Guidelines for Local Communities
What is a local community
The local communities spread over the world are often the first address for the end users. The communities help to resolve problems, give information about the distribution and the activity of the fedoraproject and stimulate people using GNU+Linux and free software.
For all this reasons a local community is very important for the fedoraproject itself, because it really helps supporting and developing Fedora.
Requirements of local communities
A local community isn't only a group who tells the users what they have to do, it's much more. An efficient and active local community offers a lot of resources to involve the end user and at the same time tries to recruit new contributors for the fedoraproject.
For this the local communities have to respect the Legal:Trademark_guidelines.
How to create a new local community
Starting a local community seems simple, but realizing a successful community with a motivated team often is a long and challenging process. The admin team should have problem solving and human resources management skills.
When deciding to set up a local community you should first think about the following points:
- In which area (country/state/region)you want to create a local community?
- Is there just a local community for your area? Look at fedoracomunity.org to find it.
- If there exists an active local community, do you have different targets than the existing one? If not contact the Infrastructure team.
- Which resources do you want to set up and who is your target?
Community domains
- We recommend that local communities use a *.fedoracommunity.org domain name supplied by the Fedora Project, along with their own hosting.
- To establish any other domain with the word Fedora in its domain name, you must have a trademark license agreement with Red Hat.
- Refer to the Local_community_domains for more information.
Find a Leader
The success of a new local community depends on the ability of the leader, which in the first month of life o a new community probably is the founder of the community itself. The leader should be easy to contact by the fedoraproject and it would be better if the leader of a local community is a contributor too. When growing, the local communities needs a good structure of the team in order to go forward, so often the leader will change in the time. It's also up to the single communities to find the right leading structure, some teams elect their leader, other operate as a leading group.
Requirements to meet before being listed in fedoracommunity.org
The fedoracommunity.org portal is a list of the most active community per single area and has the goal to help new users finding the right local community in their area. To be listed in fedoracommunity.org the local communities have to meet the requirements below:
- The community is registered with the *.fedoracommunity.org domain, approved by the infrastructure group
- The community has it's own domain name and wants to get a redirect from the *fedoracommunity.org subdomain; in this case:
- The local community must have a trademark license agreement with Red Hat
- Before beeing listed the community has to play an active rule in it's area, using as much as resources as possible to involve new and existing users
Health check procedure
The Infrastructure team controls regularly if the local community listed on *.fedoracoomunity.org portal is still active. Things can change very fast on the www, so it won't be rare having a fusion of two communities or the closure of another. Nevertheless the local communities can contact the Infrastructure every time they want to comunicate important changes about their local activity.