ARTICLE

Growing an Active Ubuntu Advocacy Community

by | Fri 17 Jan 2014

Like many of you, I am tremendously excited about Ubuntu’s future. We are building a powerful convergence platform across multiple devices with a comprehensive developer platform at the heart of it. This could have a profound impact on users and developers alike.

Now, you have all heard me and my team rattling on about this for a while, but we also have a wonderful advocacy community in Ubuntu in the form of our [LoCo Teams](https://loco.ubuntu.com) who are spreading the word. I want to explore ways to help support and grow the events and advocacy that our LoCo Teams are doing.

I had a conversation with [Jose](https://joseeantonior.wordpress.com/) on the LoCo Council about this today, and I think we have a fun plan to move forward with. We are going to need help though, so please let me know in the comments if you can participate.

## Step 1: Ubuntu Advocacy Kit

The [Ubuntu Advocacy Kit](https://launchpad.net/uak) is designed to provide a one-stop shop of information, materials (e.g. logos, brochures, presentations), and more for doing any kind of Ubuntu advocacy. Right now it needs a bit of a spring clean, which I am currently working on.

I think we need to get as many members of our community to utilize the kit. With this in mind we are going to do a few things:

* Get the kit cleaned up and up to date.
* Get it linked on [loco.ubuntu.com](https://loco.ubuntu.com) and encourage our community to use it.
* Encourage our community to contribute to the kit and add additional content.
* Grow the team that maintains the kit.

**Help needed**: great writers and editors.

## Step 2: Advocacy App

The Ubuntu Advocacy Kit works offline. This was a conscious decision with a few benefits:

1. It makes it easier to know you have all relevant content without having to go to a website and download all the assets. When you have the kit, you have all the materials.
2. The kit can be used offline.
3. The kit can be more easily shared.
4. When people contribute to the kit it feels like you are *making something*, as opposed to adding docs to a website. This increases the sense of ownership.

With the kit being contained in an offline HTML state (and the source material in reStructured Text) it means that it wouldn’t be that much work to make a click package of the kit that we can ship on the phone, tablet, and desktop.

Just imagine that: you can use the click store to install the Ubuntu Advocacy Kit and have all the information and materials you need, right from the palm of your hand on your phone, tablet, or desktop.

The current stylesheet for the kit doesn’t render well on a mobile device, so it would be handy if we could map the top-level nav (Documentation, Materials etc) to tabs in an app.

We could also potentially include links to other LoCo resources (e.g. a RSS feed view of news from loco.ubuntu.com) and a list of teams.

If you would be interested in working on this, let me know.

**Help needed**: Ubuntu SDK programmers and artists.

## Step 3: Hangout Workshops

I am going to schedule some hangout workshops to go through some tips of how to organize and run LoCo events and advocacy campaigns, and use the advocacy kit as the source material for the workshop. I hope this will result in more events being coordinated.

**Help needed**: LoCo members who want to grow their skills.

## Step 4: LoCo Portal

We also want to encourage wider use of [loco.ubuntu.com](https://loco.ubuntu.com) so our community can get a great idea of the pule of advocacy, events, and more going on.

**Help needed**: volunteers to run events.

Feedback and volunteers are most welcome!

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