[Ubuntu-US-CA] Our Shared LoCo Team Identity, Take II

[Grant Bowman]

Happy Holidays everyone,

Identity incorporates many different aspects and can be expressed in
many different ways, online and offline. It helps if there is as much
consistency as is reasonable and convenient. Some of the issues I
raised previously simply don't have good, consistent, global answers
and are simply part of the many different communities we choose and
must represent as a team to "the public."

As we are giving ourselves a face lift and adding a new website I
wanted to see what other people think rather than simply moving
forward without meaningful discussion. Bringing any message to "the
public" is NOT EASY. I think in our case as I outlined the job we have
undertaken is more difficult than most. Failing to understand how
people see "our group" would be a serious oversight and in my opinion,
irresponsible of us. Each of us should be able to provide an
approximately similar representation of our own team identity as we
bring our shared message to "the public" in ways large and small. This
could be an official event with shirts, banners, pressed CDs,
stickers, pens and such or just a sharpie marked CD or casual
discussion outside of any scheduled event.

As for our team's online resources, I think it's fair to say that we
primarily use (among others) the following online resources in roughly
alphabetical order from first alphanumeric:

    1. http://   ubuntu-california.org
    2. #         ubuntu-us-ca
    3.           ubuntu-us-ca at lists.ubuntu.com
    4. https://  wiki.ubuntu.com/CaliforniaTeam

At least for the second and third, these names will not be changing.
To understand why is beyond the scope of this email.

Verbally I think I understand the reasoning for choose the name
ubuntu-california.org as the default for our new website. Verbally I
don't have a good alternative. I understand that some teams in the US
have used a similar name pattern for their websites and verbally. I
understand something of how team internationally handle this, though
as the US is such a large country and as our state is also quite large
I don't want this opportunity to pass without any reflection or
consideration for the inherent issues each team deals with.

However as I tried to describe, I have had experiences in trying to
verbally use "Ubuntu California" as a team identity and found that in
a common case verbally there have been harmful misunderstandings in
representing our team to the intended target audience - potential
future users with little technical background. In one case this
representation was also misunderstood by a current Ubuntu user!

Within our community of course we will use whatever identifiers we
choose or, like many people do now, just use a search engine of
choice. The key point in this discussion for me is in two parts.

A. trying to make sense of the conflicts and contexts of our verbal
(and otherwise) name/identity for "us"

B. the choice of the default domain name for our "external facing"
website that we will use as our "canonical" web URL

The second item does have a significant bearing on search engine
optimization, making sure our webserver does not give out two
different URLs for the same page (anyone else ever confused by
wiki.edubuntu.org hits?) etc.

For the seonond item, any choice at this point is a trade off with
different subjective weights along different, interrelated issues. As
an online identifier I would like to verify that the most appropriate,
consistent, respectful and clear choice is the one we move forward
with. At a minimum, like now, redirects from second choices will
continue to function. I simply would like all sides to be heard, to
revisit this awkward and sensitive issue that has been raised time and
again in ways large and small in the past and to verify that the
choice that we make is the best one before moving on. I look forward
to understanding different viewpoints.

Grant Bowman