Re: Starting Chicago Gnome User Group

[Patrick Wagstrom <patrick wagstrom net>]

Dave Neary wrote:
> Hi Kevin,
>
> Kevin Harriss wrote:
> > My name is Kevin Harriss and I am new to this list was just wondering
> > if anybody was interested in joining/helping out a Gnome User Group
> > based in Chicago, Illinois in the United States.  I was looking at the
> > list of Gnome User Groups and noticed that there was a lack of US
> > based user groups so I decided that I would try to correct this
> > problem.
>
> Great! There's also a biggish GNOME presence elsewhere in the mid-west,
> in Ohio and Michigan. You might consider widening the scope a little (or
> is that too wide of a scope? From where I am, distance between US cities
> is measured in centimeters).

This is a typical problem that I've noticed when looking for help 
getting people interested in GNOME and starting user groups.  Europeans, 
please note, the US is quite large.  The area that you're suggesting for 
a user group is HUGE.  The distance from where Kevin lives (Chicago), to 
Pittsburgh (where I live, on the other edge of the area you're 
describing) is 750km -- about the same driving distance as Berlin to 
Brussels.  As far as land area, what you've just proposed is about 
460,000km^2.  For reference, Germany is 357,000km^2 and France is 
547,000km^2.  Now, imagine the scope of asking someone who was just 
looking at starting up a small user group to take on that sort of 
responsibility.  It's MAMMOTH.  I'd hate to see what would happen if 
someone in Billings or Lubbock asked about starting a user group. 
Distances to some of those conferences are also no go (1260km to Ottawa 
for OLS, 3250km to Los Angeles for SCALE).  For hardcore hackers, I can 
see them putting up the money for it, but for the casual person who is 
just looking at getting started, it's daunting.

Another issue that we have in starting up US based user groups, is that 
there is a much less clear description of what we can do.  Many of the 
other locations can focus on providing localization and localized 
support.  Most applications for GNOME are available natively in English. 
 For us Americans, the best we can do on that front is correcting 
Queen's English into good proper American English (more Z's less S's) 
and swaping the month and day around in dates (but Canada seems to beat 
us to the latter).

So what can American groups do?  I've had good luck marketing GNOME to 
individuals at conferences and educational institutions.  Last year we 
had a good booth at Ohio LinuxFest, which is probably the closest large 
show to you, although it still is a five hour drive there.  Around 1000 
people came last year, I got a chance to talk to about 350 people at the 
booth.  We'd love to have you join us at the booth this year -- 
typically this brings together folks from Michigan, Indiana, Western PA, 
and wee bits of Illinois and Kentucky.  The CFP for OLF is also up, 
maybe we should try to get some rocking GNOME sessions there.  Last year 
jdub made it out to beautiful Columbus for it.

I've also had success in marketing at my local LUG.  Although I'm really 
the only person who is into GNOME and really does much with it, I've 
gotten a handful of converts to switch to GNOME fulltime.  Mainly this 
was through a few sessions we ran that discussed how to take tasks 
people were rebooting into windows for and do them in GNOME.

> 1. Identify a starting group of 6 or 8 people who will give you some
> initial momentum (the GNOME map moght help with this:
> http://live.gnome.org/GnomeWorldWide)

Is there a way to make this a higher resolution map?  While it's cool 
and all that, it's nigh impossible to actually read the data on the map 
for anywhere that has more than 200 people.  Barring that, does anyone 
have GoogleMaps-Fu to make it into something scalable, so we can better 
see where people are.   I can make out a few names in the Northeast and 
Midwest, but I can't tell enough about where they are.

> 2. Create a mailing list, get people signed up, and advertise the list

Does GNOME provide resources for this?  It would be great if there was a 
nice process that was documented where interested people could say "Hey, 
create a gnome-us-chicago or gnome-us-pittsburgh list."  Putting it at 
gnome.org lends some credibility to the effort.

> 3. Perhaps create an IRC channel (but I'm not a huge fan of IRC as a
> community-building tool, it's more useful once the community is built)

Sound advice here.

> 4. Most important: give the group a first meeting - get people to the
> same place, identify a conference in the area to represent GNOME at, or
> have someone from the user group give a presentation to a local LUG.

Kevin, if you contact me directly, we can talk on the phone about what 
I've done in Pittsburgh to push GNOME and getting people excited at our LUG.


--Patrick