On 11/19/2019 8:24 PM, Sharan Foga wrote:
Hi All
Thanks Swapnil for the links about the ALC and I have re-read through the
threads.
+1 Thanks Swapnil for the amazing effort you put together around this
project.
I remembered sensing some push back on the proposed organisational hierarchy
and see that has now been removed. Following on from that there was the comment
of ALC being managed either within ComDev or VP Conferences.
I dont think this fits with Conferences as it is more like a local meetup type
event, which means outreach, which to me means ComDev.
So now we need to look at how to manage the integration of the ALC initiative.
Having run community meetups around several projects myself, I'd like to
humbly suggest that we consider avoiding "managing" any set of "rules"
around this type of activity. In my own experiences, I've found that
the flavor of any given meetup is a function of a lot of factors that
differ from locale to locale. Available venues, the size/interest of the
community (WRT speakers/presentors and attendees), local sponsors (for
stuff like venue, pizza/beer, giveaways), the time and resources
available to the volunteers who are coordinating a given meetup are just
a few examples of such variables.
I see ComDev and/or Conferences as resources that *can* be used, but not
*must* or even *should* be used. I don't think that the use (or lack
thereof) of the resources available to the ASF should be a metric that
ComDev is measuring any sort of success (or lack thereof) around. We
want to invite and encourage community, but I worry that "managing" will
only be a burn-out factor to the individuals who are out there doing the
heavy-lifting of organizing the communities out in the field... Rules
just make an already potentially difficult task even more difficult.
Advice can be freely followed, and just as freely ignored, with no hard
feelings either way.
Having said that, resources of the ASF, be it funding from the
small-events budget, use of ASF branding, use of other resource (like
cwiki, for example) - all of those do need some ground rules for usage
of to mitigate abuse of... And since those are ASF resources, here I'd
agree that there is more need for rules and structure.
Based on Sally's feedback that means announcing and promoting the initiative to
a wider audience. I can see some key actions already
- announce the ALC as an initiative (Swapnil we can probably create this from
your emails about it. Can you draft something? )
Announce to where?
And a better question might be "why" - or more accurately "to what
purpose do we believe making this announcement will be useful?" Is the
assumption that people don't know that it's possible to make their own
community events (I kinda think that it's common sense that one could)?
Or that there's a new Best Practice for organizing the events (so this
is just generic advice in case anyone is doing it already or interested
in doing it soon)? Or just that people don't know that ComDev exists to
provide assistance (that includes both the advice/support available
on-list, and support from the ASF in the form of money, swag, other
resources) to those who wish to develop local communities (and so we're
just reminding people that these resources and assistance are here)? Or
something else?
- promote the next event (include it on the Events calendar, tweet via
@ApacheCommunity and include a reminder on ComDev)
- plan for future events (ALC Indore seems to be having events every 1 - 2
months, so let's put them on the calendar and prepare for it.)
- funding (I am not sure if ALC is getting any funding as part of ASF small
events, or it is being covered from a third party.? BTW ComDev also has a
budget that could be used to help with stickers, swag etc)
A budget exists somewhere for this type of events. I don't know who
"owns" the budget, and how simple (or complex!) it is to get money out
of it in practice. Your local print shop (or pizza place, or
supermarket) probably won't issue a PO or accept a wire transfer - but
we probably should have a way to make it work. Maybe if we could get
away with some electronic means of moving small amounts of money: Google
Pay, prepaid credit cards, or the like? Food for thought...
- grow the ALC community (several people said they were interested in setting
up other ALCs but so far none have. This could be because of the lack of
announcement of the initiative - so lets focus on that first)
Or it could be lack of round tuits?
I'm happy to get feedback and comments on this so please feel free to respond
if you have any ideas or suggestions.
I hope I provided a bit of both. I also very sincerely hope that
everybody - and especially Swapnil who has both invested time and effort
into this initiative, AND has a lovely looking group to show for his
efforts! - will take the above the way I meant it, as practical thinking
points, and attempts to curb over-engineering when we've only got a
single real "use case", as it were.
Best,
Issac
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