FOSS Meetup Standards

Meetup
1

FOSS Meetup Standards

FOSS Conference Standards are guidelines for organizing FOSS conferences. They promote inclusivity, transparency, and eco-friendliness. FOSS United offers guidance and resources to help organizers meet these standards and provides grants and sponsorship for compliant events.

  1. Communication: The organizing team can start by creating a Telegram group or any forum of choice, having all the volunteers or key volunteers in the group.

  2. Talk proposal committee: A few FOSS developers are volunteering to review the talk proposals for the conference. Once the CFP is closed, the volunteers will review the talks within a week and share the selected proposals with the organizing team.

  3. Design: FOSS United will provide branding guidelines and design templates from previous events to ensure consistent visual branding across conference materials.

  4. Refreshment: FOSS United can pay up to â‚ą1000 - 5000 for tea and snacks as per the participant count and duration of the event.

  5. Marketing: The volunteers/organizing team can spread the word in their circles and invite more people to join.

  6. Eco-Friendly: Encourage eco-friendly practices for conference materials, such as asking participants to bring their own reusable water bottles, and using paper cups instead of plastic cups.

  7. Code of conduct - Make sure that you enforce the code of conduct to the participants. It could be through the RSVP, CFP form or in the newsletters send to the participants.

Important Links:

  1. How to Submit a Talk Proposal for a FOSS Conference?
  2. Tasklist for Conference Organizers [Quick Guideline]
  3. Telegram group for Organizers
  4. Conference Organizer Handbook
1 Like
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A few Suggestions:

  1. Add a mandatory CoC. Something like “Following the FOSS United Code of Conduct, and ensuring it is agreed upon by all attendees (such as by linking to it in the CFP/RSVP pages and Forum threads.” Perhaps having someone from FOSS United as part of all CoC contacts would be nice as well.

  2. A clear forum for “all meetup organizers” would be nice - it could be a category here on this forum, or a group elsewhere.

  3. Perhaps change “Telegram group” to forum of choice? I don’t see why every meetup has to use Telegram.

3

Thanks for the heads up.

Added this as the 7th point in the list of standards

I’ve added the organizer’s group link in the “Important Links” section.

Updated.

4

One thing I have noticed a lot across a large part of what FOSSU does is that a major part of the infra runs on non-free software (like the general collaboration using telegram, streaming/recordings being only uploaded to youtube, the announcements posts only being on twitter and so on).

This is fine to get more people involved in the community by keeping the barrier to entry low, but also is a bit hypocritical imo, claiming to be pro-FOSS and such but then on the other hand running a majority of the things on non-free software.

We should make it mandatory to maintain a presence in free software platforms as well (like bridging the telegram groups to free software platforms, using inkscape/penpot for posters, uploading the videos to a FOSSU peertube channel, be it on a public or selfhosted instance, and syncing the mastodon with FOSSU’s twitter.)
This will also help bring in more volunteers who might not be comfortable having to use non-free software.

I know my proposal is a bit radical, but implementing this would help a lot with the legitimacy of FOSS United. I can help with setting up these things if needed.

5

Thanks for the feedback.

How can we proceed? Can you help us with a volunteer who can manage to set up and maintain our infra, and bridge the platforms?

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FOSSUnited’s main public space has already been bridged using my matterbridge instance.
As I said in the previous post, I can help maintain the infrastructure.

The thing is though, we could start by using mostly public instances of these services.

A good next step would be to start syncing the twitter with our mastodon (FOSS United (@fossunited@mas.to) - mas.to)
This is a bit hard considering most crossposters were shutdown when the Twitter API went paid, but we can do it manually for now.

For the next big FOSSUnited event, we could start streaming to a public peertube instance, in addition to youtube where it is usually uploaded.

7

Is there any action required from my end to start it? I guess, you need to creds of our mastodon account.

Should we create a FOSSU official account on a Peertube public instance and upload existing videos?

8

Yeah, it would be great if you can give me the creds of the Mastodon so I can start cross-posting.

Yeah, I completely forgot about the older videos. I will setup an account on a public peertube instance and update it here :slight_smile:

9

Please DM me your email address on Telegram. I’ll email the creds.

Thanks.