What a blow

I have just been to Australia to meet my 30 year old daughter for the first time and of course reunite with her mother, when out of the blue I had a heart attack and was rushed to hospital to have it repaired. Being very healthy normally and being short of cash I didnt get medical insurance, so the bill of $14.000 really has hit us hard. My daughter Tara started a gofundme initiative to try help us out and there have been many gratefully accepted donations from Ubuntu guys and gals.
Thank you so much every one of you. We are still short $9000 so I would like to appeal to everyone to please spread the link far and wide for us. If anyone would like to donate but doesn't want to use online payments feel free to contact me for a paypal account or another direct means of payment. gofundme also takes 7% of all donations. Thank you the ubuntu community for being so generous. Here is the link, please spread it as wide as possible.
https://www.gofundme.com/ReunionRoadblock

Kilos

LoCo Problems

Greetings Ubunteros,
The opinions below are my own and not necessarily the opinions of other Ubuntu users.
Everything is running smoothly in ubuntu-za and ubuntu-africa. Here is my blog about the ubuntu-africa project.
http://kilosubuntu.blogspot.com I think most will know by now that my main aim is to spread ubuntu as far as I can and see all users happy in their LoCos with good guidance and support.
and the correct way isnt by having over 400 ubuntu users on facebook and no one on irc or using mailing list.

So I got a foolish idea to try and revive LoCos in other areas of the globe and hopefully get them to run as efficiently as my home LoCo. I didnt know what I was getting into.
I started with ubuntu-bd and found 3 nicks on the irc channel and no one
responding. There were over 20 applicants waiting for approval on LP. some for 2 years already. So with some help from the LC we found the owner and he came and agreed to get things going again but said those users prefer facebook and later said he was to busy. And their mailing list is for announcements. I am not a fan of mailing lists but find that they are a good way of getting a message out when one has no irc contact with someone. At least the LP applicants are approved now.  He greeted a few times after that and has now withdrawn again, so pavlushka (the failed applicant) has been trying to get things going again.
At times there are 10 nicks in channel and from chatting to them for the last 5 months, I have learned that they aren't satisfied with the way things are going there.The Ubuntu community spirit is missing.
I then started looking at the ubuntu-pk channel and found it in the same sad state of affairs. After a couple of months an old ubuntu user from pk arrived and was surprised to find any life there and he has been helping regrow the channel. And will apply for Ubuntu membership within a few months. By rights he could have done that years ago imo. But once again the leadership is at fault. Here is his old wiki page
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/shani
It seems to me that running a LoCo there is a personal badge of honour, and not in the best interests of Ubuntu or with any concern for other users.
Feel free to mail me at msdomdonner at ubuntu dot com or find me daily on irc in
#ubuntu-community-team

Goodness Gracious Me

Here I was worrying attendance would be poor, Fool me,

Our first AfricanTeams meeting was a rip roaring success even though I struggled to keep up at times. Attendance peeked at 54 at times. Special thanks to CC and LC members who attended, you made my day. :D I cant write about the whole meeting because suggestions and ideas were flying to and fro so rapidly.
All I know is that the plan is working and the last 2 teams will be included in the next meeting. As you will see at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/AfricanTeams we have added a section where lugs can now join our group. Being rather on the old side I don't understand if there is a difference between them and us. Aren't we all just one big Linux family. So what if some prefer other Linux Distros, betcha they have Ubuntu running somewhere. Personal thanks goes out to everyone involved for making this whole project such a success. Meeting minutes can be seen at
http://52.17.74.45/freenode-%23ubuntu-africa/2015-07-29-18-30-47.html
Thank you everyone
Miles

Really getting there

Hi there everyone,
Success is on the cards for Africa. 15 of the 18 countries have joined the group
and it looks like we will soon be helping one country form a new LoCo there.
As you can see from https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-africa/+members this group is growing in leaps and bounds. First brain storming meeting will be on the 29th of this month at 20.30 Africa time. ( UTC+2 ) I am hoping that a Council member or two can attend. And we have 3 membership board members so all is looking good. Everyone is welcome to join us at our first meeting. One of the Tunisia guys has been improving our wiki page as well
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/AfricanTeams
Keep well everyone.

If you can't beat them, Join them

Haha ,
I am not a fan of Facebook or of Twitter, but it seems social media is the way to go. We have had much success with finding missing LoCo's in Africa. Only 5 of the 18 countries still to get contact with so than can join our Africa initiative. Maybe the social media bit will help. So now we have a tweet place as well  @ubuntuinafrica and a FB  page https://www.facebook.com/groups/494775420686780/
Here one can see the Ubuntu users already committed  https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-africa
I am pleased to find that each new user or group I get into contact with is excited and happy that there is a Ubuntu revival underway in Africa. Personally I don"t mind if a few other countries join us as well, because why limit oneself to one continent if you can meet and make friends on all of them. isn't this what community spirit is all about? Oh and of course most important of all is I received my Ubuntu membership certificate today after 6 months of stressing because the post office took their time.

Africa is growing

Having an @ubuntu.com email address has some clout. After trying for six months to get a response from the missing LoCo's in Africa using my old gmail address some of them didn't reply, now , retrying with @ubuntu.com I am getting somewhere. #ubuntu-africa is slowly growing and I have received some reply mails from other counties that are all pleased that there is a LoCo revival move underway. We have grown to the stage where we will have our first meeting on the 29th of this month at 20.30 UTC+2  Anyone else is welcome to join us. I hope to see many of you there on irc > freenode > #ubuntu-africa
Everyone is welcome to promote our site http://ubuntu-africa.info

Well well, long time since I last blogged, so decided to start a new blog. What just started life as an idea at a monthly meeting the beginning of this year,  turned into quite a large project, the result of which was a new official ubuntu IRC channel #ubuntu-africa .

The idea was to try to link all LoCos in Africa in one channel so we can share experience and expertise and grow Ubuntu in the whole of Africa. I was rather shocked to find that apart from the ZA team on #ubuntu-za the rest of the continents LoCos had kinda faded away. But half of them now join us on #ubuntu-africa.

After a few weeks of trying to round up the Ubuntu LoCos in Africa and get them to join us on IRC, the Ubuntu-za team decided that having a site to help locate and attract Ubuntu users in Africa could be helpful. With superfly guiding us and doing the ground work using bzr and Nikola then inepro, mopkop and pieter2627 worked on the content. The result of which is http://ubuntu-africa.info

The whole site took a few months to get going because everyone works as well so time is in short supply, but the guys did a wonderful job and the coolest site out there is online.
Well done the ZA team.