This month had us working to build up and support our initial chapters in their earliest stages. We also began work on seeding and building up new chapters. Where chapter organizers have run into roadblocks, we have started pairing them with mentors to assist. This approach has shown very promising results so far.

Many of our chapters that our formed so far have started by just meeting and talking about various topics in the FOSS space, but we’re slowly dipping our toes into the realm of doing things.

Chapter Updates

#

• The Boston chapter has still been meeting regularly, although it has run into some struggles with engagement and the planning out of meetings. We have paired up the Boston organizer with a local mentor who will be helping him plan out meeting ideas ahead of time and stay on top of things. As the chapter mostly consists of university students, they have elected to take a hiatus over winter break and reconvene in January. Various topics and events are in the works for January.
• The DMV chapter has been regularly meeting and hosted meetings on various topics including Tor and self-hosting. There are plans in the works to begin using local university infrastructure towards hosting FOSS services like privacy frontends. Leads have been found for separate Maryland and DC chapters, so this chapter will likely split.
• The Central Illinois chapter is still in the process of formation, but the chapter lead has developed a website and various other resources to help with bringing on less technically-inclined people to Beyond40.
• THe New York group has found a new chapter lead, and recruited a lot more members. A chapter initiation meeting has been scheduled for December.
• Organizers in West Massachusetts have found members to seed a chapter with, but the chapter initiation meeting has yet to be scheduled.
• Members in the Bay Areaa have shown interest in forming a chapter and are now reaching out to local FOSS groups to begin recruiting members.

Topics Discussed at Our Meeting

#

Designing Flyers

#

We talked more concretely about expectations for flyers, and decided it’s best to design flyers in a modular fashion: with reusable assets and formats tailored to specific audiences and usecases.

Both @beardystarstuff and @zmef have created flyer designs which we should probably look to storing in a community document repository of sorts.

We’ve decided on the following designs to start out:

• Two trifolds, two 4x4 cards, and two 8.5x11 flyers: one design of each targeted to non-technical activists and one design targeted to those already familiar with FOSS

Document Repository

#

We have a lot of various shared resources from various local chapters and users that are worth pooling: we have decided it’s worth creating a shared folder to place stuff like flyers, masterdocs, notes, and meeting slides into.

This will allow for users to be able to reuse information/work and also allow for the archiving of stuff made for the group that may not necessarily get linked on the website itself.

Questions are about where to host it: some suggestions were CryptDrive, Proton Drive, among others.

Crowdsourcing Meeting Ideas

#

In that vein, a lot of our leads sometimes struggle with coming up with meeting topics or ideas. This is where I think it would be valuable to have a shared doc in which peoplecan post their suggestions for meeting topics and chapter projects.

This will make it easier for chapters to plan and share their experiences/ideas of what does and doesn’t work.

Virtual Book Club

#

Our organizer for the virtual book club had to drop off for the time being, so the book club is currently on hiatus. But, there’s still demand from a lot of users for venues and outlets to have discussions virtually – especially since we have a lot of members who live in areas outside of the reach of a local chapter.

One proposal by our members is a kind of virtual “open mic” – meetings where members informally get together and talk about whatever. Could be presentations, asking for chapter advice, or just generally talking about FOSS.

We probably do regardless need to look into finding someone to take over and help plan these.

Mentor System

#

Some of our chapters are being run or founded by people with less experience, and this can sometimes cause issues with either planning meetings or dealing with setbacks. We’ve made an active effort this month to pair chapter leads in need of help with “mentors” – active users with a long history of community organizing who don’t have a local chapter of their own to tend to.

We’ve found this kills two birds with one stone – it helps get these stranded users more engaged while also providing chapter leads with assistance and people they can turn to to ask for advice.

The success of this effort signals to us that it’s worth finding other ways to engage our members virtually and ensure knowledge is being shared between chapters.