OS Communities

This blog entry describes what national MeeGo network is and what it could be. Viewpoint is  teams which are the core of any community. Introduced model is  a refined vision or version which has been build through the experiences in Finland (MNFI). The model described here will not be the last. It is natural for the community to stay constantly on the move. Still some teams are more ’sticky’ than others and that is natural. This stickiness is discussed briefly. The model is not constructed entirely from my own thoughts. A lot of MNFI members (and some others) have been involved by creating practices and guidelines. My role in this is to gather things together and raise some discussion (hopefully). I own my gratitude to all of you, but to name a few cybette, jnwi, timoph, smoinen, Riussi, Ans5i, matrixx, sandst1, bergie, Stskeeps and jibun.

Why teams and not groups?

Before taking a look at the initial teams in MNFI, one might be wondering why I prefer to use the word ‘team’ and not for example ‘group’? According to some scholars and other thinkers, groups are formed before teams. Groups are loose networks or collectives and teams are in fact first only groups. But if things go well, group becomes a team which is more cohesive unit, possesses complementary skills and abilities, share a goal and are committed to achieve that goal. Of course this might sound like pure semantics, but it’s not. Another difference between teams and groups is leadership. In groups leader or leaders define the goals and members are willingly accountable to leader(s). In teams, members hold each other accountable and try to reach consensus on goals and how to approach identified goals. Yet another difference is found how groups and teams handle conflicts. When conflicts arise in group – for example someone is not performing as expected – members look for the leader and expect him/her to act. In teams, members approach the person directly. Final difference I wish to expose is related to decision making. Groups use commonly voting or implied agreement. Teams prefer to use consensus. There are other viewpoints to this, but I will not address those here.

At the global level MeeGo community uses the term ‘working group’. That’s fine, if you are not anarchist and hard core FOSS like me. The word working does not fit in unless you are participating MeeGo related activities as paid staff. Even though I get paid to be community manager, the word still pushes my away. Team as a term is more casual and loose enough and it fits the purpose (at least in national level) which is to get people committed to community.

I would also like to see a clear division between teams and task-forces. Teams are something that are sort of sticky; teams live longer and have more general nature in community. Task-forces are small groups, which are established for special purpose and live only to gain a specific goal. After the goal or goals have been reached, it is disassembled either for good or for some time (for example Program Task-force).

The initial teams

Our national network has been around for about 4 months now. I did have a vision of national level MeeGo network in the early stages, when I started to co-host Tampere MeeGo Network (TMN) meetings with Myrtti. I posted my vision to newly established TMN mailing list with topic: ”I have a dream”. Cheesy and worn, but it says exactly what it was, a dream.  The mail (Oct 25 2010) started with the following:

I’ve had this idea in my head for a week or so and it’s time to spit it out. I can see that a sort of community portal would be needed in the future. The portal would aggregate several info streams and possibly offer some tools for the community. By community I mean MeeGo Networks in Finland. The portal would serve as a single entry point to all local networks, MeeGo related events and activity in Finland.

In the beginning (Oct -Sept 2010) there was nothing more than Tampere MeeGo Network and lost wannabe community manager, which also co-hosted TMN meetups. At the same time Helsinki, Turku and Jyväskylä also started to organize activities. As far as I know, just Helsinki and Tampere have been active since that, but I might be wrong. After we got TMN up and running, the idea of national events matured. After a while,  foundations for the national community were defined when 6 teams were established:

I did not select pieces of puzzle by accident to describe teams. Building community from teams is like doing a puzzle. Sometimes pieces fit perfectly, sometimes not and justified forcing is needed (not necessarily by the manager). Some pieces are connected to several other pieces (gain more focus or have more activity) while some stay near the edge of the board. Unlike in puzzles, the pieces of community can overlap slightly. Too big overlapping in tasks and responsibilities will create disorder and can cause ‘territorial disputes’.  Of course community must be open to new teams or new combinations of existing teams. That’s why there are holes and hooks on the edges of pieces. I could discuss the group dynamics of teams, but it would be out of scope of this entry. Better save that for later.

Right from the start, some members of TMN jumped into teams (which were at first groups). In October some interest towards national co-operation raised in Helsinki. In December Helsinki MeeGo Network (HMN) joined newly born MNFI. This moment can be said to be the real birthday of MNFI. That moment was 1st December 2010 when HMN had meetup in Helsinki and I visited there to tell them about our (TMN) visions related to Summit and national community. Response was good and some joined immediately. You can read more about the early stages of MNFI from previous blog entry.

Let’s take a look at (just briefly) the early teams illustrated in picture above. First of all, it’s a colorful bunch :) Team names have hardly anything constant. One team is called task-force, one does not include the word team and rest are teams which varying prefix. It is said that some amount of formality and uniformity in naming structures is good. In this case, that was not followed. One team name includes even MeeGo community specific jargon (meegons). That name used inside our community is fine, but for the outsiders, from where new members come, it might seem a bit odd and puzzling. Who should we blame for this mess? Well, yeah, no other than me. I have been involved in some communities before and some ideas came from those experiences. Furthermore, since I’m a researcher I read some books and other writings. One good book for every community builder/enabler/manager is  Jono Bacon’s The Art of Community. It includes basics to get you started, but remember that every community is a bit different and you need to adjust those ‘advices’. And that is what I’m doing now, adjusting the model to fit our needs and situation.

MNFI teams were established while keeping two things in mind. First, we planned MeeGo Summit for the spring and teams seemed natural tool for that purpose (clear goal which everyone agreed on). Second, some teams need to stay alive after the summit and form more constant basis for community. This blog entry tries to take a look at life after MeeGo Summit FI, so the focus is on ’sticky’ teams.

Communication & Tech team

This team (for the sake of clarity let’s call it C&T) is responsible our server, national level mailing lists (freenode and meegonetwork), irc Ops and controls our own domain. Freenode is our national level mailing list provider. We use meegonetwork domain for team mailing lists and mail addresses. In other words, C&T is rather tech oriented and looks a lot like company IT department. Before the redistribution of tasks between this team and Marketing team, social media related tasks were sort of ‘no mans land’. Our national level social media were handled by me and smoinen.

C&T lead handled (and still does as far as I know) Tampere MeeGo Network Facebook page. Same lead also manages the LinkedIn group. This is something that is not consistent or clear in our practices, since Marketing team is supposed to manage all social media related services. This will be discussed below in details. This overlapping is an example of previously discussed task overlapping between teams. Even though it might look inconsistent or illogical, these overlappings or sneaking in other team’s ‘backyards’ normally does not matter as long as everyone knows about it. Besides we are not a big community, at least not yet so information spreads inside our community mostly from person to person. People seem to prefer personal communication over posting to national mailing list. This observation is based on the facts that MNFI has around 250 members (based on Meetup.com) and a little over 30 have joined national mailing list. Even our IRC channel (#meego-fi) has more people (over 50). Meetups are also one communication tool, since a lot of issues related to MNFI are discussed there, partly because I have reserved 15 minutes for my self in some of our TMN meetups.

Program Task-force

This team was established to take care of Summit program. Tasks included among others things to define the structure, gather ideas who should be the speakers (and then invite or approach selected candidates), what kind of tracks there should be, where the tracks can be placed and what other activities there could be. This team was based on inviting suitable community members to it. In other words, it was not open team. A of lot ideas regarding the Summit content came from community. Even though the team had responsibility to take care of the program, several community members were involved. For example, a great deal of the Meegathon competition definition was result of community work.

Marketing team

Marketing team has been (or still is) one of the most popular teams. Several members are involved in it partly because it includes a wide variety of tasks from simple leaflet distribution to graphical design. Moreover, the members in this team are highly active. This team is open, meaning that anyone is welcome to join it. Marketing team was previously more oriented to print media and  constructing marketing material such as leaflets, posters and t-shirts. They handle the whole process  from the start to distribution. This means that they design material, contact printing companies, get the prints and organize distribution. In other words, marketing team acts as quite independent unit. Of course they ask opinions from rest of the community, but they do decisions (in marketing issues). Tasks and role of this team has changed lately, but I will address that later.

Hosting team

Team’s duties include comprehensive management of items which affect speaker’s enjoyment. Such items are for example arranging hotel rooms, providing information and assisting in session preparations. Managing pre-registration and registration (including portal) is one of the key responsibilities of this team. Hosting team also takes care of Summit information desk, updates program during the event, tweets and assists Summit participants in various situations. In brief, they are the human touch or face of Summit organizers. They are the people to go to when you have lost your precious laptop, netbook, N900, tablet, shoes, coat, Tux/MeeGon figure or hacking buddy. Information desk is also the correct place to inform the organizers about different activities which summit participants are encouraged to arrange at the venue. Such activities include hands-on sessions for small groups, unconference/barcamp sessions and workhops (or in this case hack-shops).

Hack3r team

To be labeled as Hacker is an honor among us. The word hacker means to us the same as ‘Sir’ does for the royalty. Members of this team are talented in different technical areas and posses deep knowledge. They are not so interested about anything that involves maintaining systems. Instead they are true explorers and tinkerers, always looking for new tech to try. Team members are not overwhelmed in front of technical problems and can think outside-the-box to find solutions.

This team has been responsible for defining ‘developer USB- stick’, which will be given to all Summit participants. That stick will include lots of tools for MeeGo related application development from various sources. The main idea behind this stick is to cut down the need to download all tools at the venue. Furthermore, it will hopefully serve participants’ needs also after the summit.

Party MeeGons

This is probably ‘teh’ team where the party animals join. Members of this team are true multi-talented entertainers; VJs, DJs with ideas for stunning laser shows. Parties are important part of any summit or conference. Because our Summit is developer and hacker oriented event, we do not want to offer our summit participants fancy dinners at mansions or rigid and boring wine tasting. We prefer to have more casual and relaxed parties, which can include ad hoc competitions and shows.

Part of this team’s work is to find location for the party and negotiate necessary issues with facility provider. They are also encouraged to find opportunities to have joint parties with other developing and hacking oriented communities. Also getting a sponsor for the party is important and one of the tasks. In other words, this team is given quite free hands on how the parties are arranged.

That’s enough about the initial teams. You can read more about the teams from previous blog entries (for example about Program Task-force). That was the situation for a few months. Things started to change (in my mind also) around Jan-Feb 2011.

Something old - something new

In February 2011 Marketing Team lead and Communication & Tech Team lead had discussions in which they agreed that some of the tasks need to be redistributed. My initial response was:” This is great! Teams start to behave as teams and define own nature and ‘borders’.” This showed also another important aspect of good and vibrant community. This is how teams and community should work: share ideas and work together as community between teams at least in team lead level. Of course sharing ideas and information between teams in general (including member to member) is highly necessary, even more than in lead level. This is why the importance of fluent communication is highlighted in my new model below.

The need for fluent communication is nothing new to those who have been in communities for some time, yet it is sometimes necessary to remind about that. In the figure above, communication is taken ‘away’ from Tech team. This change should be understood figuratively. Lets take a closer look at communication and the teams.

Communication

Tech Team is still responsible for technical items related to communication. Reason why the word is separated, is that communication is everyone’s responsibility. Simply follow the rule: tell others what you are doing, if you want others to participate or it affects other parts of community.

Tech team lead (cybette) created a marvelous acronym and guideline for the team leads to follow. Team leads are given more responsibility in communication. In our community team leads have been given permission (username and passwd) to use our ping.fm service through which we push information to various social media tubes such as twitter, facebook and linkedIn group. Pushing is mostly generating bigger knowledge about us among the possible new members ie pushing a story out to the marketplace. At the same time we are pulling people in. Pulling is here understood as “focus[ing] to all the ways we use content and the web to pull attention and discussion in.”[source]

Enough with the social media and back to communication. Cybette labeled the guideline as D.S.P!

1. Discuss,
2. Share and
3. Ping!

Issues are first discussed inside teams or in other appropriate collectives. Ones some kind of opinion or proposal has been reached, it should be shared. Sharing can take place for example in our mailing list. The third step is to push information outside, not to keep it all within ourselves. This kind of model is simple and easy to remember. All this has been our practice for some time now and it’s part of the old.

Instead, what is new in this model, is the emphasis on social activities. Of course one can argue that MeeGo networks exist to do system and software development and innovations. This is true, but limiting one’s view to that neglects the other significant strengths of MeeGo ecosystem, namely social events.

Event Team

Having real world meetups - preferably monthly - are unique features of MeeGo ecosystem. Ubuntu or Android community does not have similar meetups. The closest thing to regular MeeGo meetups  are hackerspace events. More about hackerspace you can read from my other blog and from previous blog entry which compares MeeGo networks and hackerspaces.

This unique feature which differentiates us from other Open Source ecosystems affects our community structure and practices as well. We need ‘event team’. We need a team that coordinates our national level events and acts as a context to discuss issues related to monthly local meetups and other social events in local (cities) level. In other words, this team would be the core Summit organizing team. The other aspect - organizing meetups - is discussed below in details.

This team includes the previously discussed Hosting team. I would bring meetup organizers (and co-organizers) to this team. Until now, their important role has been neglected. They have existed, but without any clear position or context in our community. This is partly understandable, because in our community local MeeGo networks are independent from the national body. Still, remaining independent they should be part of our core activities.

Meetup organizers

Let’s take a look at what meetup organizers do, why they are valuable and why they should be included to ‘event’ team. Five duty areas can be identified: general level meetup organizing, sponsor negotiations, meetup promotion, inspiring and activating members in local level, and starting Summit preparations and acting as core Summit organizer team.

1. Organizes meetups

Well, obviously they are responsible for the meetups. This means finding locations to hold meetups, print the nametags, makes necessary arrangement with facility owners, is our local contact person and face to outside world. Concerning the space, best option is to get fixed location which has enough space and at least adequate setup for presentations. Otherwise you might end up running behind the sponsors instead of making them come to you.

This also includes sketching agenda for every meetup. It does not how ever mean that organizer should generate topics for presentations. Instead he/she should encourage members to suggest presentations and collect those as agenda. Tool for this might be local mailing list, as we have in TMN. Mailing list also helps to keep members informed about different issues and fosters activity even between the meetups. We have used meetup.com services as well. It has been the main tool for organizers. Yet our intention is to get rid of it as soon as possible. Not that it’s completely screwed, it has some features that are not as good as they could be. We will implement similar (yet improved) service in our national level portal.

2. Negotiates with sponsors (others help to get)

Often sponsors can be easily found or persuaded to take part. At least in Tampere, sponsors have been interested to be part of us. Previous sentence expresses the way I see sponsors’ role in our community. They are not ‘others’ somewhere outside the community. They are part of the community. We should listen what they say, but not loose our ability to remain independent. They must also know that they are seen as part of the community.

3. Takes care of meetup promotion

This taks is part of our marketing and communication. Putting our events to meego.com events list, the world around us can see that we are active and alive. Listing events can also attract new members. Adding our events to meego.com events is also one form of communication towards global community. By doing so, we tell rest of the community that ‘hey! We are here, we are plenty and we do interesting things!’ We have been adding our events to vapaasuomi.fi calendar too, but that is somewhat too laborious and it has been neglected lately. It would be a great place to put info, since it distributes event details for example to ubuntu-fi.org’s frontpage.

4. Activates members to contribute

Meetups need presentations, demos, implementations and permanent or casual co-organizers. Meetup organizers should be innovative, explorer like personalities. They should be bold in ideas. They are supposed to inspire members with different ideas. Let the members act as filters, they will tell you whether your idea is mad, insane, impossible or great, inspiring and a little from outer space. Flying drone is an example of such goofy idea. We tried that in Tampere and right after that in Helsinki. People talked for weeks about that presentation and drone flying around. It even inspired some members to start developing new application to drone.

5. Start Summit preparations

Main responsibility to get annual summit preparations going (includes building necessary teams). and meetup organizers are supposed to work together. Why put Meetup organizers to begin Summit organizing? First of all, they are at least monthly in touch with the people in our cities where meetups are organized. They hear what is interesting, they discuss with a lot meetup participants. Secondly, they know the facilities in their area probably pretty well. Thirdly, they are constantly in touch with local companies (which are commonly also multinational) because of meetup sponsoring. In brief, they are are extremely well connected people and they should be encouraged to be so.

Of course meetup organizers are not alone in starting Summit preparations. In 2011 Summit preparations Program Task-force took the lead in overall planning. Reason for that was simple. Community manager and two other initial promoters of the Summit worked in same company (Hermia) and were located in same city. Two of these key persons were in the Program Task-force as well and the third knew the facility providers in Tampere extremely well and was experienced event organizer. This triangle formed the ‘high council’ to make last decisions after discussing issues with others. In other words, even if Event Team would start the preparations, some kind of ‘general management’ team -even if it is distributed in several teams – will most likely be established and some outsiders can be included if necessary.

Additional activities

Meetup participants often continue the night after meetups. These events or activities are not really tasks of organizer(s), since post-meetup gatherings for example in nearby bar often occur without interfering. At least in HMN and TMN people go to nearby restaurants after the meetups for a few beers. In Tampere, sometimes nearly half of the meetup participants (normally around 40-50) attend the post-meetup gatherings. The significance of post-meetup meetings is mostly related to networking and continuing discussions which started at meetup.

Another possible task for meetup organizers is to act as contact person between other local communities and MNFI/Local MeeGo Network. An example of this could happen in Tampere. In Tampere we hold our meetups at Demola. Demola is now building some kind of developer lounge, which is supposed to be a place where Demola visitors and student can get their hands on different devices.  Those devices will also include MeeGo OS.  The lounge is as far as I know planned to be used also as demo site, where applications and other presentations could be held. I would like to see presence of TMN and MNFI in that lounge. By presence I don’t refer to maintaining the space, but more like a chance to attract more people to MeeGo activities and spread knowledge about MeeGo. This would be important since visitors of Demola often include key members of local companies, students and City officials. Having meetups in fixed location would enable deeper cooperation with the facility owners.

As it can be seen, meetup organizers act pretty independently and that’s how we like to keep it.

Marketing team

This team was discussed earlier and the role of team is changing already. In our February community meeting, responsibilities between marketing team were altered. This was due to too high overlapping in tasks and responsibilities with the Communication & Tech team.  Now this team is responsible for: marketing material such as posters and leaflets, media policy, website content policy, social media accounts, press releases and other press related issues. In addition to that, Marketing team lead acts as community managers right hand or side kick. Now the task and responsibility division between the above teams is more clear since C&T is now responsible for: MNFI portal development, Summit venue IT infrastructure/connections, Live streaming of presentations during the summit, video interviews (speakers etc.), App for summit program (summit program related, not Intel), Summit registration tech, IRC channel(s) (ops) and Mailing lists (freelists.org, meegonetwork.fi).

Development team

Members of this team are still true hack3rs! Just the name is different. One of the new responsibilities of this team is to manage our ‘organization’ and members of it in AppUp Developer Program (Intel). This team will continue (hopefully) in developing tools for us. In other words, they stay with the code and hardware hacking. I guess this team is how most people (the great public) see Open Source communities, bunch of coders.

Task-forces

Of course all the things do not fit into the above teams or if one team is stuffed with loads of tasks and members it will become hard to manage. Remember that optimal team size is 7-12. People can not always participate in team work, they will be absent sometimes even for weeks. Then if team size is less than 7,  the broadness of skill is not enough and absent members make ‘holes’. Again, if there are more 12 members, it will make management and coordination harder (but not impossible).

Therefore, it is necessary to set up task-forces, which were discussed in the beginning. In the previously introduced structure of MNFI Event Team and Marketing Team has some gray puzzle pieces. They represent the task-forces. These little units can overlap between teams more than normal teams, but they will live for relatively short time and for specific purposes.

Closure

So this is my view how MNFI could be restructured. The moment for another redistribution of tasks is not now. Suitable time could be after MeeGo Summit FI, after which some kind of restructuring is necessary anyway. Of course all the above is still rather vague and by no means perfect. Also the role of portal is still unknown, since building of it has just began and no-one really knows what it will be. Hopefully it will make some tasks easier for all and unites information flows. As a recap, below is current and new (possible) MNFI structures.

Current

New

Any thoughts? Just add comment below. Feedback is always welcome.

An ocean of ideas

In the early stages when we were thinking about the MeeGo Summit FI content, an idea of hackathon kind of competition came up. Obviously some of us checked out what kind of settings, ideas, rules etc others have generated. Multiple ideas emerged and were tossed around in the community. The whole content and structure of the Meegathon started pretty much similar as competitions around the world. It looked nice and clear with two separate categories: hardware and software. A lot of members wanted to see onsite coding as one of the main features of the competition. That would have probably worked and might have had some success. Nevertheless, it was a bit lame and sounded a bit old and worn. Despite of that, initial competition model was drafted and forgotten for a moment.

It would have been safe to arrange a similar competition compared to dozens of hackathon type competitions around the world. We wanted (some of us) to do something different. We took a risk. Time will tell if the risk was worth it.

Flying gadgets

The idea to include something relatively new as part of the competition came to my mind as I was visiting Helsinki MeeGo Network meetup in December 2010. I was there to give a presentation about the MeeGo Summit FI 2011 and to get ameegos in Helsinki as part of the organizing teams. I presented the ideas and after that there was some mingling and talks between people. Lucky for me, I ended up discussing with Kate Alhola, who introduced me and others to flying gadgets (better know as Quadricopters). I got back to my tasks and forgot the flying gadgets for a month or so. For some reason I just remembered it and started to think it as part of the competition. The more I read about Kate’s work with the Quadricopters and watched videos from youtube, the more I was convinced that this might work.

At this point the composition of the team which was drafting the competition changed. Until that moment, there had been just a few people involved. I expanded the team by involving Kate into the process. This seemed natural. She had the most information about AR.drones and she had already done pioneer work on it. Simultaneously with Kate, two members who had already participated in other competitions were included to the team.  Based on their experiences we dropped the requirement of pure onsite coding (it is still included as valued aspect but not as requirement). Instead we started to approach the competition model from community perspective. Kate kind of pushed us to go there.

The reasoning for the selected structure and rules

AR.drones are somewhat new and cool gadgets. The device was introduced at the Las Vegas International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in 2010. Because of that, Open Source development in libraries used for creating AR apps is still quite small. Also the development regarding the tools for lib and app development is mostly absent. Instead of forcing competition participants to create something hasty in 24 hours time, we wanted to start a long run development cycle or process. One of the ideas or purposes of Meegathon is to get more people involved in AR.drone lib development. This might create a new community around AR.drone related libs. This is why we have chosen to reveal (30th Jan 2011) the reference scenario months before the Summit.  People need time to produce good quality code and get familiar with the scenario and tools.

We didn’t however want to rule out that people can participate with something else than the given scenario. We intentionally left the back door open. You can participate into the competition with something totally different. You are allowed to choose your own agenda for your project. Furthermore, hardware inventions and unusual use-cases are welcome.

Releasing the scenario early is intended to get more stable code and more ‘wow’ effects. What about after this competition? Most hackathon competitions start and end at the same event. We would like to see other MeeGo events (organized by Nokia, Intel and others) to include similar setting in their future competitions. This could possibly speed up the development and teams could set goals for the development. Furthermore, drones combined with MeeGo devices could be one of the coolest technology demos to ’sell’ MeeGo and Qt around the world.

Part of other activities

Obviously it is fun to play with toys, even when you’re adult. Therefore we have decided to get some quadricopters for the Summit participants to play with. The activities does not have to be complex, just some initial settings for the people to get started. A few drones, lots of space and freedom to explore and try. Having quadricopters without the connection to Meegathon would have been sort of…out of context.

Introduced in TMN meetup

In April 2011 we had Local MeeGo Network meetup in Tampere, where one of the top developers (MAR.drone), Kate Alhola, presented what has been done already. The session was recorded (by several participants) and will be used in Meegathon marketing. Tampere has been lucky regarding the drones, since Protomo (part of New Factory which is the base for Tampere MeeGo Network) was convinced to order one Quadricopter for development purposes. Convincing Protomo lead was not hard at all. All that was needed was to look thrilled like a little kid and ask. People in Protomo like hackers and people outside our community were also interested about it. Some other MNFI members have also ordered their own quadricopter after the TMN meetup and buzz it has generated. Below two video recordings from TMN meetup.

In brief we found out that we can combine the Meegathon, help to boost AR lib development and have fun with the Quadricopter! Did we have this idea in the beginning? No, it just happened :) All it took was to include different kind of people into the process.

Meegathon

Meegathon competition will be opened for teams 31th January 2011. Team size can be 1-3 persons. More information such as detailed competition scenario, rules and team registration will be at http://summit.meegonetwork.fi by the end of this month.

More information about drone:

1. Review
2. Parrot Discussion Forum
3. Drone & MeeGo (Kate Alhola)
4. Technical details
5. Maemo Garage( MAR-drone)

Inspiration:

1. Constructing with drones
2. ‘Surveillance’

A community needs to have one or two annual events, which in this case are regional MeeGo Summits. Events are fun, mostly. Organizing events, such as summits, can benefit our community in different ways. Firstly, summit can function as a tool to build a family or sense of it. Bringing people together unites people and strengthens social bonds. Some may even become friends. Secondly, it breaks the routine. Our community holds meetups (those little peaks) more or less regularly in two cities (Helsinki and Tampere), but a bigger two-day event with people outside our inner circles break the routine. Even though we have meetups IRL, most of our community activities are virtual. Furthermore, local meetups are great, but they are as the word says, local. Summit will be national/regional event and will hopefully unite us in national level. Thirdly, it focuses our minds. In our case, summit is the first shared goal, which can be used to focus our efforts in one point. Fourthly, summit can help identifying the leaders. Summits are always a big effort for the community and inspires leaders and strong personalities in community. This is exactly what is happening right now. We are organizing a summit but at the same time we are building the foundations of our community in the form of various teams. Teams need members, but they also need someone to lead them.

We haven’t actually made a decision whether we have one or two summits, but my bet is that there will be only one. Why? Mostly because it’s not a minor task to arrange two-day community-driven event. It might be possible to arrange a smaller summit as the second one. Who knows, time will tell.

Focus

It is useful to focus your summit on some agenda. Heck, it’s useful to have focus on anything you do. We focused to hold hacker and developer oriented Summit. I know, that’s not very focused but it’s far better than embracing the whole MeeGo ecosystem including business and business logic related items. Remember that it’s only two-day Summit. Another approach could well be selecting one or two platforms; IVI, Handset, Connected TV, Mediaphone(?) or Netbook.You could do the selecting on different grounds: what platform has the strongest hold/interest in your region? Which platform needs most to be developed? What platform is full of hype? Ask the people in your community, they probably know the answer.

Once you have the focus, you should establish a task-force to work with the program. Invite 3-4 well-connected and respected developers (or what ever fits your focus) to the team. They don’t all have to be hardcore kernel hackers. Keep the team rather small, because even with such a small crowd, you’ll get a lot of opinions and desires.

Selecting appropriate team members

We had luck when selecting people to program task-force and the timing was right. We invited Timo Härkönen (timoph) because he’s very well known developer in the community. He knows just about everyone who’s worth to know :) Besides he has a lot of hacker attitude and works with the OBS and Quality Assurance. Another person who we invited was Jukka Eklund, a very vibrant man full of ideas and enthusiasm. He’s our insider man in Nokia. A colleague, Matti Saastamoinen (smoinen) was invited to the task-force, because he has a lot of experience in organizing summits. He was involved in organizing aKademy 2010 here at Tampere. Since the facilities are the same in our Summit as they were in aKademy, Matti has significant amount of tacit knowledge related to venue site. He also participated MeeGo conference in Dublin, which is another benefit.  The last member in the task-force is Henri Bergius (bergie), who’s visions and judgement are without a question high quality. He’s also very well-known in the development circles. In other words, we focused the selection to those people who are well-connected to other developers and who are experienced in FOSS development. We considered  to get one ’suit’-member, but it never happened.

Working methods

Most of the task-force work has been virtual. We have written emails to each other and discussions on IRC have been very common. We did create a mailing list for the task-force mainly because it was possible in our domain (meegonetwork.fi) and because it simplifies mail exchange. Me and Matti have used Pidgin a lot, because it’s the common real-time discussion method in our company. We have created a shared document (google doc) in which we build the summit program. There has been additional shared documents, but the program document has been central for our work. The program was by the way originally a copy of MindTrek conference program and we just edited it. Eventually it has become totally different than what it used to be and reminds the original only faintly.

We didn’t plan to have lots of pre-scheduled real life meetings. Meetings in real life were scheduled if and when they were needed. We decided to get 2-3 “hot” speakers first as baits. Then we spread the word about those few and gained the attention of other speakers. Finding suitable speakers requires some amount of tacit knowledge about the community and significant amount of emails. I managed to get a few speakers, but it was not easy for me. I was not known in the community and I didn’t know anyone personally. Needless to say that I did not have met anyone in real life. Despite that, I gained strength from others and from the success we had with the ‘baits’. Success generates more activity and success. Once we got some speakers, the community began to do their recruiting and proposing speakers to us. Keep in mind that people come to summits to see and hear presentations and speakers, but it is important to have lots of breaks in your program! Participants of previous summits and conferences have enjoyed long breaks which offer opportunities to meet other people and have fruitful conversations.

All the above represents prebuild activity. Members of our community have suggested additional program and activity. Ad hoc presentations and workshops, or as we call them, hackshops are taken into account. Summit participants will have lounges and small meeting rooms to arrange own activities. We encourage people to do so, because such small events will keep the atmosphere and spirit of the summit more casual. After all, summits should be fun.

We did decide early on to have three tracks and even defined loosely what the content will be. It turned out that the true nature and focus of each track formed during acquiring the speakers. Lesson-learned: keep your mind open and be prepared to adjust the program. I used local meetups (mostly Tampere) to discuss the program with community, gain feedback and ideas. Writing things such as confirmed speakers to wiki helps to keep people informed about the situation. Now the program starts to build, now what?

Additional activity

Speakers are only part of the program and don’t forget the importance of long breaks. There’s normally a party and other activities as well. Early on I came up with the idea of Meegathon. After all this is hacker and developer oriented event. Meegathon is a sort of Hackathon where participants have restricted amount of time to produce a solution or multiple solutions to a problem or need. We decided to have two categories: Quick & Dirty and Hardcore. In the latter participants are allowed to create new hardware in which MeeGo is used. Of course the participants need to build the gadgets mostly in advance and only assembly on the site.  We have arranged a small tool-shop for minor adjustments and craft-work. Quick & Dirty is a pure software category. We have agenda (for what and for which device solutions should be done) in mind for that category. It includes quadricopter (this time with MeeGo), but let’s keep that as a surprise for now. The teams will have separate working spaces/lounges in the venue site. They have access to those lounges for 24h from the start of the Meegathon (at 12:00 on Friday) to the end (12:00 on Saturday). Teams will demonstrate their solutions and inventions to the public on Saturday and best ones will be rewarded.

We could have chosen the other way of traditional CFP and get most of our speakers through that. It might have worked better, or not. We could have been more open about the program. This time is has been ‘developed’ behind the scenes. Nevertheless, feedback about the program has been good and inspiring. Again we as community have done something right. We have selected suitable focus for our event (at least on paper). We have lured great speakers to our summit, speakers who are highly valued by the community. We have successfully created correct image of the summit into peoples minds. An image which builds around two words: hacker and developer.

Our community has grown to include around 200 members. Not all the members are alike, neither do they have to be or even shouldn’t be. Prosperous community needs diversity and broadness both in membership, skills and needs. This post discusses the current member structure of our community. It also proposes some actions which might be needed to make us more diverse community in the future. Some propositions include practical suggestions.

Current situation

Our community has successfully attracted professional developers (in the figure: “Core Developers and Co-developers”) and perhaps some of the technology enthusiasts, but not the users or even the majority of “Active users”. Active user refers to those who get their hands dirty and try to understand how MeeGo works, what it can do, what kind of hacks can improve UX (User eXperience) and possibly post bug reports and contribute patches and code.
People coming to our meetups (once a month) are mostly getting paid to do MeeGo development or applications for MeeGo. We have to bear in mind that this will eventually turn upside down (more users than developers). Whether we want to stay as pure developer community (IMO it would not be wise) or not, is another question or topic to discuss. Naturally, the passive users (the big mass just using MeeGo) are still absent. That will change when devices using MeeGo come to market, which will be during the next year.It takes time, before the passive user mass emerges. Before the mostly silent users gain access to MeeGo, some technology enthusiast will establish ad hoc groups and communities. Some signs of this are already visible.

Emerging user community

The active users (free-time developers and testers) are already building their own circles and groups. An example of this in Finland is ‘MeeGo Suomi‘ community page in Facebook. They have nearly 240 ‘likes’. Of course it’s “just”  a page and “likes” can’t be compared to membership or involvement in activity. Yet it shows that local micro-communities are emerging. The above mentioned page lists information about MeeGo, contains discussions in small scale and links to member written blog entries. All this in Finnish only. Even their description says: “Suomenkielinen MeeGo-sivu”, “Finnish language MeeGo-page”. That can be seen both as strength and as weakness. Let’s take a closer look what we could learn from that community.

Native language and discussion forums

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 :)