0:00:10i guess i'll start
0:00:17so i'm really that is sort going to actually be reading a lot of that
0:00:21so this is that so
0:00:25first i should introduce myself my name is mike ford i'm a you know foundation
0:00:30member i got involved in you know with the women's outreach program in two thousand
0:00:37eleven and i and contributing chick you know since then i'm also working on my
0:00:44master's in computer science in chicago so this talk is basically about a group that
0:00:49jim campbell who is not documentation contributor
0:00:54in you know
0:00:55i started in chicago
0:00:57and also for so i'd like to explain the title generally when i talk about
0:01:03free and open source software i call it three the free software can or for
0:01:09us community are the flask
0:01:13well i'm calling at the open source community
0:01:17because in chicago we have a tiny for yourself
0:01:22and so in order for us
0:01:26to our reach out be and our small twenty member community we needed to learn
0:01:34how to engage people who we have things in common but by maybe didn't embrace
0:01:40all of the all the
0:01:43the ideals
0:01:46i that free software this
0:01:51so has a chicago is the third largest city you know
0:01:58so we have a population of almost people
0:02:02and we have a pretty large czech by our free software community address that is
0:02:09really small
0:02:11so when we were starting out a lot of what the challenge that we face
0:02:16how do we get people to be interested in free software how do you know
0:02:21the community around give when most people have never use windex
0:02:27or have heard of free software
0:02:32we started out
0:02:35basically looking at our community
0:02:37and seen what is the larger community that surrounds free software which are and we
0:02:44found that we have three basic groups of people who were knowledgeable about free software
0:02:49and to might possibly be interested in learning about you know
0:02:55so are the three basic ribs we have
0:02:58we have a pretty active python community and we have a hacker space with a
0:03:05lot of people who tend to run macro last
0:03:09and we have a nonprofit it's hardware recycling
0:03:15that installed linux on laptops and dot tops and either don't make seven or sells
0:03:24them at low cost
0:03:25so the i community is we have around thousand active members of the pipeline on
0:03:34that's a sad often times they turn round hole
0:03:39so they don't use linux
0:03:44but they have a lot of knowledge that can help them to learn about linux
0:03:48so that the basically the learning curve for that is not just it would be
0:03:53for someone coming from microsoft
0:03:58also they a lot of the people the pipelines maybe ten should use both front
0:04:02end and back and development and so they have a lot of understand things like
0:04:07line and concept second hope to become active you know
0:04:18i hope so
0:04:20also there are people from the python community for involved in the next one of
0:04:26the all this in
0:04:28the chicago area in the suburbs is run by a number of the type and
0:04:34community and then six of our members are actually chicago python community members as well
0:04:47so we also have a packer space
0:04:51with around two hundred members that actually probably i think that's the official number and
0:04:56they probably have actually i five
0:05:01and we have a they have a lot of a printer which is aegean you
0:05:07people use wonder in state for their projects and also they there are people who
0:05:14are using free software but maybe not necessarily
0:05:19there is also a pretty active people were hacking on michael microcontroller projects
0:05:27and they
0:05:30the people who go to the hyperspace range from startup see you know is to
0:05:36hobbyists to just come in and how come we can't
0:05:40no they mentioned there's also for each card which are is the is i'm not
0:05:47a you know that recycles computers and one's a installs want to look next
0:05:57and they also have weekly have nights but they're actually acting on their website which
0:06:01i think is in java script
0:06:04so we wanted to create
0:06:07i community problem you know and there we have to be people in chicago who
0:06:14work on you know a G able
0:06:18right here
0:06:20have the baroness at least and chris webber also decided that would help us
0:06:35this actually lives in a different city so he was just five you often to
0:06:40help us a but in the two people most organisation trivia J
0:06:50you probably does most of the he does our website updates and a lot of
0:06:57our social media posts
0:07:00so initially we decided that we would have meetings where we would go to the
0:07:06newcomers tutorial and try to teach people to happen you know and are most of
0:07:11the meetings i was the only person who actually had a
0:07:15and i found that
0:07:17me myself trying to teach twelve people to use G H build up once
0:07:22different distributions was it with choose difficult i could actually really be productive in the
0:07:28whole so because of that
0:07:32we moved trying to have a broader for
0:07:35for the group
0:07:39i'm not saying that we encountered a lot first with that P we people
0:07:46generally when we brought up you know people had a negative reaction
0:07:52and on a people would say things like you know thank you know unit easily
0:07:58this they don't care about their user
0:08:02people didn't like you know three
0:08:05and thinking chicago for example we have are some people there who is that what
0:08:13we hit you know we have to switch to access see because we're using old
0:08:18hardware we can run get a three on it why don't you care about the
0:08:22people we're donating use machines to
0:08:28and also because we had a manual focus just on you know people seem to
0:08:35see as that's kind of
0:08:37and maybe that's partly my fault on having to just as people were only focus
0:08:42on you know
0:08:44we're not really concerned about building a community around free software in general
0:08:51another issue that we ran into where was a
0:08:56diversity issues
0:09:05so i
0:09:07so we actually and it out of putting a diversity statement on our website at
0:09:13a certain point in time and the main reason why we ended up doing that
0:09:20was because
0:09:25and well at the women some people did not like the fact that i was
0:09:30representing the which is
0:09:34and so i ran into some issues with people being anything that i was in
0:09:41a position of authority as a woman in the past community and so we did
0:09:48end up having to diversity statement and we sort of came up with a way
0:09:54to deal with people on it's actually pretty common in chicago for people to i
0:10:00for people to feel that
0:10:02women are not involved in the next because it doesn't interest
0:10:10one thing that we've tried to do is have discussions with those people we tried
0:10:15to engage them and keep them in our community and we have some failures doing
0:10:23and we did have one person laughter
0:10:27but it's
0:10:28we tried to be as inclusive as parts
0:10:33so in general what we feel is if someone doesn't agree with that adversity balls
0:10:38that's totally fine
0:10:40and we welcome that person to be community anyway
0:10:43just that people don't for us for having the balls
0:10:56the basic way that we deal with that issue in
0:11:00we've tried to engage the larger linux community and we found other people were sort
0:11:06of in senior positions in the linux community more willing to speak up and support
0:11:10of diversity and that's kind of changed data to a lot of
0:11:14a lot of the people involved in our group
0:11:18and we try to give people a reasonable chance to talk about how they feel
0:11:24about first i think ye
0:11:27you know not everyone has the same how political ideas like
0:11:32so i tried to
0:11:35try to engage people and give them a chance to talk about what they feel
0:11:38is important that we do and conversations what we're so productive
0:11:46i do emphasise in this
0:11:49so we do things like try to use just for like which some people like
0:11:56that that's important talk
0:11:59and we do have maybe writes to i have expressed about this
0:12:07click there are but
0:12:14the one that we ended up with is we have at our meetings one someone
0:12:19the first two hours we have a harness and we invite members of the community
0:12:24this sometimes people will approach us
0:12:28ask you talked some topics
0:12:30that is that we all the topics are related to free software and since gemini
0:12:36our we don't community members we tend to talk about things that are happening you
0:12:41know so when we go to know that will usually
0:12:47give people gonna talk about it so that people kind of feel like they're involved
0:12:53you know what's go what's going on
0:12:56so we want people to feel like
0:12:59we are part of the fast but at the same time they can be in
0:13:04the gonna buy belong to our organisation and then we spend the remaining three hours
0:13:10of our meeting sorry one
0:13:16the remaining three hours we have
0:13:22generally we invite people to bring whatever project they're working on
0:13:25so some people drink it all related projects
0:13:32no some people drink they don't they do projects and some people just bring whatever
0:13:37they are working on at the time
0:13:39we hold our meetings at the local hacker space
0:13:43at this point we're affiliated with chicago
0:13:47so we have a share need a page we have a lapel once in the
0:13:51chicago area where the only linux related in the city
0:13:57we have a social media presents that we actively poster twitter little plus
0:14:03i tended to see a we actually
0:14:06and we have a website that we maintain a mailing list
0:14:12there's you channel and then the me to start
0:14:18so what we provide for members
0:14:22we try to provide an informal space for people to talk about three
0:14:28software related topics
0:14:30and we try to provide people with some tech support so we have people who
0:14:35use linux or we try to install it if they aren't you know we try
0:14:40to help them or how
0:14:42and we have an o'reilly book just now so people can purchase textbooks you know
0:14:49and also they do reviews they can get
0:14:51chequebooks for free and then we specifically try to help with again so help you
0:14:57work problem G H bill
0:15:00learn out right
0:15:05so some of the talks that we had we had an intro to you max
0:15:09talk to chris webber gave and we went that michael there about came and talked
0:15:14with about our system D
0:15:17do you confident she studies open show showed and then i do what
0:15:23is that we had in brussels
0:15:26and we have a lot of times
0:15:28but in general maybe half or two thirds of them are gonna like it
0:15:34some of the project that people have worked on and we have one guy respond
0:15:39working on the G object bindings go programming language i didn't work on documentation and
0:15:46we had someone who are actually does that models
0:15:51i don't know does a lot of our video he recording for a free and
0:15:57open source work for inferences and so he was working on the system so we
0:16:02can streamline video and then i worked on documents we've had someone working on you
0:16:10know music and i'm working on some more right point had from that
0:16:15another percent working on this decay bindings
0:16:19we've also had thank you some of our members become involved in we are just
0:16:27about a two are actually participating in P W
0:16:33we see more people who are interested in you know open to the idea of
0:16:38using you know we don't get people generally have kind of move past
0:16:44a pass
0:16:46a huge you know and they
0:16:50we see a lot of people who actually
0:16:54actually what are the things that it really big difference was the introduction of fast
0:16:59and as much as i hate to say that was something that people would completely
0:17:05given up i'm going on using you know it was something that need them feel
0:17:13so it actually have made a pretty big difference in terms of perception our community
0:17:17east i don't some of our members also become friends
0:17:23the community of people who we have all we actually have a lot of systems
0:17:29cool come to our because which i was actually kind of surprised about actually didn't
0:17:35realise that a lot of sysadmins use linux on the desktop for
0:17:40and so what i was trying to teach people to cool for development in what
0:17:44they're like an extra
0:17:46i thought it was because i was a student make been using linux problem turn
0:17:50turned out that actually a lot of them were not about
0:17:55so i was surprised but i suppose
0:17:58like to
0:18:00we do have a lot of hype on community members
0:18:03we have students from local universities to come and the hackers
0:18:10so what we found is as we've kind of moved
0:18:14having a slightly broader for this
0:18:17that people are able to sort of contextualized you know basically it last as a
0:18:25that is working they don't see as are working in isolation and making decisions
0:18:32just based on what we want to do they see us as people who are
0:18:37contributing to the larger
0:18:40as well
0:18:44also we found that people who may know something about free software for example allows
0:18:54but i don't really know much about you know more about linux desktop
0:19:00are able to express interest from to our meetings and learn some things without feeling
0:19:06like i have to be axed
0:19:10so in the past we plan doing meetings monthly since september and to be as
0:19:15i said we started out with four members we have about fifteen people who are
0:19:19actively engaged in organising is
0:19:23and then we have various other people from not sure how many met members of
0:19:30it's probably right
0:19:33and we've also found that the community feedback that we've gotten have become a lot
0:19:39so that's all i feel is even though in some ways i feel like we're
0:19:44not really have much to you know directly we are making a difference in the
0:19:50king in our in terms of how is see so
0:19:57so our plans for the coming year are owns some of our members want to
0:20:04start doing some packing only events
0:20:06we're going to do you to work that how we should and building the community
0:20:11and encouraging and supporting interesting often channel
0:20:20you said i should talk to about starting
0:20:26so i would say that you last i think a free open source software is
0:20:32not as popular as it is in here
0:20:34so you may be starting from scratch that we that we were or you may
0:20:38have a all the next user group in your area you can get involved in
0:20:43any sort of
0:20:44actively talk about it will work
0:20:47of course you know
0:20:50so out there is a on linux user group then i would recommend that you
0:20:56probably try to start with a broader focus if you have a really small
0:21:01like we have website it you can go and set up pretty easily probably take
0:21:08about twenty minutes to start it up
0:21:11we use our mailing list a lot for a communicating with numbers for starting dates
0:21:18of our meetings for asking members to get a
0:21:23and the other thing is that you should convince your friends
0:21:27well just
0:21:31starting out especially we found that we had to give talks a lot
0:21:37and it was pretty hard at first to get people in the in the group
0:21:42to present
0:21:44and so you
0:21:46i would be willing to step up to back whenever there's an these five
0:21:51and just share your knowledge and trying to form so that people are become you
0:21:58know comfortable contributing what thing
0:22:02so the other thing that we think
0:22:06is that we see free software as something that people can use
0:22:15to enhance their
0:22:17if they can on learn they can use it so vertical they can read the
0:22:22source code you can modify it on they can provide they can distract through using
0:22:30and developing free software
0:22:34well one thing that we do it's not is that oftentimes people why and write
0:22:38your software
0:22:39at work
0:22:41first social media et cetera and so
0:22:45we try to not be basic we try not to be judgement
0:22:50we try to encourage people and keep it
0:22:58that's our so
0:23:02you are the links
0:23:05and i give i talk really that's why
0:23:14we have any spend
0:23:23i but most what we use for which use should we have the existing more
0:23:31so actually but what happened was that there had analogue in the chicago area that
0:23:37had become that had that was no longer act
0:23:41that started that i at which is that
0:23:43school area and then it not and at the for a number of years and
0:23:48so we started out just doing they can you know
0:23:52and as we kind of found that was working as well we sort of resurrected
0:23:59a lot and so we did end up having some people who had part of
0:24:05a lot of what which was where i hope
0:24:10but we did and that fill sort of resurrecting like the philly sound that in
0:24:18so this point you to or we just to
0:24:24we should what was no i would say i mean someone is i that hesitant
0:24:31about giving this talk to the you know
0:24:33because we started out really need don't focus and that was kind of my interesting
0:24:38being involved but in the and what we what we are doing is we're doing
0:24:45two hours of talks about three hours of have
0:24:49and the hacking events
0:24:51we have people work on you know and during the talks we do a lot
0:24:56of you know related talks and it's know that the people organising are gonna
0:25:03so i would say that in some ways
0:25:06we are exactly part of the you know
0:25:09we've sort of we've sort of had to broaden our for us because we have
0:25:13such a small
0:25:17well it's a will which will almost
0:25:23so we use
0:25:29you could use G really male
0:25:57so what advice would you give to people were you know sort of you know
0:26:02from your experience
0:26:03starting out new groups and then you give a little bit of space already but
0:26:08which you
0:26:09would use you were to do it all over again which you start with how
0:26:12to focus on them
0:26:16i think
0:26:17for me the focus it'll kind of the reason why got involved
0:26:21and that's and something that spend really important to me and that i
0:26:25try to
0:26:27keep going
0:26:28and so i don't
0:26:30i don't think i will
0:26:32lose the focus on you know i think that is something that i feel is
0:26:37an important
0:26:39but i do you think that
0:26:42i mean it it's hard to get people involved in software
0:26:48it's kind of at a help that a lot of ways we
0:26:51and so
0:26:53we sort of try to do whatever works
0:26:57is all
0:26:59making people interested and excited about
0:27:03just the gina project and just saw for in general
0:27:08so as a result of that i think you know i mean you know
0:27:14if you look at
0:27:15all of the projects that are
0:27:19you know and
0:27:21these are
0:27:22and do you buy these are things that people outside i can do you
0:27:27and so explaining how we fit into the larger
0:27:32free open source community has that really interesting thing i have sort of helps people
0:27:37to sort of
0:27:39just sort of what you know in a certain place and there
0:27:43as a group that isn't just isolated
0:27:51making decisions kind of without listening to you
0:27:54but so are a group that's providing
0:27:58second used by
0:28:05thank you for your told to i everything that you to say that there's been
0:28:10some pictures used some possibilities for know quality about two works generally able to see
0:28:17how do you do you do face a to discreetly seasonal and how would you
0:28:23try to do these group of course try to do that to change the point
0:28:29of view a the altar for you
0:28:33so i think i think things that we did were first it's a
0:28:39a three stopper in general are the other thing that we try to do is
0:28:44to help people or how to use get a three and to talk about you
0:28:48know three and what's happening in the ghetto project and what people are working on
0:28:53and how the vision of the ball and sort of present what we want to
0:28:59have happen in the future and you know how to get project use itself
0:29:05and i think in a way that's sort of where we've seen a change
0:29:10and how to is when people start to see that this is something that
0:29:14we all people are working on
0:29:16and that this is something that we are actively contributing to because we have a
0:29:20passion for free software
0:29:23a passion for development and then we seen people's attitude share and become more open
0:29:32minded about saying well you know they'll tell us
0:29:35this doesn't work for me but they don't see that as being something that will
0:29:39not for me
0:29:41it's you know something that
0:29:43someone is form
0:29:45i'm not you know maybe three months in the future will be different and there
0:29:50will be improve
0:30:05any other
0:30:10thank you