LoCo Love! Illinois people (that small corn state in the US) you now have a place to call home in the Ubuntu community. Tonight, after talks with other Ubuntu members it has been decided to start an Ubuntu Illinois Local Community Team. Since I have been the team lead in a way for Ubuntu Chicago, it was decided that I should go ahead and get the project rolling. Well after further thought, a couple of dreams and some hacking, Illinois has now been Ubuntu’ized.

What is a LoCo? A LoCo, or Local Community, is a team of Ubuntu enthusiast that want to see Ubuntu succeed. The team will be made up of people from all walks of life with advocacy and support of Ubuntu in their minds. The building process will be slow, but if you are in the state of Illinois and would like to be apart of the Ubuntu community, you now have a place to start. What will we do? Right now the growth of membership is a large priority. Once we have a strong membership, and during the process of gaining new members, we will give talks, do demos, advocate (market) Ubuntu anyway possible. We will help people switch over, we will provide them with support, and we will turn them into enthusiasts as well.

Ubuntu Chicago in the past year has had some pretty good success. The team has held in-depth meetings, members have given talks at local events, converted hundreds of local users and have even helped support those users with their new life in the free software world.

Sign me up! Well, you can sign up yourself to show that you are interested in helping Ubuntu and Ubuntu Illinois grow. Head on over to the team page on launchpad and sign up. Note that you have to have an account on the launchpad first. Until the team gets up to speed the Ubuntu Chicago mailing list will be used for communications as well as the IRC channel. So, point your IRC client to #ubuntu-illinois on Freenode which will redirect you for the time being to #ubuntu-chicago. Say hi and hang out. Within the following months we are hoping to have a decent turn out in membership as well as events planned at the state universities. Keep an eye out for an updated wiki page for the team as well.

Thanks to everyone who helped in conceiving this idea and for poking me enough times to go ahead and start it up.