As part of this cycle I have been talking with some people in the awesome Ubuntu LoCo Teams community to identify next steps in how we can optimize the community to go out and get *200 million* users.

Today I feel we have a fantastic LoCo Team community; lots of teams distributed throughout the world, governance effectively applied via the [LoCo Council](https://loco.ubuntu.com/loco-council/), and continued excitement and growth in our various events.

I am keen though to see how we can bring some key improvements to the community:

* provide a central point in which you can find out about all the incredible work going on in the community.
* encourage best practice and skills acquisition across different LoCo teams.
* encourage and inspire teams to participate by seeing the great work and ideas from other teams.

To help with this I have scheduled some calls with a few folks:

* Randall Ross – I was really impressed with the work Randall has done with the Vancouver team and I am keen to see how he can help teams share and flow best practice and ideas between them.
* Laura Czajkowski – Laura has done great work with the LoCo Council in continuing to govern and promote quality, fair, and balanced interaction between teams.
* Michael Hall, Chris Johnston, and Nigel Babu – these guys all contribute to the awesome [loco.ubuntu.com](https://loco.ubuntu.com), among many other great contributors.

I gathered these folks together as a means to pull together the strategic strings of LoCo inspiration, governance, and active development. As part of these discussions, and based upon discussions at UDS, in this cycle there will be a focus to:

* Make loco.ubuntu.com more *tab-worthy*; in other words, add value to loco.ubuntu.com that will provide the central point for finding out what the community are working on, as discussed above, thus opening the doors for (a) teams to share their great work in a hub for LoCo activity and (b) for teams to be inspired by the work of other teams, thus encouraging future contributions.
* We will build upon this work to make loco.ubuntu.com a real hub of activity and a central point for LoCo members and teams to congregate. The goal here is a rolling stream of content that justifies a tab in your browser open all day showing this content.
* We will work with community leaders to encourage wider posting and sharing of updates and progress achieved by teams, and also encourage the publication of best practice and ideas to inspire other teams to participate in their area.

In a nutshell: by building a hub of information and knowledge, and then reaching out to community leaders to provide useful and interesting content, we expect this will grow knowledge, skills, and inspiration in teams to be successful in their own projects.

## Changes to the LoCo Team Portal

In a call today with Chris, Nigel, and Randall, we discussed some of the changes to loco.ubuntu.com with a primary focus on:

* showing the people-orientated nature of LoCo teams via a slider that shows different photos from events. This could also be used to add informational slider images highlighting campaigns such as the Ubuntu Global Jam.
* provide a regularly updating stream of blog content from across the LoCo community.
* showcase other dynamic content from Twitter and social networking sites.
* provide a set of quick-start links for brand new users to get started.

While I am by no-means a designer, I created an initial design, inspired by Ahmed’s work in pulling together design input from various sources and implementing [cloud.ubuntu.com](https://cloud.ubuntu.com) which I think can act as a great starting point for discussion:

A few notes about the design:

* The slider would function like the one on [uds.ubuntu.com](https://uds.ubuntu.com) and the images at first would be chosen by the admins of the site and/or the LoCo Council.
* Under the slider are quick start points for brand new users, again inspired by similar buttons on [cloud.ubuntu.com](https://cloud.ubuntu.com). It would be useful to have a close button in the top-right corner of this section for regular users who no longer want to see these buttons when they visit the site.
* The blogging area would be regularly updated and function a bit like the Ubuntu Planet. On the call we discussed that the choice of feeds would at first be recommended by the LoCo Council and the site admins and we would ask people to provide RSS feeds for tagged entries (e.g. so if I tag a blog entry on my blog with `ubuntu-loco` it would appear on the site). Randall and I committed to recommending the first 25 feeds to appear on the site. For each feed we would also note the team that the person is in, so we can provide this meta-data under the post title to show the different teams that have content posted on the site.

Again, this is very much a first cut of the design, and comments are welcome; the goal here is to outline and share the discussions so far. I am delighted with everyone on board to make these changes, and I think this will really help us grow and inspire the global Ubuntu community.