Hello Hackers,

September was a particularly busy month, especially for the Boston chapter. From the early stages of planning for Beyond40, we expected to really push our adversiting and evangelization in September because that is when students return to universities, and we expect universities to be a natural hotbed of FOSS activity.

The Boston Chapter

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Here in the Boston Chapter, we started completely from scratch and achieved something stable. Last year at Northeastern University, there was an attempt at organizing a FOSS club, and it failed for several reasons, which we wanted to avoid this year.

The primary one was that, do to being an “official” club of the school, the club was under its iron grip. Because of the fairly archaic room-booking process, the club was restricted to only meeting once every 2 weeks at a time that was inconvenient for most members. Also, letting non-Northeastern students join the club had to be done in secret, and the club leadership was concerned that having a public-facing Discourse, Mastodon, or other communication platform would reveal that non-Northeastern students were active in the club.

Advice for Beyond40 Chapters on University Campuses

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Registering with the School is Probably not Worth it

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It is worth stating that a huge advantage of organizing a group of young people (AKA few responsibilites) who are all in close physical proximity to each other is that meetings can be formed spontaneously without being planned ahead of time. In university campuses, Beyond40 chapters should use this to their advantage.

As described above, registering as an official club stands fully against that. There are of course benefits to being a club, such as funding from the school, but registering should be done with very significant contemplation beforehand. Therefore, in the author’s (Zachary Liebl’s) opinion, it is not worth registering with the school.

In the Boston chapter, this allows us to meet both spontaneously and consistently. We had a meeting every Wednesday in September, but (technically this happened early October) there was a major FOSS conference nearby Northeastern and some FOSS-interested people just happened to be in town. Therefore on a 4-hour notice we called a meeting and invited the out-of-towners (and they showed up).

The way we achieve this (despite not having a room booked beforehand) is that we advertise that we will meet on a certain floor of a certain builing (we announce this a week ahead of time). There are about 7 classrooms on that floor, and we do not know which ones will be full beforehand. Then 10 minutes before the meeting starts, one of our members will check the classrooms to find an empty one. Then they will post the room number on our Signal chat. If the interested attendee is not in the Signal group, then we can meet them at the staircase and walk them to the room. Since the room is not booked ahead of time, this strategy works for spontaneous meetings, as we do not have to wait for the school to approve our room booking.

In short be creative with how you pick a meeting space. It will probably work out.

Not registering with the school also allows us to easy and trivially invite guest speakers and to invite students from other schools.

Clear, Easy Communication is Key

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All of our members are in a Signal group chat. If your members have concerns about blobs in Signal, know that there is a 100% FOSS Signal client called Molly. This allows us to quickly and easily push meeting times.

There are other FOSS communication options like Matrix and XMPP, but in real-world testing Signal has worked the best for us.

Any organization will fall apart without clear communication channels

Miscellaneous About the Boston Chapter

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I (Zachary Liebl was the main organizer of the Boston chapter). However, I knew that I would be leaving Boston for 6 months starting in early October. Therefore I needed to start the whole thing and find a successor in about a month. This actually did work, and Jayden, one of our regular members, is now the main contact for the club. Yet, the other club members are very engaged and it is unlikely that the chapter’s decisions will be so top-down as when I was leading it and made all the decisions.