LoCo Handover Process

Approved by @loco-council with vote at 2024-08-28T09:32:00Z. Click this link for vote details.

The handover of a LoCo leadership can be a request from the current leaders or by prospective leaders willing to take over the LoCo. If the request comes from a current leader of the LoCo, the “LoCo leadership check” can be skipped. However, if the request comes from a prospective leader, the following needs to be done.

Submitting a Handover request

If current leaders or prospective leaders want to request LoCo handover, they need to submit a request by creating a topic on discourse LoCo Support category with the template provided.

LoCo leadership check

The LoCo Council will to try to contact the current leadership of the LoCo using all means of communication found on launchpad profile of current leaders such as but not limited to:

• Email
• Discourse
• Chat(IRC, Matrix, etc.)
• “Contact this user” button on Launchpad profile
• If all above not works, other ways of communication suggested from prospective leaders

The window of 15 days will be given to get a reply in at least one of the means above. If this period is past and no reply was received, then up to 2 more round of “trying contact” is made. After this period, the LoCo leadership is considered unreachable by the LoCo Council.

If a response from current LoCo leaders is received, then we need to confirm followings from the current leaders.

• If they are currently running their LoCo actively or not. If LoCo Council can confirm any of followings, current leaders will be considered as active
  • LoCo with current leaders have either done verification or re-verification in recent 2 years from the day LoCo Council received handover request.
  • Current leaders have done several activities in recent 2 years And they also have detailed and solid plans for future activities.
    • For their recent activities, current leaders need to share proof such as photos, report on discourse.ubuntu.com and it must be easily accessible publicly.
    • For future activity plans, current leaders will need to provide formal write up and it should sound feasible with consideration of their situation and backgrounds.
• Whether they agree to the handover process or not.

If current leaders agree to the handover:

• If current leaders are running LoCo actively, LoCo Council will just ask them to handle by themselves besides those tasks that could be facilitated by the LoCo Council.
• If current leaders are inactive, LoCo Council will take care the next steps of the handover process

If current leaders disagree:

• If current leaders are running LoCo actively, the process will be halted without any handover.
• If current leaders are inactive, LoCo Council will proceed with next steps and if LoCo Council decides it’s better the handover to prospective leaders, handover will be made only in that case.

If the LoCo is considered inactive and not reachable, We’ll need to check how prospective leaders are currently recognized in their region.

To do this, LoCo Council will need to gather following information first:

• Information about prospective leaders:
  • Names, Biography in 2 or 3 sentences
  • URL of their Ubuntu Discourse and Launchpad Profile - With their latest and reachable contact information such as email, IRC and Matrix filled in their profile
• Their recent 6 months activity reports with links or attachments (such as blog posts, event reports, photos and more) and future activity plans from prospective leaders
• Endorsements from members or people have been involved with the LoCo.

Based on information gathered, If LoCo Council can confirm that they have already organized number of activities and have enough number of people who agrees that prospective leaders should lead the LoCo, LoCo Council can proceed with next steps of handover process.

Identify new leadership

Once the LoCo Council makes a decision to proceed with handover, LoCo council will need to check the list of prospective leaders once again and this time along with their roles for communicating with LoCo Council. Such as LoCo contact who will be the person that LoCo Council can contact if needed. And also one or two backup contact person in case LoCo council were not able to communicate with LoCo’s main contact person.

Identify resources needs to be handed over to prospective leaders

If any of the following resources for the LoCo exists, and In case current leaders can’t take handle the resource handover, LoCo Council will also assist in the handover to prospective leaders.
In case such resources do not exist yet, prospective leaders can ask LoCo Council to facilitate the set up the resources required.

• Admin access of Real time chat channels: (IRC (Libera.chat) and Matrix (ubuntu.com))
• LoCo Mailing list
• Discourse LoCo Category
• Domain (DNS) access (ubuntu-**.org)
• LoCo Team on Launchpad

Other resources such as social media accounts, website and forums that were setup by LoCo themselves needs to be handed over by LoCo leaders themselves as those are not accessible by LoCo Council.