OS Communities

Tampere MeeGo Network started with strong interest both from network members and companies. First 4-5 meetups gathered 40 to 50 participants. However, TMN has lost some of it’s attraction lately. Partly that is due to MeeGo Summit FI which took a lot of energy from other activities, since most members were involved as volunteer organizers. Furthermore, Summit might have ‘consumed’ some of the need to have social gatherings at least for a moment. That does not explain all though. TMN meetups have been mostly about talking and discussions. There has not been much doing.

Perhaps we should change our focus to gain more attention and regenerate enthusiasm which we had in the beginning. Some of TMN members have expressed need for more hands-on related activity. This is visible in TMN meetup web discussions:

Something more coding oriented. I personally would be interested in something like “come with your tablet and we’ll help you get started”, other guys could be interested in coding camps focused on the other areas.

[M]aybe we could do a two week cadence, i.e. keep the current timeline for the presentations and news oriented meetups, and have a “enter only if you’re willing to code” type event also once a month but with a 2 week offset.

Perhaps the answer is in focusing on projects, which are run by the community. Projects are hands-on, at least application development projects should be, and software development raises new topics, issues, skills to learn and discuss. There are multiple projects going on inside our community. Current projects can best be described as ‘one man shows’. People are scattered in own projects. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it leads to situation that skills, talent, time and resources are wasted. Perhaps it’s time to find a few ideas for joint development project and participate in that even if it is not exactly what one initially wants to do. Some ideas for joint project has already been tossed in the air. One of those is to implement sort of ‘meetup app’, which would be used for making notes about meetups.

Projects are great, but what’s the big picture?

Again I had to make another drawing about the ‘big picture’ behind the projects discussed above. And again, I failed to make a simple model (skill that I lack, but I’m working on it). After a few moments thinking I found out that we have all the pieces to build/start a joint development ecosystem. Oh yes, the current buzz word ecosystem :) Anyway, what we have in Tampere:

• individual small projects (’itch’ is there, but one hand can’t make it go away)
• lots of skills and tacit knowledge
• people have interest to hands-on doing
• two universities (one is tech) and several other high education institutions.
• lots of companies, which have business interests in open source application development
• ideas, both business origin and from community.
• facilities to use as base (New Factory) and platform for projects.
• Virtual tools to enable communication: MNFI portal, mailing lists, IRC channel (#meego-fi)
• large local app development community (TMN: over 110 members)
• connections to other open source communities (hackerspaces, LUG, vapaakoodi, Ubuntu LoCo) and organizations (such as COSS)

All that needs to be done, is to make all pieces work together. In other words, someone to function as glue-gun and shoot! Below is rather complex looking illustration how things could go.

Benefits for companies

For companies supporting the above model based development are evident (and nothing new). They can test their ideas in volunteer based projects. They can use the community to implement solutions to practical needs or at least feed the community with ideas. During the projects, people generate more skills and knowledge (tacit knowledge might turn into visible form) which can be used in own product development. Needless to say that new talented employees can be found through projects and networks. New people come in from joint networks such as local hackerspaces, Linux Users Groups and other communities.

General benefits for business

Projects create applications and skills, which can benefit open source community.  New applications can create new startups for new companies and enhance entrepreneurship in Tampere region. Some of the apps would most likely be ready for end-users and could be uploaded directly to existing (and future) app stores.

What is needed

Plan to set up ‘developer lounge’, which would have devices for development and education use has been on ice for some time now. This lounge would be located to Demola, New factory. Need for devices is evident. I stumble upon the need almost daily;  many application developers (pure volunteers and people from startups) face sudden need for different devices. Developer lounge would not be limited to include just MeeGo devices. The support would include also devices suitable for iOS, Android and others. What is needed, is some support from local companies. Someone has to maintain the facilities and lounge. Of course hardware is needed too. Devices can be bought or companies could donate those for development and educational purposes.

To sum up, we have all the pieces to boost local application development and create ecosystem that benefits all participants. We just need to sit around the round table and discuss details. I’m willing to take the challenge, what about you? :)

This blog entry discusses different layers of MeeGo community and roles they posses, if things would go as I would like things to evolve. Some things might seem rather bold, but I’ll try to justify my opinions as profoundly as possible. Focus is on events and who is responsible for what and why. Ok, the pyramid :) Some kind of structure is needed when community includes hundreds or thousands of members. That can hardly be denied even by hard core anarchists. Pyramid is one common way to describe structure. Those of you who see pyramid as ‘evil’ since it resembles corporate or military style management, take a look at any other FOSS project. They all have ‘pyramid’. They have masses, contributors, working groups, gatekeepers and some even dictators, benevolent or other. In my view, that pyramid is turned upside down.

The pyramid is not drawn upside down by accident. It is done for a reason. Open Source development’s strength including MeeGo community is in the people who constitute that community. At the highest level are Local MeeGo Networks (LMN). They are the foundation of our community. Second layer should be regional (/national) level networks. The ‘bottom’ is Community Office. All situations and discussions should take place as near as possible to local MeeGo networks. Only when matters can not be solved at local level or affects for example regional issues/global community issues, they should be taken to next level.

Community office is there to serve ‘higher level’ parts of the community. Community office does not exist to dictate how things are done, what forms different things take or how local MeeGo Networks should function. Community office has an important role in creating guidelines and coordinating efforts which is done by listening what our members say. This requires that members participate community office work in meetings, email discussions and other forms of communication. Messages and information must flow both ways, up to down - down to up, to ensure mutual understanding and agreement. Otherwise guidelines and such are based on hunch and gut-feeling, not on facts or needs of developers and other community members. Of course there are issues that belong to community office eg community managers. Which those issues are, depends on community at hand.

Local events

Local events refers to local meetups. Normally meetups are understood as monthly meetups organized by local MeeGo network. Topics discussed and demoed in meetups are somehow MeeGo related. But that can be boring in the long run. Local networks can organize other kind of events too. One option is to have weekend-long event. That offers more time and enables to concentrate on issues that can not be dealt with in one evening meetups. An example of such weekend event could be ‘bug munching’. Weekend could include lessons about different approaches to identifying and fixing bugs, hands-on examples with different tools and development environments. That was just an example, use your imagination and create other possibilities: weekend hackathons (combine on-site activity and virtual participation), make a visit to local hackerspace, get a new gadget, demonstrate it and let people play with it, etc. Something that breaks the routine can boost your local community and get them excited again.

Why do we need regional level?

Regional level network is responsible for handling regional events such as MeeGo Summits. It must be kept in mind that regional level body does not dictate what local networks do (just as community office does not dictate what regional networks do). Organizing national or regional event requires partners and sponsors. That is more easily done when you can speak in the name of national network, instead of one city in your country. Furthermore, if regional body is used, you might have better chance to get all MeeGo developers in your area behind the Summit. If just one local network decides to organize a summit, others might feel ‘not so welcome’ and left out or secondary.

Of course the beginning can be different even considering organizing national events. It might be (or is probable) that people from venue site will take more crucial role, but that is natural. In time people from other cities will join the efforts. But still, people in venue site will take care of most of tasks. Why? They know the area, facilities, possibilities since they live there. Furthermore they see each other often in local meetups and get bonded.

Summits are planned to bridge the gap between local meetups and MeeGo Conferences(see guideline). I think that is what Amy Leeland has said a few times and that is written in guidelines too. According to event guidelines, summits “are hosted by the community entirely and are not in any way managed or planned by the MeeGo Project”. This puts all responsibility of Summits to the hands of local (or as prefer to say regional) communities. The same guideline states that organizing Summit is greater task than organizing local meetup. Based on my experiences during the last months, I can concur to that. Current guidelines suggest that each year some local group starts the process. This suggests that summit organizing begins outside the local networks boundaries. That is of course one interpretation only.

The guideline (which is useful and great in general) also seems to assume that no summit organization teams (guideline speaks about a team) will be formed or preserved from year to year. This is where I partly disagree. I do understand that the guideline is still in progress and I have contributed to that some parts that I now criticize. That only means that lessons have been learned. Here’s a few pointers.

In my opinion the team in guideline refers to some kind of management team, which in turn creates plans for the summit and gets blessing for the Summit before starting the actual work. From whom is this blessing asked? That is still open. Guideline does not bring up any other teams , that would be part of organizing the summit. Obviously there will be, each year. There is no point inventing the wheel again year after year. Based on our experience, teams will be formed and practices such as communication and team work are established. This is were regional level body steps in. Those teams are part of national network, which is responsible for the summit. Some of those teams handle same tasks (which serve the whole national community) even between the summits. It would be unnatural to attach those teams to some local network. Besides summit planning, getting sponsors, building program, getting speakers, finding suitable venue and other tasks take a lot time, months to be more precise. Much like Summits bridge meetups and international events, regional networks bridge local networks and community office. MeeGo community office should encourage local networks to join together and support all efforts in that. Those regions that have organized a summit should collect/write down an example (reference) of summit organizing teams and what they do. This would help the others and redoing the same mistakes. In other words, sort of “dos and donts”. I am willing to be part of this process as soon as MeeGo Summit FI 2011 in Tampere is over and I have kept my well-earned vacation.

Obviously people have roles in communities. MNFI is not an exception, but structure and interactions of the community are still rough. This is understandable because community has been around for about 4-5 months. Yet some roles can be identified already. Roles described below are not result of any clear (systematic) scientific method, they are based on my experiences and observations.

Community layers

National community, such as MNFI, can be seen to include at least three somewhat independent layers: 1) local MeeGo networks, 2) teams and 3) national network. Clearly there can be more layers, but this post attempts to give only one view. In our case LMNs are independent from the national level, MNFI. Local MeeGo Networks organize meetups in the real world. The approach may vary, but most aim to organize meetup once a month. Organizing meetups is discussed in some details. On the national level, several teams can be formed. Each team has a team lead which should direct and coordinate team efforts and report to larger community about results and problems. Teams are the building blocks of our national community. Teams unite people coming from different LMNs. Labelling regionally LMNs and teams uniting body as national community is a bit problematic, since some members can be from abroad. The figure below offers one view to community roles and connections between the layers. The figure is not intended to describe every possible variation of membership/role modes. It only presents some role/membership forms and needs more work to become more valid, accurate and useful.

Roles

Roles are something that can not be avoided. Every member of group or larger community has a role or even multiple roles. It is natural for humans to seek their ‘position’ in a group. Roles that people have are based on group activity. People might have several roles at the same time depending of the nature of their level of networkedness. Roles are not sticky. Instead roles come and go when people join or leave LMNs, teams or other group formations. The below described roles and descriptions of them, are based on my observations and therefore have no scientific background.

In the figure red squares are local MeeGo networks, green circles are local members, yellow circle represents foreign members and blue triangles are national level (MNFI) teams. Now let’s take a look at some roles.

Some members are not member of any LMN. It is not mandatory to be member of LMN to participate otherwise. Instead they might be part of national level team(M3) or even multiple teams(M1). Those members who are involved in several teams and/or LMNs, are keyplayers to community since they pass information from one team to another. This is something that Bacon has emphasized in his book (The Art Of Community). I have placed the current ‘end-users’ to this group (’participants and followers’). In future they might form a separate grouping, if MeeGo is a success. Their role is still vague and therefore left out for now. Some members prefer to stay active only in local meetups (M2). As discussed before, some members of the teams and LMNs can be from abroad(M4).

Meetup participants and followers

Some MNFI members are actively involved or at least members in several LMNs (member M1 in the figure). I for example am member of Tampere, Helsinki and Oulu MeeGo Network. Dispite of this multimembership, I am active in one local network.

Developers

Some of the members are clearly hackers/developers. They have no interest (or just minimal) in community management or other similar tasks. They wish to code, explore and be innovative. This role or group mode is what normally constitutes the core of FOSS communities, at least in development point of view. Developers come in different flavors. Some of them are n00bs and some are old skool. Naturally there are developers who are somewhere in between the two extremes. Another feature of developers is that some of them are paid to do development and some are pure freetime developers. This is common in current FOSS development projects and MeeGo is no exception.

Supporters

Normal supporters are companies which sponsor meetups. They can offer facilities, beverages, food and even post-meetup activities. Supporters include also ‘angels’, oldtimers in FOSS development who support, help and encourage new communities. They do not have a clear position or role in community, and are present mostly in the background. Their input is highly valued, since they have a lot of knowledge (partly tacit) about the larger commmunity and practices in it, in this case global MeeGo community. Local media can be seen as supporter if it can be mobilized to promote MeeGo activities in your area.

Community Builders

This role includes community managers, meetup organizers and team leads. Community manager could be seen as a facilitator, which tries to enhance community activities and inspire members, suggest direction for the community and if necessary solve disputes and fights. Community manager can also act as advocate and visit schools, summits and other events to promote own community. Community manager can also be the bridge between own community and global community level decisionmakers, a bit like a liaison offficer. On top of all the above, community manager should also act as a buffer between community and other organizations such as companies. This might be necessary to keep possible company related power struggles outside the community. The above might look a lot for one person. This is where community teams and team leads come in.

Teams can be formally constituted or let them be born by themselves. Teams should have a lead, which coordinates team efforts and communication. Team leads should be trusted members who are actively involved in community. Selecting team lead can be simple. One option is to select leads by merits. In other words apply some form of meritocracy. Since the leads are supposed to be trusted, it might be wise to do the nomination (or at least introduction of new leads) in community meetings.

The third form of community builders are meetup organizers. Their role is important especially to LMNs, since it’s their responsibily to organize meetups in real world. They should be active and try to inspire members to bring up new topics and ideas for presentations and activities in meetups. They do not dictate what topics are taken to meetup agenda, they merely suggest and coordinate so that every meetup would be somewhat coherent. Of course, every LMN can have different methods to define agendas for meetups. Some might even not to have agenda. In our case (TMN) we have had agenda every time. Some have raised the opportunity not to have agenda. I might go with that, if the community would be more mature. At the moment, having no agenda at all, would most likely result to meetup without any presentations. Furthermore, I have a gutt feeling that participants want to know what is expected to be seen or heard when deciding whether to attend or not. Therefore, I would suggest that some kind of agenda is always formed in cooperation and through discussions, and presented somewhere public.

Some LMNs organize meetups in different locations. This might work in some occasions. Some hold meetups in local restaurants, bars and other similar facilities. Personally, I don’t need a LMN to get a few drinks in a bar and discuss MeeGo. I can do that without LMN. Some LMNs organize meetups in sponsored facilities and rotate from one place to another. Again, this might work too. This kind of model forces LMN to follow what the sponsors say and offer. Instead of that, I would turn the setting upside down. Let the sponsors follow you. We have done this in TMN. We have a permanent location for our meetups. The place never changes and sponsors follow us there. Of course this is possible only because New Factory has given us the possibility to use their facilities. This kind of mode has some benefits. Firstly, people always know where to go and become familiar with the settings very quickly. Secondly, we don’t need a new sponsor for every meetup to gain access to some facilities. Thirdly, sponsors can concentrate their input to food, drinks and other fun kind of support such as arranging sauna. Lastly, having a set place enables always ready tools, such as WiFi, screens for presentations, for meetups. Having a permanent place might even enable other kind of cooperation modes and networks. For example, in Tampere we have began to build cooperative network with Nokia and New Factory to set up a permanent ‘MeeGo Café’, where people could try MeeGo devices (5 days/week) and even loan devices for development purposes. The café would have other activities too, but they need to be defined later.

I’ve been fascinated by hackers and hacker culture all my life. About 2 years ago I stumbled upon Hackerspaces while I was looking for new forms of hacker culture. It was love at first sight. I found out that there isn’t any hackerspaces in Finland. So, I started to build one - Mode 5w. Things didn’t get started very well and the building of that little community is still on. However, we just found a promising space which might be suitable for us. Anyway, my fascination was so deep, that I did some research about Hackerspaces during 2009-2010. You can read more about that in here.

Things lead to another and I found my self thinking: “Why does Local MeeGo Network (LMN) type of activity sound so familiar to me?” The obvious reason is the huge similarity between hackerspaces and LMNs. Of course there are bunch of differences too, but let’s take a look at both, the similarities and what LMNs could learn from hackerspaces. One might wonder why LMNs should take a look at what hackerspaces have done. Hackerspaces have been around for decades already. They have faced a lot of difficulties and based on their experiences have created several good ‘rules’ and guidelines.

Starting a community

Starting a community in MeeGo context refers to creating of new Local MeeGoNetwork into some city or regional area. Comparing the guidelines about how to start a new community reveals that both apply the Rule of Critical Mass. In Meego community 5 aMeeGos are required to get ‘candidate’ status. When the candidate LMN arranges the first meetup, they are granted ‘full’ status (can remove the ‘candidate’ suffix in their name). In hackerspace context the (normative) rule is called 2+2. Firstly, you need a partner to get the initial idea kicked off. That makes two of you. Then you need two more people in order to get real work done. Nothing should be started before you have at least four people, but aim at 10. In hackerspace world status gained after critical mass is called ‘building’ (equivalent of candidate in MeeGo world). In hackerspaces context functional hackerspace is in ‘active’ status. No one controls directly who uses and what status.

Members

Hackerspace members are mostly Open Source enthusiasts, use FOSS tools or at least think positively about Open Source. Furthermore, most of them seem to follow Hacker Ethic and the values it includes [survey study results]. What about MeeGo Networks? After organizing Tampere MeeGo Network meetups for 4 months, my gutt-feeling is that (no surprise) most members have warm feelings towards FOSS and hacker culture. This has been the case at least in TMN, where the first people coming to the meetups were developers, not the ’suits’. The most significant difference is that, in hackerspaces members have more diverse interests than in MeeGo Networks. In MeeGo Networks, information where someone works and what’s his/her job, seems to have more importance than in hackerspaces. In other words, MeeGo Networks are not pure freetime communities, business is lurking in the background all the time. Hackerspaces do not want to be attached to corporations, they want to remain as free as possible. In other words, similar sponsoring model (member corporations sponsor for example food & drinks) which some MeeGo Networks uses, is not acceptable. The LMN sponsoring model is good, but contains the possibility of power struggles between sponsoring corporations. Besides the bigger sponsors have significant advantage when compared to smaller corporations. So how does hackerspaces fund their space rent and activities? They use monthly member fees. In brief, hackerspaces represent pure member-run and funded communities, which is not the case on LMNs. They are more like business-funded yet member-run communities. The role of members in LMNs and hackerspaces is different.

Physical world extensions

Both require physical world activities such as meetups. Hackerspaces normally start with meetups which can be compared to MeeGo meetups. This is where/when LMNs normally stop or satisfy. They have meetups once a month perhaps. The content of sessions or meetups vary from simple presentations to live coding and demonstrations. Then if the local community wants, they create tools and methods to meet in virtual world. This is great. People meet in meetups and get to know each other. Then the communication and collaboration in virtual world is easier. Now the LMN is granted active status.

Hackerspaces take the community aspect a bit further. They do all the same stuff as LMNs do. But to become a ‘full’ or active hackerspace, it has to have a physical space. A space which functions as the center for the community. The space is the core of community. Everything is build around the physical space. The space normally includes some kind of toolshop where members can do HW related development. It might include classrooms for teaching, a living room to hang out with other hackers, kitchen and what ever members want to have. In brief, hackerspace can be seen as a ‘third space’. First space is home or family. Second space is work. Hackerspace is something that exists in separate - third - space.

Motivation

It’s quite impossible to define what are the motivations to participate in LMN activities and become a member. Some well educated guesses can be done but there has not been any studies about the subject. My hypothesis is that this is where the biggest differences can be found. As I mentioned earlier, I did a small survey (n = 201) about hackerspaces and members of hackerspaces in summer 2010. In hackerspaces the most important factors to participate are:

Altruism, community commitment, meeting other hackers in real world and having fun

If the same survey would be done among LMN members, some differences would probably be found. A bit similar survey study (attempt) was conducted in MeeGo community before the end of 2010 (see the invitation). Survey received a lot of critics (some justified some perhaps not) and only 38 ameegos took part. In my opinion, this reflects also the status of MeeGo community. It is still young and not yet so willing or mature to want outside views or information about it self.

The MeeGo community is more rigid and hierarchical than hackerspaces community. This became visible in the discussion related to how the survey was not approved by the community managers before exposure to the community. Although some members objected the need to get approval from somewhere (MeeGo council which does not even exist) to do a survey and pointed out that this is Open Source community after all. Some compared academic surveys to actions which are aimed at getting personal benefit, which is a bit odd. Survey was obviously considered as spam by some members, which should not be posted to the mailing lists. The bad language and somewhat poorly structured questions (member opinions) were big reasons for not taking part in the survey. Someone even claimed that the “[original invitation to participate in the survey] is an invitation to a non-MeeGo survey, it’s an advertisement.”  Again this is bit odd viewpoint, but duly noted.

One reason for objection was perhaps that some members of the community saw the researcher as an outsider. It is true, that I haven’t contributed a single line of Qt code to the community, but I have been active in organizing local meetups in Tampere and started to build a national MeeGo community. Perhaps some ameegos should rethink the attitude towards non-coding members of the community. Some members seem to follow rigidly the FOSS onion model described below.

One critic towards the survey was about the benefit of academic surveys. According to one ameego academic surveys come and go “without realistically contributing back to that particular community.” The claim might have some truth, but this kind of attitude and prejudice towards scientific surveys does not really encourage scientists to approach MeeGo community or do research about them. Is that really beneficial for the MeeGo community? Nevertheless, if someone will do a survey among the ameegos in the future, the above critics and viewpoints should be considered first. Good luck! :) Needless to say that none of the above was relevant in the hackerspace community survey process.

Conclusions and suggestions

When comparing both communities, it might not be too bold to say that LMN is something between a pure open source community (such as Ubuntu LoCos) and hackerspaces. LMNs are hybrids, which take the benefits of both ‘extremes’. The traditional onion model used in FOSS research does not seem to describe LMNs very accurately. Onion model is software development oriented model. LMN could be described better if the approach would be community oriented. Why? Because if you look at the onion model below,

you can see that a lot of roles are missing. There is no community manager or where to put all people exited about real world events? Where to put HW development oriented aMeeGos? Perhaps the roles could be described similarly as what has been found from hackerspaces (’Community roles‘)?

It might not be such a bad idea to get a permanent location for the meetups. It would probably stabilize the LMN, since all meetups would be held in one place. An example of this is Tampere MeeGo Network. All meetups are held at New Factory. People know where to come and there is no need to ‘hunt’ a new place for each meetup. I would take this even further.

Now, this is where ‘Meegolandia’ steps in again. Meegolandia would be a ‘MeeGo Centre‘, a kind of MeeGo hacking ‘corner’ or meeting place where the presence of Qt could be strong. It could be a bit like a hackerspace. We could have great MeeGo release parties twice a year and invite new people there. It could include small or bigger scale teaching. How? Just get local universities and universities of applied science as partners into your LMN. What about business? Member partners could demonstrate latest inventions and applications. If we could regularly get both end-users and developers in the same ‘room’ ones a month, it certainly would not hurt the development. Imagine the looks on the face of the users when they can really meet the developers in flesh.

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 :)