Re: How to open Gnome Malaysia Usergroup

[Mohd Fazli Azran <mfazliazran gmail com>]

Thanks for the great advice Frederic. We need guide from others experience people how to manage very good usergroup.

On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 11:30 AM, Frederic Muller <fredm gnome org> wrote:

On 01/26/2011 11:02 AM, Mohd Fazli Azran wrote:
[...]

Yep. We know in not good for us if the community keep having war but now
community are on sleep mode. I need to poke them all and create hype to
wake of all them.

[...]

Yes, we need GNOME, GNU, FSF or other related organisation to help us to
build good communication and keep the relationship. Although your word
some of it sound like indonesian :). Thank to you all

Dear Mohd (hope that's the right way to address you),

I'm just reacting to those 2 statements of yours within the context of that long exchange we've had.

I have been running and involved in user groups for quite some time and here is what I can offer as an advice:

1. you need to inspire your community, not create hype

Yes, Agree with you!!

2. getting businesses seems to be a major focus of yours, however businesses compete, they do not collaborate well in general. Inspired people on the contrary share ideology and do things beyond money and companies interests, because they believe it's the right thing to do and they have fun doing it. This is why it's called a user group, and not a business group.

Yes i agree with the statement for others. But not in Malaysia. People are here are more talk rather then do it something. In Malaysia people will not do for free and need something in return. We see many community die because of this. In this term we need backup by money or any business community for community survival. Without them our community like desert without human life.
 

3. you do not need GNOME, GNU, FSF: you can chose to be part of those communities and do what you believe should be done. A community is a flat organization where everyone is at the same level. We all do what we can at our level, and I would recommend you to do the same. This is the best way to strengthen the GNOME community. At this stage I wonder what else you need?

We here just need support like any GNOME can give us something like freebies or any material that we can give away to our community like we did same like openSUSE, Fedora, FreeBSD, Ubuntu, Joomla & Drupal. It like part of marketing strategy.

 

4. Getting involved in building a user group is easy (almost), you already have all the needed pointers: now you should lay out a plan and act upon it. From my experience a user group tends to cost time and money to its organizers, which seems to be what you lack of.

Yeah we lack of leadership and on more important is lack of people that wanna to contribute. In Malaysia our culture more on big talk rather the implementation. We have this problem at many others community to. "Doing for free" or "Doing for money".  This will always delusion for who want to start up any project community in Malaysia.

5. Having so many FOSS projects under one umbrella might not be the best way to attract volunteers and contributors: I would personally doubt about the focus of such an organization and be afraid to come to learn about GNOME and be told about ...Drupal.

We try that for many long time ago and we fail. In Malaysia the situation it not suitable for this. We are small country and we need to be together as one not to separate community. You can see many other OSS/FOSS/FLOSS community that we involve now like grave yard project from Malaysia especially.
 

6. What I've learned in my years as a contributor in the Free Software communities: when you want something to happen you need to start yourself and show the way, rather than expect people to do the work for you. People will usually have a different perspective and other opinions on how to execute. As a community leader your role is often to start and help combine all those energies towards a good direction for the project (not necessarily what you initially envisioned).

Yes we put in my mind that everything we want to do something we need start 1st and doing something 1st. They lack of us in Malaysia now day are "How to maintain it?". In this phase we lack of. Many people in Malaysia do for reason like hobby, interest, personal agenda, some maybe business purpose & or create profit. Those who intend to do because of hobby, interest, personal agenda die 1st before reach the goal. Actually why this happen cause our education here not strength on community and Why we need sharing, involve & contribute. The culture in Malaysia not yet that standards. We have many experience when we want do something related to community and we fall again & again and many project never finish and just hang in out there. Now we dont want it like that. We now on phase to create more professional community rather just because of hobby. It would benefit everybody about what we want to do now.

Those comments are really based on what I have learned and I hope they will benefit you and help you to get started. I have participated, lead and contributed to my local GNU/Linux User Group for years and I'd say it has been a wonderful experience. I've met great people, had fun and did stuff that I felt mattered. I hope you can experience the same as I did, or even more!

Yes we learn and learn and will not stop to learn. In Malaysia we have many great people but they not seem interest to participate to community world because cant get anything. Unless money involve everybody will participate. This is mindset from our culture. It so hard to change it but we try slowly from below and will go on until we reach we lost faith on it. What we want to do now we start our project and focus on student from university. We dont want target people from workers cause they have no time, family commitment and limited by their carrier.

Good luck and let us know when you're planning on your first meeting!

Kind regards,

Fred
ps: also do subscribe to the gugmasters-list@ which is where GNOME User Group issues are being discussed.

Regards,
Mohd Fazli Azran