Nordic LoCo Teams in cooperation
In a blog posts, Jono brings up the topic of how we can improve the way LoCo teams work and how to increase cooperating between teams. The Ubuntu project has 170 Local Community Teams in almost just as may countries, but not everyone is equally big, and some even consists of only a few persons.
Starting a LoCo Team and get it to grow is not an easy task, and getting the ball to roll is the hardest of all the tasks.
The European Nordic countries share similiar languages and cultures, and though they definitely are not the same, they share great many things. So about a half year ago I proposed on my blog that the Nordic countries should cooperate a lot more. While everybody thought it was a great idea, the only specific things that came out of it was a wiki page and an IRC channel.
So this blog post explores the idea of a regional cooperation can optimize LoCo Teams that share geography, culture, language or other important things that constitutes a society.
In the Nordic countries we are just about to launch a Nordic planet, that gather all feeds from the national planets. A kind of super planet. Now, the great thing about this is that it requires so little: The setup of a new planet with the feed URLs from the other planets.
But the benefits are great: The big Nordic Ubuntu communities can give a much bigger sense of activity, when they combine their two or three daily planet posts; It gives a better picture on what is happening in the region; It may inspire similiar thinking people to try new things; It can inspire people to create brand new events or other LoCo related activities.
But also very important: It offers the smaller countries a possibility to be among more active communities, and share their thoughts and ideas and get inspired by them. Smaller countries that do not have enough participants to keep a national planet interesting. It means that as soon as a new community emerge in a small regional country it becomes a part of something bigger – without becoming lost in something TOO big.
Now, the Nordic countries share a common language base. It means the especially three of the Nordic countries can understand each other (although sometimes with difficulties), that is Denmark, Sweden and Norway, while the other Nordic countries (such as Iceland and Finland) has languages that differs too much from the rest to be understood by most people.
This give us the dilemma whether the planet should be an English-only planet, or if we should just accept that there will be some posts that we simply cannot understand.
Personally, I kind a like the idea of the planet being in our own languages even though we do not understand everything. Though 90% speaks and understand English there are just so many things you can express in your own language that you cannot in another language.
The idea of a common planet is just first step. The easy step. The super planet is meant to clear the road towards a greater and bigger cooperation between LoCo Teams in the same regions. Teams which share culture, national legislations, to some degree language as well and who can inspire eacht other.
Let us see what will a common regional planet, a common eye on activities will bring the LoCo Teams of the Nordic countries in the new year.
(For a summary of previous discussions on this matter see this link)
2 comments
Hoho! Good idea!
I want to point out one thing though: Icelandic is the closest to the old norse language so exposing you and other Nordic people to it would be a good thing! It would be a way to bring you closer to your roots
What I don’t understand about your proposal is this: Why do you want to constrain people and make them use a certain language? I think the rule should be as follows: English should be the default language but members are free and allowed to use their own Nordic languages as they please. I think English should be default because we want to be able to join international discussions and allow non-nordics as well as foreigners in the nordic countries to understand. It would make most posts understandable to most people while giving the planet a “nordicness” to it. I think it would simply bring character to the planet…
This coming from an Icelander living in Stockholm, Sweden.
Hälsningar,
/David
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HI David
Since neither of the people involved in creating the planet has any intentions to use the the planet to push any language-policy, the discussions are mostly topics of practical issues.
Not only do I like the idea of a Nordic planet where everybody is writing in their own languages, but it is also the by far most practical thing.
The idea as it is now, is to create a ‘superplanet’ that aggregates the feeds from our national planets. Now, the Danish planet usually aggregates posts in Danish, and the Swedish planet usually aggregates posts in Swedish. So a superplanet will contain feeds in both Danish and Swedish.
If we would like the ‘superplanet’ to be in mainly English, we would need another structure. It would not be possible to merely aggregate the existing planets, but you would have to create a brand new planet where bloggers would need to be added seperately.
So for starters I recommend we go with simple solution and see how that goes. If we need to adjust anything we could do that along the way. If nobody reads posts in the other languages, then perhaps we should consider another approach. But let’s see how it goes
There is a lot more debate going on about this topic in the Swedish forums: http://ubuntu-se.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=35051
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