Ubuntu-it is, as the name says, the LoCo team that takes care to promote Ubuntu in Italy and to make available all resources (documentation, support, the system itself) in Italian. The LoCo itself hasn’t any resource - we are all volunteers - and it isn’t an association or any other recognized institution, so we can’t accept donations.
Our websites run on a Canonical server, and we don’t have any other expenses. When some of us go to any conference to show Ubuntu to the world, the expenses are paid by the volunteer himself or, in the best cases, by the organizers of the conference. Despite lack of resources what ubuntu-it could achieve is awesome.
To have some idea on what is our audience, according to Wikipedia, Italy has ~61 million inhabitants, and in 2011 54,5% of Italian families had access to the internet. Definitely a little market compared to the world.
Events
In 2014 ubuntu-it organized two main events: DUCC-IT and a community meeting.
DUCC-IT
The Debian/Ubuntu Community Conference Italia is an event that wants to unite the Italian communities of Debian and Ubuntu but also Italian organizations working in Free Software, to exchange knowledge, discuss the current situation and meet other developers and community members.
The conference had a lot of visitors, and the talks were pretty interesting, mainly about Debian and Ubuntu, but also about PostgreSQL, Raspberry pi and others.
Organize this event is complicated and requires a lot of work, so thanks to UIELinux and S.P.R.I.T.E for the help. We will try to organize another one for the next year.
Community meeting
In November we organized an event for the contributors, to choose what to focus on until Ubuntu 15.04. The event was funny as usual, a day to drink beers together and to work on our favourite distro!
Some numbers
The 2014 was huge also about numbers: this year we focused on social networks, because forums and mailing list aren’t used so much anymore, and we need to advertise Ubuntu where people are: social networks, indeed. So we have a group on Facebook with 3400 members and a page with 7400 likes. The group itself is quite good, but our page needs more likes - we have some ideas for the new year, and we will try to boost it.
I think a good indicator about how much our community works well are website stats: it is static (we don’t have news on it) so a user uses the website only to download Ubuntu or to find informations on Ubuntu. Indeed, 25.32% of pageviews are on homepage and 24.26% are on the download page.
So, in 2014 we had 2,256,985 visits by 1,525,845 unique visitors (65.84% are new visitors) that have visited 7,237,480 pages.
In 2015 we’re planning to launch a new version of the website, mobile ready (sorry, we’re very late on this, but you know, we do it in our little free time).
With the launch of the new website and of Ubuntu Phone in February (and with a lot of people interested in it) I think we can do bigger numbers, and I hope we will have a fantastic year in the Free Software world.
Ciao,
R.
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