The following is an update for the past three months. For quicker updates, follow the wiki or our Mastodon!

These past couple months have mostly seen us settle into a basic rhythm at B40. In response to some of our setbacks in prior months, we spent these months taking a much more cautious approach to scaling and giving more attention to seeding and supporting existing chapters.

As a result we’ve seen extremely strong and sustainable growth for our efforts on the local level, with our existing chapters showing promising indicators of health and self-sufficiency. These next months will most likely be committed to building up a strong national/virtual culture, as the focus on chapters has left that with a lot of work left to do.

Local Chapter Updates

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As per recommendations from our last quarterly report, we’ve taken a much more conservative approach to seeding chapters. As a result, we have seen our presence be a lot less spread thin and our existing chapters showing a lot stronger indications of long-term health and self-sufficiency.

Among our official chapters:

• The Boston chapter has continued to meet regularly, with a strong mix of presentations and workshops given by a variety of members. B40 Boston is beginning to look into organizing more
• The Maryland chapter has shown extremely promising progress. Meetings have been held regularly with strong attendance levels, various members have given presentations on a variety of topics, and they have also branched into workshops (such as an OpenStreetMap Contribution Drive and a Self-Hosting Workshop).

Where we’re currently seeding chapters:

• The Bay Area group had a solid showing to their LibreLocal event, which also doubled as their first in-person meeting. Signs of health for future meetings look strong.
• The West Massachussetts group did not get sufficient attendance for their first planned in-person meeting but were able to quickly reschedule. How this goes is yet to be seen. The WM organizer has run into some unexpected circumstances and won’t be in the area for the short term. What happens from hre has yet to be seen.
• The Central Illinois group has a new organizer who brought in a new wave of members, and seems to have strong momentum behind it. No meetings have been planned yet, but this group is currently in formation.
• The New York group has still struggled with attendance, with great difficulty in both planning meetings and demonstrating turnout. Right now, things might need to go back to the drawing board for this group.

LibreLocal Month

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In addition, because May was LibreLocal Month, various B40 groups made it a priority to give a strong showing across America! We organized a variety of events and meetups, all for the purpose of promoting free-software!

• The Boston chapter organized an EFF Rayhunter workshop to help promote awareness of countersurveillance techniques.
• The Maryland chapter organized a field trip to the System Source Museum, a museum dedicated to the history of computing. There, members learned about various topics in computing history and the origins of early computing.
• B40 members in NYC and the Bay Area also organized meetups where presentations and discussions surrounding a variety of free-software topics were given.

Fostering a National Culture

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While we’ve seen very strong progress in terms of our local chapter health, there’s still a lot of work to do to provide connections for those without a chapter and foster a more cohesive national culture. This is especially important as both of our official chapters are tied to universities and are currently out for summer break.

We spent the past couple months experimenting with a couple concepts:

• In May, we hosted a “virtual mixer event” where we invited a guest speaker and had him talk a bit about his work mapping the decentralized web. This event turned out well, with solid attendance, and brought together some good discussions and connections for everyone involved. We are looking at organizing more of these
• One of the ideas discussed was possibly having FOSS game nights as a general social event. Idea was that these require not much work for organization, are more casual, and would make building a national culture easier.

The struggle with organizing both of these has been a lack of responsiveness in terms of scheduling, which probably can be attributed to the lack of an existing national culture (and by extent incentive to follow up on scheduling). It’s still unclear on how to address this.

In the past, having a presence at FOSS conferences has been a reliable way to boost our national energy, we’ll likely look into doing that again this year.

Miscellaneous

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Much work still needs to be done on the wiki, some of the following topics for articles are planned:

• Finding Guest Speakers
• Measuring Chapter Health
• Networking and Recruiting New Members
• Planning Chapter Meetings

It might be necessary to find helpers for the wiki but this will also require building a stronger national culture out of which people can be recruited.