This month continued our work in getting chapters off the ground, especially following the huge surge of interest we got in the wake of our presentation at FSF40.

Chapter Updates

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Here’s where our chapters are at right now:

• The Central Illinois chapter is showing a lot of promising growth. 10-15 people have expressed interest in starting a chapter and our organizer has made connections with a lot of local organizations in his community including the Illinois Pirate Party.
• A sufficient number of founding members in South Florida has been reached and they had their icebreaker meeting this month. They are now moving to planning regular, in-person meetings.
• The Boston chapter has shown an incredible amount of activity, meeting on a weekly basis hosting workshops on topics such as Raspberry Pis and Nextcloud. The original organizer is on a sabbatical of sorts, so responsibility for the chapter has transferred to a different member. The transition in leadership has gone very smoothly, with no notable hiccups in the chapter’s activities.
• The DMV chapter is meeting on a regular schedule now, and a core group of members has been identified. This month, they had a discussion on RSS and the impact of software freedom on how we consume news. Geographic distance still remains an issue, so talks are in place to split the chapter into DC and Maryland.
• The New York chapter still has yet to get off the ground, our organizer said his schedule should free up in December. The number of interested members shows a lot of promise for this chapter though.
• Missouri will probably be de-listed as a chapter, due to the lack of promising leads in finding membrs or expectation of such. This is to be expected as it’s a rural area, and recent events related to the government shutdown has preoccupied the attention of the community. The organizer there, however, has continued to work with his local library to upcycle computers and is helping out Beyond40 in other ways.

Topics Discussed At Our Meeting

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Designing Flyers

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A lot of our organizers have taken to either tabling or promoting Beyond40 at various events and conferences they attend. As a result, there’s been a lot of demand for some kind of flyers or cards that could be handed out. We’ve tasked someone with designing them, and hopefully we’ll have them ready and released on the website in the coming weeks.

Ideally, we’d want these flyers to contain a lot of the most essential links (interest form, website, calendar, etc.) so maybe a LinkTree (or whatever the FOSS alternative is) is in the works? It could give us a single link to put in a QR code with all the essential info.

Mastodon Account

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Some members at the meeting suggested a Mastodon account which would post status updates from all the various chapters. This is a large commitment so if we were to go down this path, we might want to find someone whose willing to commit to gathering information from all the different organizers and regularly post about them.

Other systems to aggregate updates from different organizers and chapters were suggested, but this requires its own overhead. Another suggestion brought up (which seems to be good) is for now to tag any posts about events or updates with a #beyond40 hashtag. This would allow people to follow the tag without us having to commit to maintaining a full social media account.

Other Issues

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With regards to some of the more minor questions left open during last month’s recap:

• There is now an interest form for prospective members and members to fill out. This will give us an idea of your skills, interest, and other information that’ll make it easier for us to get you connected or find useful work to help out with. The more people we get filling this out, the better.
• We’re still using Gath.io for our calendar, but we’re now archiving previous events on Mobilizon.
• We ran a couple experiments with Zulip, but for now the plan is to continue using Signal for our chats.

The Bigger Picture

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How to Launch A Chapter

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The real big test for this month was having to quickly figure and lay out a process for going from that initial loose collection of 3-4 “interested members” to a functioning chapter. That process of breaking the ice and actually getting people to create and commit to a regular schedule isn’t easy. What I’ve seen is a lot of organizers do not know where to start when doing this, so they do need some sort of baseline to work off of.

Over the course of my time experimenting with Florida, the DMV, and New York, here’s the method I found works:

1. Whenever a member recruits someone interested, they should encourage the recruit to fill out the interest form and join the main groupchat. This gets the recruits directly in the loop and available for future sorting.
2. Organizers should keep a track of who is from where as members accumulate. Once there’s a decent amount of people (about 3 or more) in our network from the same area, national organizers should create a separate “formation groupchat” and invite prospective chapter members.
3. As the formation groupchat gets spun up, national organizers should identify who in the area is a good candidate to be tasked with running the chapter. Once a candidate is decided on, they should be reached out to in order to see if they’re willing to commit.
4. Once a chapter leader and a core set of “founding members” are found, national organizers should survey those in the formation group to begin scheduling an chapter initiation meeting. This chapter initiation meeting will be virtual and planned by national organizers.
   • This chapter initiation meeting should start by asking everyone to introduce themselves to each other, and finding subjects to break the ice with.
   • Afterwards, national organizers will briefly introduce Beyond40, our goals, and what chapters do.
   • Then, turn the conversation back to asking everyone what topics they might like to discuss in future meetings, what projects they’d like to work on, etc. Note down these ideas, pass them along, and make sure they exit the meeting with a plan of what comes next. The goal of the meeting is to pass a sense of responsibility onto the members.
5. Afterwards, the designated chapter lead will plan and schedule the first in-person meeting. Potentially have the first meeting be casual like a bar social, before dipping their toes further. National organizers should work with the chapter lead to ease them into running the chapter and overcoming hurdles.

As this goes on, national organizers will probably want to keep an eye and get a sense for what kind of “crowd” makes up the membership for each chapter, as that will guide what chapters grow into. A chapter could be more university-focused, more activist-leaning, more tech-heavy, older folks, etc, it’s all situational. Having a system to keep an eye and classify this might be helpful.