Guidelines for Local Communities
What is a local community
The local communities spread over the world are often the first address for end users. The communities help to solve 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. In fact one of the main goals of a local community should be to facilitate those users who want to contribute to the fedoraproject.
According to this requirements 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) do you want to create a local community?
- Is there just a local community for your area? Look at fedoracomunity.org to find it.
- Which resources do you want to set up and who is your target?
- If there exists an active local community, do you have different targets than the existing one? If not you should think about joining the active community trying to enforce it in your country.
- 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 months of life of a new community probably is also the community-founder. The leader should be easy to contact by the fedoraproject and it would be better if the leader of a local community is an active contributor too.
When growing, the local communities need 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 communities per single area/country 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 should meet the following requirements:
- The community which is registered with the *.fedoracommunity.org domain, is just approved by the infrastructure team.
- The community which has it's own domain name and wants to get a redirect from the *.fedoracommunity.org subdomain, has to satisfy the following:
- The local community must have a trademark license agreement with Red Hat.
Only one community per area/country can obtain the *.fedoracommunity.org subdomain (directly or with a redirect). However it's possible for other communities in the same area/country, which meet the requirements, to be listed on the summary page of http://fedoracommunity.org.
Health check procedure
The Websites team controls regularly if the local communities listed on the *.fedoracommunity.org portal are still active and running. Things can change very fast on the web, so it won't be rare having a fusion of two communities or the closure of another one. Every time a listed community doesn't satisfy any more the requirements of the fedoracommunity.org portal, and, above all, if their is another active community in the same area/country, the *.fedoracommunity.org subdomain may be redirected; this particularity also will be applied to the communities registered as **.fedoracommunity.org.