Create an Ubuntu LoCo Team and grow Ubuntu adoption in your local area

Setting Up Communication Channels

Communication is a critical component in a community. When people can communicate freely and easily, communities feel like vibrant, thriving places. When communication is unclear, clunky, or restrictive, communities feel boring and devoid of life.

Setting up great communication channels involves not only picking suitable media but also building a culture of positive tone and communication on top of them.

I'll look at the media first. Fortunately, you have a range of different options for your groups. These include:

• Mailing Lists – Email discussion lists provide a means for members to send a message to an email address that is then sent to everyone in the group. Mailing lists are fantastic for those comfortable with email; they are low bandwidth and messages are automatically delivered as opposed your having to manually go and look at a communication channel for them. Mailing lists are very common in Open Source communities and are particularly popular with software development groups. You can request a mailing list for your team from Ubuntu [1].
• Forums – Discussion forums provide online bulletin boards where conversations happen chronologically on a web page. Forums are a popular choice for many end-user communities because they are simple to use. However, they are not particularly popular with developer communities, who instead prefer the convenience of mailing lists. A great example of a popular, modern forum is Discourse [2].
• Internet Relay Chat (IRC) – This is a text-based chat medium that is great for conversational and social discussions in real-time. IRC has become popular in the Open Source world, and a good free IRC network for Open Source projects is Freenode [3].

By far the most popular method of communication in most communities, and particularly Ubuntu, are mailing lists. I recommend that you set up a mailing list as your main communication medium, and you may also want to set up an IRC channel for more interactive discussions.

Aside from choosing you communication media, you should strive to keep the communication active and pleasant.

Collaboration

Many communities, and particularly those in the Open Source world, collaborate on projects to produce content (Figure 3). A huge range of tools out there are designed for various types of collaboration (e.g. programming, writing, testing, design, translations, etc.). You should assess which tools your community needs to do its work and provide simple and freely available access to them.

Figure 3: The Ubuntu Myanmar team at work.

As an example, if you want to do software development, you will likely need code hosting, bug tracking, and translations tools. Various free online software development sites provide these services such as Launchpad [4] and GitHub [5].

On the topic of external sites providing the tools you need, you should always be a little wary of being sucked into the well of hosting your own tools. Although many of you can set up and provide your own self-hosted tools, I heavily recommend that you use a third-party site (e.g., Launchpad). A third-party site has a team that ensures the site stays online, has security fixes, and protects your data. When you maintain hosted tools yourself, you will get busy at some point, and it will become a burden.

The HVLT is most likely to collaborate on documentation and content (e.g., HOWTO guides for the group, other documentation, and promotional literature about Linux). For these kinds of collaborative documentation needs, a wiki is a perfect solution. Wikis provide an editable web page that anyone can contribute to, and they are simple to use. Thankfully, there's an Ubuntu wiki [6] that you can use right away!