model for local groups

Daniel Pocock daniel at pocock.pro
Sat Jan 13 23:50:14 UTC 2018


We've received a lot of positive responses to an email sent to community
members in Suisse Romande recently.

Unlike big metropolitan areas like Berlin, the population of Suisse
Romande and the FSFE community there is divided between many smaller
cities like Geneva, Lausanne, Fribourg and Neuchatel.

The model adopted in bigger cities involves having a monthly meeting in
the same place every month.  This is a good model when there is a
critical mass in the same city but I'm concerned it doesn't apply as
easily to the situation in Suisse Romande.  There may be other regions
like this, such as the north west[1] of England.

Another pattern that I notice is that people involved in FSFE are also
involved in other local groups, for example, two people who replied to
the email are also members of the local Debian.ch group and I also met
several of the people at RHL'18 today as they are involved in
Swisslinux.  This raises issues of duplication, for example, some people
may receive duplicates of emails sent to different mailing lists while
other people may not receive any copies of some announcements.  These
questions are highlighted by the decision today to dissolve the
association GULL and encourage members to join forces with Swisslinux.org.

One technical approach to a situation like this: encourage local FSFE
community members to collaborate through a dedicated FSFE section on the
Swisslinux forum rather than having a dedicated FSFE mailing list?  This
could reduce duplication and increase exposure to other people in the
region.

An organizational solution that comes to mind: having a monthly free
software meeting, same day of the month, same place, but with different
organizations so that the meeting has critical mass.

Note that neither Swisslinux or GULL is currently listed[2] as an
associated organisation either, maybe it is worth reaching out to
Swisslinux?

Have these issues been discussed in other regions before?

Regards,

Daniel


1. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-27971552
2. https://fsfe.org/associates/




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