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

Creating Your Online Home

A website is essential for any community group. Websites are how people will find you. They provide a vessel to share the benefits of your group to prospective community members, and they provide important details about events and other group activities.

Unfortunately, setting up the group's website is where many teams experience their first problems. The reason is largely because of the personality trait that knits us all together: We are geeks, and as geeks we like to debate software preferences. Unfortunately, this can often devolve into weeks of debate about this content management system versus that one, their respective benefits, and other inane and often irrelevant chatter.

In these situations, it is important to remember that the "content" in a Content Management System is more important than the "management system." In other words: Just pick something and move on. Some people may be unhappy, but stress the importance of making progress and moving the group forward, and the debate will eventually pass.

Several great free providers are available for getting a website online, and I would highly recommend WordPress as a good start. It is a mature and popular content management system; it provides the means for multiple authors to post content, and the service is reliable. Whether you use WordPress or something else, find a provider, get your site online, and start creating content.

When creating your website, you need to provide some "must-have" pieces of content that most of your visitors will look for. These are:

• Purpose – Explain what your community group does. For HVLT, the website should offer details about the local technical support and Ubuntu advocacy that the group provides to the Hill Valley area. It should also describe some of our projects and community work. For example, if we have handed Ubuntu CDs out to people in downtown Hill Valley, we should put up some photos and text about that work. Remember that you want to sell people on your team and have them join you, so make it sound like a fun and interesting place to get involved.
• How To Join – Make it really easy to understand how to join the group. For most Ubuntu LoCo Teams, this is as simple as joining your mailing list or IRC channel. Explain how to get connected and how to subscribe to the mailing list.
• Contact – Situations will always arise in which someone has questions or problems in getting involved in the group and needs a helping hand. Provide one or more primary points of contact to look after these cases.

A very common mistake many new communities make when creating a website is to make the language overly complicated and unattractive. As an example, for HVLT, we welcome the full spectrum of users (both new users and experts alike) into our group. That means the language on the website must be simple and accessible for this range of users; otherwise, some users will get confused, grow bored, and move on.

A great way of preventing this is to get feedback from new members: Ask them what they thought of the website and whether anything needs to be improved and simplified.

Planning Projects

With your resources and communication channels up and running, the next step is to decide what type of projects your group wants to work on. For some teams, this will be obvious; a software development team focuses their efforts on a software project, a documentation team writes content, and a translation team decides what to translate and into which language. For some teams, however, this is a little less obvious.

One challenge that every team faces is the ability to coordinate what goals and ambitions the team is going to work on and to unite the group around an agreed set of projects. Traditionally, this process has been somewhat ad hoc: People join a team and work on whatever they feel like.

One of the most wonderful elements of a community is that there is no manager telling you what to do, and the environment produces an incredible sense of creativity and fresh ideas. Every community every day finds themselves knee-deep in ideas that sound fun, rewarding, and that ultimately satisfy the purpose of the group.

Ideas are cheap, though. For some communities, coordinating this work can seem complex. Some projects require coordination across many people with different skill sets, time availability, and resources. For example, if HVLT wants to produce a regionally focused booklet that explains what Ubuntu is and provides an introductory tutorial, the project likely needs people with the following skills:

• Writer – Someone to write the content in the booklet.
• Artist – If you want your booklet to be attractive, you need someone to make it look good.
• Content providers – You may need several people to produce content for the booklet on different topics.
• Printer – You will need someone who knows how to get the booklet printed.
• Distributors – With the booklets ready, you'll need outgoing people to get out there and hand them to strangers.

Many communities don't take a particularly organized approach to these types of projects, and that can kill motivation in the team. If there's one thing that will cause a community to struggle, it's a sense that nothing happens and nothing gets done. Providing a more structured way of organizing projects and documenting how they will work and who is working on which parts is known as a specification , and it has a number of benefits:

• Direction – One of the biggest complaints teams often report is a lack of direction. If the team gets into the habit of creating a specification at the beginning of a project, this gives everyone a sense of focus and direction.
• Documented commitments are more effective – A common rule in Project Management training is that actions assigned to people in a shared document are more effective than ad hoc or privately made commitments. Documenting who will work on what and putting someone's name next to an action can help seal a sense of accountability for contributions to the project.
• Feeling of success – Regularly revisiting a specification and checking off items that have been completed can develop a strong feeling of progress and success. It makes a team feel productive.

The first step is to open up a discussion with your team to talk about the things that the team would like to do. The most effective way to have this conversation is to produce a wiki page in which people can jot down their ideas and work on them together.

This process provides the foundation of converting popular ideas into more specific and concrete items. Keep the discussion focused on the project and what is doable. Always make sure you have these discussions out in the open in your team communication channels, whether that means mailing lists, IRC channels, or otherwise.

Once you have a set of ideas for a particular project (e.g., creating HVLT's booklet), it is recommended that you drill the ideas down into a specification for each project.

This specification will again form a set of commitments that outline what is involved in completing the project and who is going to be doing what. A wiki is also a great place to do this.

Over the past few years, I have developed a useful format for documenting these plans. For each project, note down these key pieces of information:

• Objective: An objective is a goal that you want to achieve. Summarize your objective here in one sentence (e.g., Demonstrate Ubuntu at Hill Valley library).
• Success Criteria: This is a statement that can be clearly read to determine success in the above objective. This needs to be as clear as possible and not vague; it is the determining factor that indicates whether or not you achieved the objective. Although this may seem unnecessary, it's a great way for the team to be clear in what success looks like, which is often surprisingly inconsistent in many community projects.
• Actions: This is a set of steps that need to be executed to achieve the objective. It is recommended that if someone volunteers to commit to delivering on an action, you put their name next to the action (e.g., Print out LoCo logo on a banner (Jono Bacon)). There can be multiple actions for each objective.
• Driver: If someone is coordinating this objective and helping those involved to deliver on their actions, list that person here (optional).

To illustrate the elements, here is an example of a simple plan for running a demo event at Hill Valley library:

• Objective: Demonstrate Ubuntu at Hill Valley library.
• Success Criteria: A successful Ubuntu demonstration to Hill Valley library attendees.
• Actions:

1. Confirm booth space with librarians (Jon Smith)
2. Burn CDs with copies of Ubuntu (Dave Jones)
3. Develop artwork for main banner sign, staff badges, flyers (Sarah Gilbert)
4. Provide demonstration laptops (2 x laptops) (Dave Jones and Jon Smith)
5. Prepare demonstration speaking script (Andy Gibson)
6. Print fliers to promote the event and put them up in the library (Sarah Gilbert)

• Driver: Sarah Gilbert

Although it may take a little bit of extra work to put together your plan for a project, it will dramatically improve the project's chances of success. This in turn makes the group feel nimble and effective.

Although plans and specifications are a great way to ensure project work is spread out across the team and well structured, this alone will not guarantee a project's success or the growth of the group. To stay on track you need to regularly get the team together and focus their efforts on current projects, highlight problems, solve them, and talk about new ideas and challenges. A great way to do this is to have regular meetings.