When starting this initiative, September was the month we set to launch. It goes without saying, then, that this past month has been very eventful for the group.
Over the course of only one month, here’s already what we have to show:
- Our Boston chapter has hosted multiple guest speakers for their events, including those involved with Internet in a Box and the Internet Archive. Zach talks about this in more detail in a separate blogpost.
- The DMV chapter came together this month to organize a letter-writing campaign in response to a recent right-to-repair bill that has gone through the Maryland state legislature.
- In St. Louis, we held an Upgrade From Windows assisted Linux install session at the Ozark Regional Library! Denny talks more about his experience in this post here.
As for other areas right now:
- The New York chapter has identified both an organizer and enough members willing to seed a chapter there. A formation groupchat has been started, and the national team will work with the local members in coming weeks to get meetings started there.
- The organizers in South Florida and Central Illinois are starting to uncover more leads for finding members, but a core group has yet to be locked in. I’m thinking it’ll probably be worthwhile to find someone who can work on a more individual level to assist the organizers in recruitment.
- DMV is proving to be a difficult region to bridge distance-wise, and we’re starting to have enough members spread across that splitting the chapter into separate Maryland and D.C. groups might be in the works.
- Newly joined members have expressed interest in getting chapters started in Northern California and Western Massachusetts. We will be following up with them to see where these go.
The other big news is that we were invited to present our initiative at the FSF40 celebration. The reception was a strong success, and led to a significant surge in both interest and registrations. The talk has been translated into a blogpost and can be found here.
This next month is going to be a real test of how effectively our group can scale. The pace at which things are moving is getting to a point where I alone cannot coordinate everything. I’m going to have to be more proactive with delegating national tasks, and also finding quicker ways to get people in the loop.
Some of the more specific problems to address:
- How do we train organizers? The bulk of the workload of running these chapters is going to fall on whoever volunteers to do the organizing work for a given area. We cannot always guarantee these people are familiar with what to do to get stuff off the ground. How do we effectively support them and provide them with basic guidance in terms of being able to deal with the hurdles that come with organizing a local group?
- How do we get people on the same page? There’s a lot of nuances and specifics to our approach and what we do which we have yet to be able to explain concisely. The pace at which things progress can prove disorienting for new members, and the specifics of our approach are not clearly documented anywhere.
- How do we effectively follow chapter progress? Obviously, nobody can be everywhere, but at the same time it’s important to keep tabs on how things are going with each local group. The more organizers and chapters there are, the harder this will get to do manually.
- How do we effectively track our members? If we have members who have prior experience in organizing, who have specific interests, who have a certain level of energy and free time, how do we identify them and funnel them into the places they need to be? How do we avoid losing them in the sea of members?
Some potential solutions I’m considering:
- I’m going to take the slide deck that we compiled for the FSF40 conference and translate it into another blogpost which lays out our roadmap in explicit detail.
- I’m going to create a member survey asking stuff like experience, availability, location, etc, all with the intention of being more easily able to keep track of our social graph and connect people.
- Creating a system to pair the less-experienced chapter founders with “mentors” who have organizing experience I suspect will help in terms of making the process of starting a chapter less intimidating for them. Getting those experienced members on the right page with our plan will be critical.
- I’m thinking it might be worthwhile to host “first meetings” virtually in cooperation with whoever volunteers to be the lead. These meetings could serve to initially break the ice and get people to know each other, and also act as a testing grounds to get organizers’ feet wet with basic stuff such as wrangling people and scheduling before getting into more complicated planning.
There’s also some concerns about how our technology stack will scale:
- Our selection of Signal has a chat platform has raised questions for a while, due to the fact that it’s typically not used for large-scale organizations like these. I initially picked Signal because of its wide adoption and reliability for basic functionality relative to other popular FOSS groupchat offerings. Signal seems to work well for the local chapters and DMs, but the national group has a tendency to move at a pace nobody else can keep up with.
- Members have suggested something like Zulip, which is both open-source and seems to be more suited to collaborative usecases. My main hesitation right now is that I want to make sure we use a platform people can actually be trusted to check and that won’t run into various issues or hiccups down the line. Therefore I do want to test this over the course of a month or two to see how it is before making a decision on migration. If we do choose to switch over, we’ll probably retain Signal for smaller chats (such as for organizers and local chapters).
- There’s also some questions surrounding our choice of Gath.io as a group calendar platform. The rationale for picking Gath.io is thatit’s very simple and does not require accounts or registration of any kind for interaction. This means that I can easily request anyone running an event to quickly create one and send the link to me.
- The problem is the default Gath.io instance is set to auto-delete events after a week (which stops us from showing a backlog of what we’ve done) and event groups cannot be followed on the Fediverse. Mobilizon is a suggested alternative, but Mobilizon does require registration to create events which does have me hesitant. I do at least want to try out Mobilizon and see how it goes.