We’re proposing starting a regular “Community Call” and we would like your comments regarding it.
What is the “Community Call”?
The Community Call will be a regular online meetup for members of the FOSS United community. Specifically, the focus of the call will be to bring together the volunteers running the various FOSS United monthly meetups across the country under the same roof regularly. The community call will be open to all members of the FOSS United community but the agenda will primarily involve updates from the various monthly meetups.
What is the point of the “Community Call”?
As FOSS United spreads across the country, we need a way for the disparate set of volunteers running the various city meetups to gather under the same roof to share their learnings, talk about what they are planning to do, discuss what went wrong and provide meaningful, learned advice on running the city meetups.
What happens in the “Community Call”?
Each monthly call will have most of the agenda set in advance. A city volunteer group interested in joining the call will be expected to provide information about what happened at their last meetup and what they are planning for their upcoming meetup in advance e.g. on a forum post. The participants in the call are expected to have read the agenda in advance so that they can go over the agenda points and seek advice from other community volunteers.
The FOSS United Core team will also guide the volunteer teams where possible.
Towards the end of each call, there will be an open slot. The open slot is meant for people in the community who want to understand the inner workings of our community. They could use this information to start their own city meetup or to join an existing meetup.
When will the “Community Call” happen?
The Community Call will happen on the first Saturday of every month from 10 AM - 11 AM(edited). This is because
- we cannot expect volunteers to spend time on weekdays
- we don’t want to expect volunteers (or the FOSS United core team) to work on a Sunday
- we don’t want to have the call in the afternoon on a Saturday as most city meetups are held in the afternoon e.g. 3-6 PM
What will come out of the “Community Calls”?
- The notes for each call will be publicly available e.g. via a forum post. The increased transparency in how things work internally will also hopefully make the city teams more accessible to new potential volunteers
- In the short term, we are hoping that the calls will help the volunteer teams running individual city meetups to share their learnings with other city teams
Where do we go from here?
We can go ahead with the community call if atleast three city volunteer teams agree to this idea. We can have a Version 0 of the call on August 5, 2023 (next Saturday). As the proposer and a part of the HydFOSS team, I’m keen to share our learnings.