

getting a title of being an ambassador and then actually do one or two things every year. We want to make the ambassador program a starting point for people that actually want to work and

want to attract contributors to the Omasus project.

Okay, so Debian community in terms of developers, in terms of official project members is very large and very scattered around the world. So we are about 1000 developers which can be found all over the world mostly in Europe, in the United States, developing in South Africa, in Asia, in Australia. But on the other end, we don't have a real structure for gathering and

to fostering the creation of local groups in specific parts of the world. So the current structure is that we have a lot of mailing lists which are used by local communities to work on specific topics. So for instance, we have a user discussion list in specific languages

like Debian France or Debian Italian or Debian German and those are contact points for users to have a virtual place where to discuss issues or what they're doing with Debian. This is mostly user focused. Then we have also a plenty of developer mailing lists in specific languages and this helps for people who want to approach Debian development but maybe are not

that familiar with English. We also have a lot of translation activities which goes on on mailing lists. So we have the Debian L10N set of mailing lists which are mostly used to work on the translation of Debian specific content in several languages. And we have a quite new activity which is meant to offer mailing lists for local groups but it's very new so we

just have like three mailing lists for local meetings around the world. Then we have something which is rather ad hoc. So on the wiki, some users started to flock together and create local contact points around the world. So there is essentially a wiki page where local groups can

declare themselves and point to their specific resources. And we have on a completely different level what we call Debian trusted organizations. So Debian as a project is not backed by any specific company. So we have the need to have associations around the world which hold our assets and we have them around the world but some are used to promote Debian but most of them

exist only to hold Debian assets. So we have quite some issues with this structure. So first of all it's too much ad hoc. So there is no real structure that, first of all, advertises the possibility of creating a local Debian group in your area and there is no incentive. So people who start up creating a local group do that just because they love

Debian but there is no way for the project to actually encourage them to do so. And as a consequence of that, while Debian developers are all around the world, local Debian groups are very very little, are not covering the whole world. So there are plenty of places where you will not be able to find a local Debian interest group. So this is the first problem

and the second one is that we are scattering our sources. So a lot of groups what they are doing are creating their non-official website and fan site for Debian, their unofficial forum, their unofficial wiki, their unofficial IRC channel and we have the impression that doing this we are actually wasting some of the efforts in the community. Next please. So we want to fix

this. So I must say I'm here mostly to learn from other projects which have a more developed structure for local groups but what I want to share with you is the goal we are setting ourselves for this initiative. So for us the first goal is to actually to think, so encourage groups to form spontaneously. So let's say we have people who are enthusiastic about Debian

around the world and we want them to know that they are welcome to create a local group in their area and then also to have some mechanisms to keep alive those groups because it's fairly easy that groups create and then the interests of the main driving person fade away and so we want them to keep them alive and want to find the right incentive to do so. And what are the

goals of the groups for us? So first of all reduce the gap among users and developers. So there is a sort of charge among simple users and developers and it's fairly difficult to pass from a user or developer and we believe that local groups that can meet face to face can be a good way to make it easier to cross the enthusiasm from users to developers. And also we want to ensure

some Debian presence at local events and we want a place, a directory, where it's easy to find an answer to the question, okay I'm interested in Debian and I live in this specific area, who should I contact if I want to work with people on Debian, if I want to organize Debian events in that area? This question is a question that people often pose to me as a Debian project

leader and I often don't know how to answer. So this is the things we want to fix. And the third problem we'd like to solve with a more organized structure is to actually have some mechanisms to avoid conflicts. So for instance we want to avoid situations in which for a specific area of the world, a specific country or specific region for very big countries, we want to avoid that

there are two competing groups saying okay I want to be the local Debian group, so who is winning? So we want to avoid this kind of conflicts but if they will ever arise we want to have a light governance model that helps us in fixing that. Thanks. Stuff but about the what makes your pro project special. Okay.

The pdf at the left. Okay. We are a fairly new project though, so the situation is we

don't have a real local community team yet. It's something that just has to be established. Next please. But we do have quite a lot local communities in several countries. So the biggest ones are in France and Germany. France is the country most of

Maghay people come from and Germany is our second stronghold. But there are also groups in Poland, Greece, Italy, Spain, in Brazil. I don't know about the United States or Australia or Canada or something like that. So our main goal is to get organized and

so my main goal here is to see what others do and how they do it to learn from them. Okay. So little thing about Maghay and how those local community teams will be fitting into our overall structure. So we have two bodies. The one is the association doing all

the legal stuff, holding the assets, taking donations and things like that. And the other one is the Maghay project with the council leading it and the council is made up of representatives of each team. So translators, developers, packages, artwork, marketing,

whatsoever. And a local community team would fit into that left section. So the local community team would have the same voice as a package of team or as an internationalization team and so on. Okay. Now as I just said we are organized in teams and every team has the same voice.

Every team has one representative in council and the council is the body that is actually doing the decisions. Okay. I just said that. Okay. That is the point that is rather important to us. We don't want to have only the technical people ruling the Maghay project.

We want to have everyone who is contributing having the same voice in the project. That's why we decided not to leave any team out as soon as it forms up. And so a local community team would have the same voice as every other team as well. And

our idea is to create a team that actually represents all those local communities we have. So each local community can elect a leader which they normally do have and those leaders will

select a representative who will represent all the teams in the council. If this works I don't know. We have to check. We have to see. It's something we will try to do this year to get an overview of what we have because up to now we mostly know

about what the French and the German, the Italian and the Spanish groups do. We don't really know what groups in Greece and in Poland and in Brazil do and we want to change that. Not to tell them you have to do this or that but just to

be informed and to be to have a central point where the teams can ask for help if they need it. All right, thank you. I don't have any slides but I can just talk. Originally Donny Burchill was supposed to be here

but then in the end I guess my name ended up there. From Gentoo we have like 200 developers. We don't have any local stuff so there's a good question at what point in the size of the organization you want to start splitting up to local things. But in Gentoo everyone can, those who do translation and things there, it's all a big group of 200 people.

But so far it's worked fine and everyone can start new projects under Gentoo so if someone wants to form a local team they could do it. But as far as backing codes, there's like Debian there's very little money to go around, much less money to go around than Debian, the foundation

why so? As for in contrast if we are canonical there's fewer opportunities to buy stuff around the world and should be there. So thanks. Thank you. I don't

don't really know why Christoph chose me because my English is very bad so I'm sorry. Because basically you built up the whole project that's why you were chosen. Okay the Fedora ambassadors are just a small subset of around 25,000 Fedora account holders

but I think it represents the project very good because from all the groups like packagers, artwork, marketing, translation, they are all also ambassadors and they can join this group and yeah this is the ideal role model that we would have in an ideal world.

So we don't see ambassadors not only as doing events or doing some marketing, we also want them to doing HR so find the right contributor for the right task is really important and yeah to have some people who get recognized. Oh this is the guy from Fedora so

give them a face and a name yeah and of course they should have some work in the Fedora project so they are not only ambassadors they should be yeah doing some stuff. As example I do the

security lab beside my work as the Fedora ambassador. Yeah we are organized with a steering committee which is elected by the Fedora ambassadors. Christoph I do not know if you try to change that so the whole project will be elected.

It will it will be continued to be elected I think. Okay I'm the chair of the farm school. So then we have the ambassador membership administration who is doing all the administration stuff but also develops the mentoring process and we have around 12

mentors around the world who are yeah mentor new candidates and decide if he is ready to become an ambassador and yeah and then we have the regular leadership yeah it's not really teams it's more informal leaders so we have credit card holders who can pay for their local community.

Yeah right now we are over 500 ambassadors but there are some inactive accounts in this number so I think we are 540. So you see also we developed since

2005 and we were more than 800 people but we make some cleanups every three years so we clean up the inactive accounts and yeah yeah this is a number we start

since we started with the mentoring program we got I need I need classes we had 1 600 nearly 1 600 membership requests and from this request only 295 right

295 yeah this is these were sponsored yes and these were not yeah and they didn't make it still ongoing issues yes and on the right side you see the the yellow line is so we sponsor 10 ambassadors every month. So this just some slides how we developed

how it started in 2006. Yeah we became uniforms in 2008 and yeah and now we are very large good developed community

and maybe some numbers also to the event so we are doing 183 events in 2010 and you can see how it grows and then you see the budget we have a budget around 100 000 dollars per year to making events and here's the distribution of events in percent

for the budget and what events we or how much events we do with the budget and how it's spreaded around APEC, EMEA, LATAM and North America. That's it. Okay thanks everybody I

think that was enough to give you a brief idea of the different projects we have. I would now like to have an open discussion about what makes this program a project different I mean from the Fedora point of view with my Fedora hat on I can say one thing that makes the program very special is the strict mentoring only one out of four makes it to become an

ambassador I'm not sure if other distributions have anything like that you just take everybody or do you just how many candidates apply every month or it works right so Ubuntu is a bit

different that way we have Ubuntu local teams and we have Ubuntu membership so at the moment we have over 700 members worldwide and those have gone through approximately they've gone to an interview panel on IRC either through Europe, Americas or Asia and those are Ubuntu members

but anybody can be involved in local teams you don't have to be an Ubuntu member and with regards to mentoring different groups so documentation, translations, Ubuntu women all have their own mentoring project so it's different that way. The local teams are just the local communities it's not that you have a dedicated project who are just doing spread the word who

are going outside like I mean so again local teams they they have to remain active and they're more than a lug they have to prove that they're promoting Ubuntu and only Ubuntu but some Ubuntu teams are do interact with other communities so I do know the Italian loco

operates really well with the Debian community and they hold a lot of joint conferences so that's a great resource to have both communities joining together but mostly like a local team would work on their own translations for their team so French, German translations they do great work there and they kind of mentor one another and sometimes if we're fortunate enough they grow their community up to the larger governance

so like I'm from Ireland but I also sit on the community council the local council and the membership board in Europe and different people get more involved. So related to that I wonder which kind of mechanism are you people using in general to to verify if people are still active so what we have seen that your numbers go down because

I guess at some point you check if people are active anymore and I guess we have something similar so and I'm interested to see if you try a different solution and which one worked best for you. I can say this for fedora I mean we had this in the past people were not really active on the mailing list and somebody then said please reply to this mail if you're still alive and kicking

and suddenly they all showed up again and that was endless threats on the mailing list there was not yes I'm still alive I am still here I still work for fedora no you don't but anyway people were arguing and we were arguing about introducing the status of an inactive ambassador so I say I have to work for university or something I mean you can become inactive we

don't throw you out of the project but meanwhile we have say a natural cleaning up mechanism because you have to change your ssh keys and your password like every six months or something or we had a major we had a we have exchanged all ssh key in the fedora account system

and people were given time like three months to do this and if you haven't changed your password after three months then you are no longer the the accounts are still in the account system but they are suspended they can reactivate them at any time if they decide to come back but they are inactive in the account system and therefore their membership is it's not come to an

end but it's yeah we don't have nothing like this actually everybody can become an ambassador and that's a problem and that's why we're now rewriting the ambassador program because we have 165 ambassadors and we have less than 50 active many people become ambassadors and then

forget that they have they are just naming the list so also this cause this causes people that are actually active in the project and can lead and lead local teams and lead tries trans they have translators around them and make great work and not becoming an ambassador because

many people think that being an ambassador is like nothing and now that is why we're trying to reconstruct the whole idea because anyway when the ambassador program when the associate ambassador program started it was it they didn't give it any thought they said

in my mind i say they thought oh if i don't have a master program let's make an ambassador program ourselves but nobody can deny someone to become i'm a member of the ambassador welcome team program sushi and we cannot actually deny someone to become an ambassador so practically everybody

can do that and that causes problems we hope in the next month we will change all that we're adding that okay um see just to touch back on that um so again because it wouldn't do has grown and we did we started off i've been putting all our events on wiki pages and all

our teams on wiki pages and through governance and kind of people wanting getting more and more involved we have ended up with loca.abuntu.com which is our local team portal you know we have started off smaller and we have grown um it's not perfect we're still tweaking it with regards to membership again um to becoming a member you have to go through a process and go through an application board but you get a notification every two years to renew your membership and

if not you're expired so that's one way of cleaning up um when you become a member you get an irc cloak and the irc council at the moment are doing a spring cleaning of all the cloaks that have expired so there are we do do try and keep it as up to the as possible with regard those ways and the same way our planet ubuntu gets updated as well

the default mechanism is you need to declare expertise if you are active otherwise you are expire after some time what's what's the link between membership and local teams then

so um anybody in the world can be a part of an ubuntu loco team um if you go to the local team portal you can see if there's a community nearby and you can take part and join their mailing list and just join the irc channel or forums um to become an ubuntu member you have to show sustained activity in the ubuntu community so if that is through advocacy i'm not a

advocacy and i get people involved and i organize events and i try as much as i possibly can to promote ubuntu on my machine or giving a talks or handing out cds um and different people do different things to warrant membership and we put them through two different ways we through through like say maybe advocacy and non-development ways and we also go through developer way so

moto the developer membership board so there's two different ways of getting membership in ubuntu and those are but anybody can be part of a local team we don't turn anybody away there's also a generic mailing list called loco teams and anybody can join it and just listen with the low traffic mailing list okay anymore i would continue with questions that show

if you have any questions i think first and then we continue with questions from the audience how much importance do you think it has that the financial background of its distribution to

the development of local or in general the communities um so i want to just state for clarification canonical doesn't give loco teams any money um any loco team operates on their own way of fundraising so i do know that the belgium loco may have sold some stuff this

weekend and that will raise money for their team to buy cds for the next event um in ireland we got pins for our t-shirts we sold them at two euros that's money for our next event we don't get any financial money from canonical for ubuntu the only thing we do get is cds um yes but that's not canonical yes but we're saying from the head um the lady

was just clarifying that the brazilian loco has money but what i'm saying is canonical doesn't give us yes if i mean so they've been is possibly lacking terms of donation because it's

a quite visible project so we do get quite a fair amount of money donated to us but i would say that in terms of creating the community money are not very useful so it might be useful to promote stuff and the biggest difference i see between a non-profit standpoint like debian and for-profit standpoint is that we we we will not for instance give things for free at booth

so at best we give them at the price of the co of the production cost but in the end in terms of the effective level of promotion i don't think that specific parts change significantly but my question is how does is this helpful in order to evolve the community to make a better community or do you think that this is not one of the things that you actually need

well that's a kind of new community project without very much funding i think you can grow a rather good community without any money and getting the money along the way by donations um i think if if you don't have any financial background you will only have the people who are

really into the project because they have to pay for everything out of their own account while if you say okay we can pay you your travel expenses or something like that

you will have more people who are going to an event but perhaps not better quality of people as far as money goes it for example in a lot of open source projects there's students involved and so for them uh paying at their own expense you get better quality people if you

are sponsoring students like that i i think it's really important to uh help people to travel to events to meet there or make activity days to get something done and i want to ask the ubuntu lady sorry i forgot your name okay um if you raise money

from selling some ubuntu stuff do you have an npo for that or yeah the question is about a legal entity because we have that a problem in that are we don't have a legal entity that's why we cannot sell schwag or something because we are not allowed to earn money um some loco teams have

set up organizations because they have to have a bank account um i know in ireland all we did was it was small it was maybe we had about 60 euros maybe 80 euros at a time and we'd use that maybe for a global jam to get some pizzas and some food afterwards it's not that extravagant um other teams have become very much organized they've had chairs treasuries bank

accounts signatures and that gets an awful lot bureaucratic to be honest for me i don't find it any useful but for them for their country if they need to raise money they have to do it that way for the local council we can't sell them they can't do it that way because they want to raise funds for their community and that's how they need to do it so again every team

loco team does things differently in their community to a certain degree if i can give a suggestion on there so on that so they've been as a legal entity actually and full of them yesterday there have been a wonderful legal issue track here at fosdom in which it was a talk about specifically this point on non-profits organization which helped free software project there are

plenty of them that are happy to accept other projects and the talks have been recorded and will be available on the podcast run by bradley coon and karen sandler so there are a lot of before starting your own association look around there are plenty of organization already able to do that fairly efficiently for you um about the point i just heard this morning

from one of our greek guys that for example in greece there is a linux association there and their only reason of existence is to be the legal entity for all the linux user groups there are in greece so there is one organization that does all the legal work

for all the rest so not every project does have to create its own legal uh entity um i think it's it's good to have a legal entity on on top of of the the overall organization like fedora has with with the or is fedora itself a legal entity

so the fedora trademark is owned by redhead and so redhead is the main sponsor um for yeah for fedora and as i said before we have to go all through the processes

in redhead so if we want to spend money we spend redhead money and we have to file budget reports and that's often very bureaucratic and if you want to we we had a legal entity

um i think uh geralt when was it closed down two years ago we had to close down the german legal entity or yeah fedora and now the processes to get money are not the shortest way so some um well it we didn't have to close it down but

the redhead the the i mean redhead is an american country they need to protect that trademark very aggressively even if they protect it against their own people basically against their own community and we were given the choice either you rename your foundation to

something generic not with the federal name in it or you won't get any money any longer from us and that's why we uh canceled canceled this and i think this brings up another interesting question mainly for from magia or for ubuntu as well what is the relation to your commercial sponsor i

mean the relations between mandrea and magia it's not the best we all know that okay let's first say that there isn't any relation between mandriva and magia um you told us yesterday about some things but you just were not specific at all you just had a few ideas so

uh yes okay we can find the product um magia is a project that did fork from mandriva and in september 2010 and we are a purely community driven project we don't have any

commercial background we don't have any company uh we live only by donations we get so there isn't any sponsor so uh if anybody has a few euro left uh so again we are a separate entity to canonical the only backing we get and support we get is

through cds or conference pack so if a team is organizing a conference be them our approved team or an unapproved team um they get a conference pack from canonical and that could be a case of cds lanyard some stickers what that team does with them if they want to sell them for a euro or two euros each that's up to the logo team and as i said me personally i

think that's a good idea because the team kit then has a little bit of extra cash if they want to have uh maybe some pizzas or to buy some t-shirts or to buy the next lot of cds to burn cds that's fine with it to be honest i'd be interested to see if there's any more comments from the audience yes on local teams specifically local teams i'd like to know

what you believe does not work well at all because pretty much everyone has been selling the good sides i think we can rather learn from mistakes and bad experiences in the past definitely it's the budget thing that doesn't work good and the then the trademark thing that is definitely the biggest issue we get money from redhead but it's a lot of bureaucracy and

that's why the the relationship or overall the relationship between the commercial redhead side and the contributors the community contributors is um it's a we we both need each other but sometimes it's a little hard to work together that's the crucial thing it's going it's going

to become better because it's mixing many redhead employees even get engaged in fedora in their free time and so things are getting better but there's still a lot of work that needs to be fixed and i'm yeah we the legal stuff is boring i know but it needs to be done and we need to work on that no york the question was whether one of us works for redhead

no we don't uh york is allowed york has a credit card from redhead or and he had to sign a lot of paperwork and he gets to he needs to file budget reports and he needs to know oh the dinner is

booked on this cost center and this is booked on that cost center so this is a lot of paperwork and this really sucks so this needs to be improved just a comment on that i so we are not commercial at all we are a completely independent organization but that does not relieve people from filing receipts or this kind of stuff in fact i believe that if you spend money

that are donated to us you need to be even more clear on being sure that there are receipts and all this kind of stuff so of course it's not like we have budget reports but still people will be reimbursed only if they have received and this kind of stuff because otherwise you risk to waste the money that people donated to you but for example the money you raise at this

event you sell all these t-shirts and and stuff where does it go do you have a bank account who is the bank account holder do you have a legal entity for that as i briefly mentioned we have various organizations around the world mainly because if you have only one in a specific counter then you need to do money conversion and the kind of stuff so we have devian constitution as a notion of devian trusted organization which are organization which are

which we trust okay and we can update the list saying okay we trust you also and or you don't we don't trust you anymore and this organization a legal entity which can hold assets that exist in the real in let's say in the legal world like money like usually there are non-profit organization like trademarks and this kind of stuff and usually they respond to what the

project usually by the mean of the devian project leader ask them to do so when there is reimbursement to do the devian project leader approves it and then these organization proceed and do the reimbursement okay can i say something directly um sorry yeah often reimbursement

doesn't work for poor countries we we have uh indian people who we want to have at our conferences or at our developer meetings and they cannot afford to prepay something so we have to pay for them and i think the credit cards besides all the paperwork is it is an improvement

compared to the situation that we had yeah years before but i mean just to get back onto paschal's question um so things that work and things that don't work um about four years ago the local council didn't exist it was just the community council operated all of the boards um and that was kind of unattainable

because as the community grew there was nothing else to help everybody other groups so we got the irc council the forums council and the local council so the six of us elected to look after specifically local teams and that means we actually have more time more energy to look after local teams rather than one council looking after all of the teams so that's something that

we've had to learn and as a community we've grown um within the community council ourselves we've um had to look at the way we do approving teams so teams have to show that they are more than um a lug more than just a group of false enthusiasts that they are actually promoting Ubuntu um so they come for a monthly meeting to for to be approved and they have to show

and document on a wiki page how their active photographs blogs you know show they actually are taking part um and that was one meeting a month and that wasn't working out so two cycles ago we realized that you know having a monthly meeting wasn't working so we do things through bug tracking and that's worked out but again it is a learning curve for us all because as the

community grows our local teams are growing and that also means multiple time zones is also we need to fully appreciate that we are an irc the whole time so we have a factoid it's just small little things that you actually grow that you might not have realized two years ago well you know they can just email us and then you have to realize it's also a language barrier so the six of us and not everybody speaks english there are three in europe and three in

the states and that's just because it's not that it wasn't even active in asia it was just that people who were nominated were the most active from those countries um it's not ideal we would like to have more people from other countries but as the as the community grows we get more people involved in the greater community it will help so governance i think is a big key

issue for us i think and i think for any community growing up if you can put in the foundations first of what you would like to see happening that if you have a main community and break it into sub areas if you can put that road work in before everything gets kind of skewed it will kind of save you a lot of headache in in the future okay thank you laura something that

doesn't work in open susie in the ambassador program actually most of the things doesn't work correctly oh that's an honest answer that's what we are trying to fix uh nowadays where we we don't like that we don't have many strong local communities because most of the

people in open susie work in the global project rather than organizing local groups we're trying to change that by writing tons of documentation and after correcting the documentation we wrote we kind of have some financial control me and zabel wrote a program about that

was yeah we have we have the same problem with india although we get the funding we try to keep the funding only in local traveling and not sponsoring people for doing

trips outside their country so that we strength we give strength to the local communities well if open source community would be human it would be a teenager nowadays because we have people constantly arguing about how things should go the good thing in that point is that

in open susie we have meritocracy so those who decide are those who actually work on the project so in all of that bad cloud we have we have meritocracy that actually help help us evolve and we hope in about six eight months to take on to be on the stage

i think we still have one left you still need to tell us what doesn't work in your community you don't have slides uh now what doesn't work in in the mega community um first and foremost what didn't work was setting up a centralized organization for the local communities because

it was just forgotten because there was so much else to do this is an error we would like to to fix and to get in touch with the local communities we know about and

to find out if there are any out there we don't know about so um what doesn't work is most of us are not really experienced in building a worldwide community so we may just do loads of things that are not done in the best way but we are learning and

we are taking advice from our users and the members of the worldwide community serious and try to fix what doesn't work okay pass it along here and um

yeah the language part was an interesting question what i was thinking about is that to become officially involved in gender you need to you manage no english so you're able to communicate with the product at large but think about uh thinking if that is a limiting factor into for example asia if you think about it's mostly europe and north america where most

people are centered but it could also be just a question that open source communities in general in some areas are not as big as in uh europe and north america none of the you uh other people have people involved on asia if you can comment on if it's a language or open source culture issue in general okay um i think we should continue with a quick round of questions from the

audience because we are running out of time we have like five minutes left i think officially we can extend this in this room but there are most likely people who want to talk attend other talks so let's hurry up your question please no questions hi i have a question about um

how do you work with uh non-technical people or less technical people do you do you split communities do you keep them together with the developers how do you deal with them

so i'm not a developer um very vocal about that but um we have developers and non-developers working side by side in local teams all our channels are ubuntu dash namespace and the same for our local team so in the ubuntu dash desktop channel for example you have canonical

developers and local team people who are active in say bug triaging working side by side um as a non-developer um i report bugs anybody can report a book you don't have to be technical to report a book um we make translations very easy via launchpad it's click a button it's very simple and we try and get people who are not developers looking at those two areas

um also getting involved in documentation you might find the most person who's not a developer is really good at reading english or really good at reading their own specific language and spotting typos and you get them involved slowly and you get them involved that way and that's how they become more involved in the open source community to be honest you don't have to scare them saying you have to be a developer to be involved in a community

because quite frankly that means you're pushing away some of your other community and that's not very fair okay so i'm not a developer either i'm a firefighter i have anyway so we are using using people if someone wants to contribute in the community

all the only thing that he has is to want to contribute in the community we have people that don't know english and help us with the booths we have people that make translations we have people that make graphics we have a free software project or an open source project needs people

to do a lot of work and nowadays open source has a lot of programmers but not people that are graphical that do graphics don't have have always needs translators okay always needs people to go to events because what i see personally in greece is that the only

people that have booths in greece are fedora and open sushi mainly in most of the events other communities are not so active not so active they are the community in greece is the most active community in the internet but at some points they don't have booths and start something

like that we use people to to make all kinds of stuff to cover all the community okay no there are quite some things that non-technical people can do for example the biggest team we have in a non-technical area is internationalization you don't have to

be a technical person to translate anything if it's a website translation block translation or actually the translation of our tools the next one is artwork you don't have to be a technical person to create a wallpaper or an icon or something like that and we have marketing we have

communication we have a documentation team okay you should be a bit technical to write documentation but you don't have to be a developer or a packager to write good documentation rather different most developers do not write good documentation um

now soon we are opening up localized wikis so people can write wiki pages in their own languages up until now we only have an english wiki and we will try to have people from the internationalization team that have a look at those localized wikis and see for good

documentation in the localized wiki and translate that back to english so it will be available for everyone else um i know that's gonna be a hard job for yeah i18n but um they elected me as team leader so they have no choice um and i think if you really want to to help

something you can actually find something but we did notice it's actually easier to get technical people than non-technical people into the project getting a package is easy getting

a good designer is hard i think the proper answer is that do not differentiate as much as possible i can change who we list everyone under the developer list no matter what they do um well it's a smaller project so

200 people in total and listed there so so so yeah this is one reason why we have ambassadors because ambassadors are also mentors to help non-technical people to find a way inside the fedora project of course we have all the opportunities to do artwork marketing and such stuff

but i think it's really important to know a person in the project who knows the way around the project to find the right place for this non-technical person so i think it's really important to have some people who can show where you where they can do

non-technical work i think this is really important okay i think there were two more questions in the background somewhere raise your hand question already solved okay then it's your turn we will repeat it it doesn't make sense to run around all the time i think spot can tell

this answer those questions in the in the next track we should repeat the question first the question was about infrastructure if the infrastructure is run by the company or by the sponsor or if we okay so if people are looking if we are looking for sys admins to

to take care of our infrastructure so uh just um i'm not a specific title for your question but in labian we have volunteers doing the amazing work of doing the system administrator they will be there in the next session and i must say that raising uh let's say a team or a

generation of sysadmin to to run your own infrastructure is very important and it's a great achievement that project should look for to be independent from the possibly the main sponsor of the project um so with ubuntu um all the resources are the wiki the websites they're all

hosted on canonical servers um so it does have pros and cons about it to be honest um all the wikis is great it's very handy but sometimes for translations teams aren't really happy with that even though you can translate a wiki but for some of the fonts and for the writing languages it isn't so easy they hold their own wikis uh for the websites um the maybe the

wrong theme is there and the the local teams don't have access to that so they have to log tickets to get updates for the drupal websites um teams may or may not like that and they often get their own hosting they have the option of doing that um but yeah so the community has nothing to do with the servers and i think the canonical like doing their own servers so

we have a separation there we're the lucky ones here uh we're hosted by susa and susa servers i don't know about sysadmins i don't know if we have volunteers sysadmins or are susa people we have a few so anyway we have we have a few okay uh the thing here is that

we it is pretty easy for local teams to work in open sushi wiki and in if any local team wants a forum like we have the greek forum you just ask for the people and they give you so we don't actually have any problem for us again the forums again are hosted by

canonical we don't have any issues if we have um software updates or we just log or t tickets and canonical take care of it for us there's a good relationship between community and canonical

right okay it is you don't know maybe for like uh maybe i can say something about fedora in infrastructure redhead does appoint a fedora infrastructure leader who is coordinating the

efforts around it but you can join the infrastructure team and you can really break things as a community member the fedora infrastructure leader is a full-time job it's a red employee he gets paid by redhead so but nevertheless all the websites everything it's run

by uh by the community they where we have a fedora admin uh IRC channel they are all there around the clock 24 7 i think the fedora project home page has uh we had less updates downtimes than microsoft.com run with a completely community run project

okay uh the question wasn't really intended for me since i have no company that is doing anything so we have a quite great sysadmin team that does work on our servers that does manage our servers and they're really using up quite much of the free time we had a big server upgrade

now where four people had to go to Marseille and look at those servers directly because hardware had to be changed and i think as a community team a community project there is no other way

you have to look after them yourself. Yeah, it's the same in Cenzio, but that wasn't the point of the question, anyway. Okay, I see there was another question over here.

Do people work with so-called bounties with proposing an amount of money for doing that and that? And are people doing that, and is it working? Okay, I just repeat the question.

It was about the coordination between the contributors and especially about bounties, about having a certain goal and paying a certain amount of money for the person or for the team who gets this goal implemented, right? I can say, no, we don't have that in Fedora, next.

Are you involved in Google Summer of Code? Well, it's sort of a bounty. Fedora is registered as an organization in Google Summer of Code. We did some mentoring, but it's not used that much, to be honest.

What's the other, Google GoDyn? That's all purely bounty programs, I suppose. Yeah, but, well, it depends how you define bounty, I guess. But it has nothing to do with the projects. It's a Google kind of project. Okay, actually, we don't have any money to give as a bounty to anyone

because we do need our money to keep the organization as a whole running. So no, we don't do it. And the organization between the contributors is done in the council because every team has a representative in the council. So we do the organization and the cooperation there.

So we don't have any bounty in Debian. We are quite proud of being a volunteer project. So there are, of course, people paid by their own employees to work on Debian, but this is something which is not coordinated by the project. And I must say that for me, it's quite an interesting challenge to see a project based on volunteers to try to compete with other project

which are a lot backed by companies. We don't either have people that are getting paid to do volunteering job, except SUSE employees. But I don't know how this works for SUSE. I believe that most of open SUSE employees are volunteering to the open SUSE community

and not otherwise. But I don't really know that. We have, I think the only people that are getting paid in open SUSE are the project manager, the community manager, okay? And AJ, and Coolio, anyway.

I don't, I have two or three people getting paid, but they are SUSE employees, that they are actually here to help the community. Nobody else is getting paid. No, there's no such thing as the bounty kind of thing in Ubuntu. I mean, people take part in helping Ubuntu, be it like, so the local team portal was created

with the help of actually people from Florida and different teams worldwide building and developing on us. We had some help from Canonical at one point. People can apply for sponsorship twice a year to attend a Ubuntu developer summit, but not everybody gets it. So there's no such thing as really as a bounty, to be honest. Anybody else for questions?

One final question. I mean, time is up, yes. In fact, we are already like eight minutes over time. Okay, okay, then I'm sorry for you. Thank you. Thank you.