MeeGo Summit FI 2011 was held at Finlayson area Tampere. Keynotes were at Plevna movie theater and rest of the program - three tracks, MeeGathon competition and Intel AppUp at New Factory. Friday evening party was at Gloria restaurant, which is well-known for cougars and table-dancing opportunities ;)

This Summit was possible because we have a very active MeeGo community in Finland (MNFI) which includes nearly 300 members. Big thanks goes to Hermia, COSS and other partners and sponsors as well. On Friday we handed out 259 badges. Some appeared to venue only on Saturday. Still over 100 did not come, which is bad and good. Bad because a lot of those who really wanted to come were left out (there was over 140 still queuing). Good, because the venue was not too crowded.

Overall impression that I have is that both sponsors and attendees were happy and enjoyed the Summit. Add your opinion as comment to this blog. Some verbal feedback was even flattering. Unfortunately I did not have time to follow sessions due to several responsibilities. Fortunately all sessions were recorded, so I will have a chance to look those after Summit. Those videos and session slides will be put available to summit.meegonetwork.fi as soon as possible. Pictures from Summit can be found from Flickr (search for meegofi).

People were quit eager to tweet about Summit since I counted over 500 tweets referring to Summit (hashtag #meegofi). Some blogs wrote about Summit too, for example MeeGoExperts.com. Our event IRC channel, #meego-summit-fi, had over 70 participants. Normal community channel (#meego-fi) was reserved for organizers during the summit. Even local radio “Radio 957″ had two news about the Summit in their website. Local newspaper did call me couple of times during the Summit, but I did not have time to see if Summit ever was mentioned in Aamulehti(.fi).

Some web stats:

It is not a surprise that program was most popular just after web root. A positive surprise is that visitors do check out sponsors too.

I don’t have the world map indicating browser origin before the summit, but I remember that just before the summit (about 2 weeks or so), just US, Germany, Britain and some other countries were included as origin. After the Summit, visibility is global.

Some tweets:

Feedback from participants

We are gathering written feedback from the Summit participants and deadline for that is 30th Apr. I have taken a preliminary look at the feedback (19th Apr) and below are some parts of it. Feedback form includes 5 selection questions and two free-form fields (topics were: Improvement ideas, Additional feedback). Citations below are from those free-form questions. The amount (N) of respondents was at this moment 64.

Overall impression

Nearly half of the respondents graded overall impression as ‘great’. Slightly under 1/3 felt that event was at least satisfactory and same amount saw it as ‘excellent’. One feedback sums this pretty good: “Venues used could be a little more convenient in general, but overall, you guys did a great job making sure everything clicks from day one.”

Program

Nearly half considered Summit program great. Nearly as many felt that program was satisfactory. 5% were possibly slightly disappointed. The numbers/opinions looks good since program is often the most criticized part of any summit/conference. Some participants did not see any need for long breaks between sessions: “A 45 minutes break between each and every session was maybe a bit overkill and extended the event late into the evening“. Some considered long breaks good. Opinions about facilities divided too. Some saw that “Seminars were nicely spaced so there was also plenty of time for networking and stand-browsing, which is important.”

The content was too shallow to some participants. Some would have liked to  ”see more in-depth presentations, since there definitely were a lot of very competent people who could’ve shared some of their wisdom.” “More technical and detailed presentations“. Of course these comments represent part of the participants view. Those who were happy did not give feedback and say “Ok, content was technical enough“. Nevertheless, we will take this under consideration when planning the next MeeGo Summit FI.

One great idea found in feedback was demo corner: “demo corner for participants to show off hw hacks or apps they have developed“. This was partly the idea of Hacking space at 4th floor, but it could have been emphasized a lot more.

Summit program was packed with different topics from mobile development and OBS to IVI and embedded solutions. Intel’s AppUp was the last part of official program. More than 190 developers gathered to 4th floor to learn about application development with Intel’s tools. After the session participants (190 lucky ones who had registered on time) were directed to hacking space where they received ExoPCs. This device was given for 3 three year loan, after which…well you know :) The smile I saw on people’s faces made me almost cry. My hacker heart was very pleased. Hopefully most of them will register to AppUp developer program, join our organization (meego-fi) in developer program and publish a lot of new kewl apps! That would make another AppUp in Finland more than likely.

Location & premises

Most of the participants were happy with location and premises. Most of the critique was about the arrangements on the 4th floor: “The North and South halls were too close to each other, and the presentations disturbed each other somewhat.” There were two tracks in one big hall. The tracks were separated only with curtain and that did not obviously stop the sounds coming from one track to the other. This is something that can be said to be sort of failure, but that was the best we could do with the given opportunities. Perhaps the best comment was related to weather: “Wish really hard for even better weather next time round.” We should move Finland to better location…that would need a few more sponsors though :)

And what about next Summit?

We did not fail with this Summit, instead we exceeded the expectations of several participants. This two-day Summit is in my opinion a good example (if not reference) for others to follow. I guess it would make sense to arrange Summit again 2012. If you would like to see that happen, join Meego Network Finland (more info #meego-fi) or support us otherwise for example by blogging and tweeting about us.

Oh! Don’t forget to join our organization at Intel AppUp Developer program. Our organization is (for the sake of consistency, dm8tbr loves this;) ) meego-fi and we have over 30 developers already.

Well…where should I start? Before jumping into experiences and lessons-learned, some background information about me and the community (MNFI, MeeGo Network Finland). My name is Jarkko Moilanen aka kyb3R.

This first entry will be rather long because I have to gather some history into it. I’ll try to keep it as short as possible. I’m middle-aged hacker(ish) Open Source enthusiast. I’ve been involved (as user) in FOSS since 2000. I have not been very active in coding, but more as a community person; interested about howto build communities, what inspires people to participate/contribute in it, how they function and how communities can/should be maintained successfully. I’ve been member of the Ubuntu Finland LoCo for about a year or a little less. My time in the Ubuntu community has been more or less learning time. It has opened my eyes about Open Source Communities. I have also been rather active in Hackerspaces. Sometimes I attend our LUG (linkku) meetings. I have written a few articles about hackerspaces, I did a small survey about the members of hackerspaces, I started one hackerspace (Mode 5w in Tampere) and have been theorizing about hackerspaces in the general hacker generations context. In brief, I was familiar with the hacker culture (I love it, see my other blog) and common practices in Open Source.

MeeGo?

I was spending - as I usually do - my time on multiple IRC channels such as #ubuntu-fi-tiimit, #hackerspaces, #vapaakoodi, #linkku and #5w. One person I got to know in LUG meeting (or was it in one of the local hackerspace meetings) told me that MeeGo community is building local networks around the world.  At that moment I was not so familiar with MeeGo. I had heard about it and I knew that it is based on Linux. Well, it was something new and based on Linux, which was enough to get me interested about it. Furthermore, communities were needed and wanted. I considered myself a little ‘community builder’ kind of person since I’m not much of a programmer (though have done some but nothing big). Little did I know about building communities or being a community manager.

Initiate Tampere MeeGo Network

Anyway, 9th September 2010 I posted a message to MeeGo Forum that I would like to start a Local MeeGo Network in Tampere. I was not very optimistic about it. But hey, I had to try. Very soon enough people responded to the post and we got “candidate” status as a local network. Yay! Next we needed to find a spot were to gather for the first time. As it happened, that our local hackerspace (5w) was given the opportunity to hold their meetings in the Demola facilities, an idea occurred to me. How about if I just take the crowd to Demola? If I just offer that we can use Demola facilities (which btw are ideal for this kind of purpose)? So I did, without asking the managers at Demola. Lucky to me that people at Demola understood the value of getting local MeeGo developers together and did not spank me or give me any hard time. Tampere MeeGo Network decided to use Meetup.com service (sponsored by one company ) to coordinate our meetups. The first meetup was scheduled to happen Tuesday Sep 21, 2010. Demola has sponsored the facilities for all four meetups and will also continue to do so in the future. We appreciate the input! Thanks!

Tampere - It works!

The first meetup was a success; 24 eager ameegos participated the meetup. We were happy to notice that first enthusiasts were developers, not the suits. Developers came to the first meeting and brought the suits to the next meetup. This thrilled me (deeply hackerminded person). Perhaps the initial message which was posted to the forum attracted more hackerminded people than suits:

Hi, there is an interest creating a Local MeeGo Network at TAMPERE. If you are interested please answer here. The Meego group would be (loose) part of the 5w hackerspace family. The benefits are clear:

• We have a great facility to hold meetings (Demola in Finlayson)
• Support from larger group of young hacker-minded members

Although we have a bigger community (5w hackerspace) some of us want to hack especially with Meego and for that purpose we need more people. The connection to 5w hackerspace would be extremely loose and would not require anything from this Meego group. The co-operation would just benefit both.

Eventually, Tampere MeeGo Network and mode 5w have gone separate ways. The meetups have been held regularly once a month. What also happened was that people were active also between the meetups. They posted photos from the events and ideas to meetup.com pages, started Facebook page and LinkedIn group and a mailing list. Well, I had something to do with the above, but it is more important to notice that people started to do stuff for the mini-community. In the same time (a day or two later) with Tampere, Helsinki started local MeeGo network.

At the moment (24th Dec 2010) Tampere MeeGo Network has 81 members and normally half of them participate meetups. Tampere has already held 4 meetups. Tampere MeeGo Network acts like a community. This is visible at least in two ways. Firstly, people (10-20) go to pub together after the meetups. Ones there was even unofficial ad hoc sauna after-party. In December we had official Sauna-party as part of the meetup. Secondly, people participate in local network related issues in the web without (much) butt kicking. Such issues are for example: next meeting agenda, arrange sponsors for the refreshments and getting people to hold presentations.  Helsinki MeeGo Network has also grown to include 97 members. Oulu MeeGo Network is a bit small, but active with 27 members.

Becoming a community manager

In the early stages, when Tampere MeeGo Network had started to roll, I suggested some people at Hermia that perhaps they could pay me for doing this kind of stuff. I didn’t exactly think about becoming a community manager until I saw the word in my contract. Reason for asking to build a job for me, was that I was waiting for decisions about whether I get a grant to do my PhD research or not. Which btw seems to be ‘denied’. I’m thinking about changing my PhD topic to something related to current job.

So I started to work as a community manager. What next? What the heck am I supposed to do? What is a community manager? What MeeGo is exactly? Where do I begin? My mind was full of questions. To my relief, I soon found out that no-one knows exactly what a community manager does. So I decided to observe what Quim and Dawn were doing and read what ever I could find bout it. That is a task still under work. Next it was time to get familiar with the MeeGo and the community around it. So I joined the discussion lists and IRC channel. For some time I just lurked there, without doing nothing else but reading what the heck was going on. I also had already started to put all my ideas and information about our efforts to wiki.meego.com pages (http://wiki.meego.com/Local_MeeGo_Networks/MeeGo_Network_Finland).I believed (and still do) in open discussion and this is after all open source project. This is something that some of the participants in MeeGo project do not seem to know or understand. Some prefer to stay hidden and trade behind the curtains (eg email agreements and such).

Let’s unite the forces in Finland

Things started to go well in local meetups and people seemed to enjoy it. It came to my mind that perhaps we could organise a summit here in Finland about MeeGo. At that time, I didn’t know that my employers had had the same idea for months before me. Anyway, I posted the idea to Community list and it got good response in the MeeGo community. Things lead to another and I realised that Tampere network can not do the summit alone. Or it can do it, but why not make this thing national? The idea of national/regional MeeGo Network had been born. I had already registered IRC channel for us (#meegolandia) and people came there. Discussions about the summit began there. I started to gather all the ideas to wiki and also to other shared documents . Side-note: later the channel was moved to #meego-fi, which is the current channel. Reason for that was related to the issue about how to name our community. Co-operation between Helsinki and Tampere regarding the summit began in virtual world by using shared documents, IRC and emails. Also a regional mailing list had been created (http://www.freelists.org/list/meego-network-fi)

Once we (at Tampere) got things  on paper (or more precisely a slide show), I visited Helsinki MeeGo Network meetup in December and presented the idea of MeeGo Summit FI, which by the way was not the first name of the summit. It used to be ‘Meegolandia Open’. The name was not “liked” by Linux Foundation or some of the global community members. Some members thought that it was a great name. Anyway, it violated the MeeGo trademark. So, we negotiated with LF and other people involved about the name issue and found a mutually agreeable name. Long story short: don’t mess with trademarks. Or if you do, keep your voice down. Others (even among MeeGo community) do not seem to be so obedient as us. The visit to Helsinki was the moment IMO when MeeGo Network Finland really kicked off. After that, people have been more and more active. It seems that it was important to show a face (this time mine) and give an opportunity to ask questions about the plans.

Summit as unifier or ‘glue’

My thought was: “The Summit would be an excellent goal for which we all could join our (all local Finnish MeeGo Networks) forces.” In the same process we can build our community. This has worked very well. Having a shared common goal has functioned as a unifying item. It is currently the ‘thing’ that holds the community together. The community structure (teams) we establish and build for organizing the Summit 15-16th Apr 2011 (http://summit.meegonetwork.fi) will partly remain as the core even after the summit.

At the same time Oulu MeeGo Network has been organizing a MeeGo Summit too. They use the name “MeeGo Summit Oulu”. This double-summit issue is not the best situation. Yet, the two events are different in nature. We have community-driven developer/hacker oriented event and Oulu has business oriented event. Nevertheless, having two events will without question have effect on participation on both events. Besides, the communication between Oulu organizers and Tampere located event organizers was for long time minimal. Both organizers sat around the same table on 21th Dec 2010. Hopefully, communication in the future will be more fluent. At the meeting MeeGo Network Finland welcomed Oulu to be part of the community (if they wish).

Time to tell the world about us

We have harnessed social media channels. Currently we have Facebook page, twitter and identi.ca. Those are managed from ping.fm service, which enables posting to all at the same time. We see social media more as tools to push information rather than pulling information (such as RSVP to events or feedback). RSVPs to meetups are handled in meetup.com pages, but will eventually be managed in our regional portal.

Tampere MeeGo Network has also Facebook page.

First community online meeting

It was time to gather people to online meeting. Again wiki.meego.com was used. We added our meeting among the other MeeGo meetings in http://wiki.meego.com/MeeGo-Meeting_IRC_Schedule. We also put our agenda and related data to wiki.

Even though Finland is not a huge country (as in geographical area), the only convenient meeting type is IRC meeting. Besides, at least some of the members are quite  familiar with online meetings and IRC. Those that aren’t, just have to learn it by participation. Of course meeting minutes are available to everyone. First community meeting was scheduled to take place at #meego-meeting 20th Dec 2010 18:00 UTC (20:00 EET). A member of global community (Stskeeps) encouraged me to take this meeting to the official meego meeting channel. Carsten, thank you for that! Benefits of this became clear to me too. Firstly, we would be more visible and transparent (compared to holding meeting in our own channel). Secondly, we get the automated minutes and logs of the meetings. Downside (possibly) in the beginning is that people might be a little reluctant to act naturally (or be a little reserved) in the Big official meeting channel. The help I have received from several people from the global MeeGo community (including Myrtti, Stskeeps, qgil, DawnFoster, Amy Leeland) has given me feeling that I’m not alone with this. And of course people in my local community support me in multiple ways, sometimes more than I could have imagined. I wish to keep it that way. As a contribution back to the community, I will put all our experiences to wiki pages, so that it could be used in the future as one model how to build national/regional network and how to organise community-driven regional MeeGo Summit. Also notes on this blog could be useful to others, perhaps.

A lot of little things have been going on but all efforts are now focused on two items: 1) MeeGo Summit FI 2011 and 2) building the community (that is teams). One important issue is our portal: http://meegonetwork.fi

Portal - entry point to MeeGo activities

The building of our portal began around Nov-Dec 2010. The idea is to build a service which includes tools to find MeeGo activies as well as Qt activities in Finland, information about local MeeGo Networks, gather blog entries about MeeGo (mostly written by our members), offer a forum for discussions which might also be in Finnish and in the future questions/answers from the MeeGo users in Finland. The initial building is partly Hermia funded, but will shortly turn to community maintained. One reason for building the portal is to get rid of meetup.com and get local networks together, to unite us under one domain.

From virtual to reality

In my opinion, our community is an example how a single off-topic line in non-MeeGo IRC channel can produce a regional MeeGo community (which has about 200 members) in a few months. A community which is ready to organize a regional Summit in the spring, is building teams, having conversations on mailing lists and irc channel and hold more or less regular meetups IRL! We must have done something right.

Let’s keep in mind that we are the first (in the world) to organize a community-driven regional MeeGo Summit. It also means that we will face a huge amount of obstacles to cross and we need to create patterns how to do things. What we do today, will possibly be an example for the others to follow.

As a community manager (the title still gives me the creeps), I have become more and more confident to face obstacles (which will always be there) since I know that I can trust the community behind me. If needed they will back me up and support me if needed. I have already experienced that too. Of course community will be there as long as I keep my act together and don’t get cocky. They need to trust me too. I just love the feeling - trust - and wish to maintain it in the future. There’s a lot of stuff I need to learn. One of them is for sure to become a better listener. Sometimes I tend to be impatient. But hey, who’s perfect.

I am proud to be a member of this community. This is my ‘Open Source home’.

That’s the story so far in brief. I might later put the missing pieces to this entry, if I remember or have time. Who knows. In the following (Jan 2011 onwards) weeks I’ll post one entry each week to share the horrors, joys and experiences I have encountered. Comments are more than welcome.

P.S. Just downloaded The Art Of Community written by Jono Bacon for the Christmas holidays :)