i guess i'll start and so i'm really that is sort going to actually be reading a lot of that so this is that so first i should introduce myself my name is mike ford i'm a you know foundation member i got involved in you know with the women's outreach program in two thousand eleven and i and contributing chick you know since then i'm also working on my master's in computer science in chicago so this talk is basically about a group that jim campbell who is not documentation contributor in you know i started in chicago and also for so i'd like to explain the title generally when i talk about free and open source software i call it three the free software can or for us community are the flask well i'm calling at the open source community because in chicago we have a tiny for yourself and so in order for us to our reach out be and our small twenty member community we needed to learn how to engage people who we have things in common but by maybe didn't embrace all of the all the the ideals i that free software this so so has a chicago is the third largest city you know so we have a population of almost people and we have a pretty large czech by our free software community address that is really small so when we were starting out a lot of what the challenge that we face ways how do we get people to be interested in free software how do you know the community around give when most people have never use windex or have heard of free software so we started out basically looking at our community and seen what is the larger community that surrounds free software which are and we found that we have three basic groups of people who were knowledgeable about free software and to might possibly be interested in learning about you know and so are the three basic ribs we have we have a pretty active python community and we have a hacker space with a lot of people who tend to run macro last and we have a nonprofit it's hardware recycling that installed linux on laptops and dot tops and either don't make seven or sells them at low cost so the i community is we have around thousand active members of the pipeline on that's a sad often times they turn round hole so they don't use linux but they have a lot of knowledge that can help them to learn about linux so that the basically the learning curve for that is not just it would be for someone coming from microsoft also they a lot of the people the pipelines maybe ten should use both front end and back and development and so they have a lot of understand things like line and concept second hope to become active you know so i hope so also there are people from the python community for involved in the next one of the all this in the chicago area in the suburbs is run by a number of the type and community and then six of our members are actually chicago python community members as well so we also have a packer space with around two hundred members that actually probably i think that's the official number and they probably have actually i five and we have a they have a lot of a printer which is aegean you project people use wonder in state for their projects and also they there are people who are using free software but maybe not necessarily there is also a pretty active people were hacking on michael microcontroller projects and they the people who go to the hyperspace range from startup see you know is to hobbyists to just come in and how come we can't no they mentioned there's also for each card which are is the is i'm not a you know that recycles computers and one's a installs want to look next and they also have weekly have nights but they're actually acting on their website which i think is in java script so we wanted to create i community problem you know and there we have to be people in chicago who work on you know a G able right here have the baroness at least and chris webber also decided that would help us so this actually lives in a different city so he was just five you often to help us a but in the two people most organisation trivia J you probably does most of the he does our website updates and a lot of our social media posts so initially we decided that we would have meetings where we would go to the newcomers tutorial and try to teach people to happen you know and are most of the meetings i was the only person who actually had a and i found that me myself trying to teach twelve people to use G H build up once different distributions was it with choose difficult i could actually really be productive in the whole so because of that we moved trying to have a broader for for the group i'm not saying that we encountered a lot first with that P we people generally when we brought up you know people had a negative reaction and on a people would say things like you know thank you know unit easily this they don't care about their user people didn't like you know three and thinking chicago for example we have are some people there who is that what we hit you know we have to switch to access see because we're using old hardware we can run get a three on it why don't you care about the people we're donating use machines to and also because we had a manual focus just on you know people seem to see as that's kind of and maybe that's partly my fault on having to just as people were only focus on you know we're not really concerned about building a community around free software in general another issue that we ran into where was a diversity issues we and so i so we actually and it out of putting a diversity statement on our website at a certain point in time and the main reason why we ended up doing that was because and well at the women some people did not like the fact that i was representing the which is and so i ran into some issues with people being anything that i was in a position of authority as a woman in the past community and so we did end up having to diversity statement and we sort of came up with a way to deal with people on it's actually pretty common in chicago for people to i for people to feel that women are not involved in the next because it doesn't interest and so one thing that we've tried to do is have discussions with those people we tried to engage them and keep them in our community and we have some failures doing that and we did have one person laughter but it's we tried to be as inclusive as parts and so in general what we feel is if someone doesn't agree with that adversity balls that's totally fine and we welcome that person to be community anyway just that people don't for us for having the balls so the basic way that we deal with that issue in we've tried to engage the larger linux community and we found other people were sort of in senior positions in the linux community more willing to speak up and support of diversity and that's kind of changed data to a lot of a lot of the people involved in our group and we try to give people a reasonable chance to talk about how they feel about first i think ye you know not everyone has the same how political ideas like so i tried to try to engage people and give them a chance to talk about what they feel is important that we do and conversations what we're so productive and i do emphasise in this so we do things like try to use just for like which some people like that that's important talk and we do have maybe writes to i have expressed about this click there are but so the one that we ended up with is we have at our meetings one someone the first two hours we have a harness and we invite members of the community this sometimes people will approach us ask you talked some topics that is that we all the topics are related to free software and since gemini our we don't community members we tend to talk about things that are happening you know so when we go to know that will usually give people gonna talk about it so that people kind of feel like they're involved you know what's go what's going on so we want people to feel like we are part of the fast but at the same time they can be in the gonna buy belong to our organisation and then we spend the remaining three hours of our meeting sorry one the remaining three hours we have and generally we invite people to bring whatever project they're working on so some people drink it all related projects okay no some people drink they don't they do projects and some people just bring whatever they are working on at the time we hold our meetings at the local hacker space at this point we're affiliated with chicago so we have a share need a page we have a lapel once in the chicago area where the only linux related in the city we have a social media presents that we actively poster twitter little plus i tended to see a we actually and we have a website that we maintain a mailing list there's you channel and then the me to start so what we provide for members we try to provide an informal space for people to talk about three software related topics and we try to provide people with some tech support so we have people who use linux or we try to install it if they aren't you know we try to help them or how and we have an o'reilly book just now so people can purchase textbooks you know and also they do reviews they can get chequebooks for free and then we specifically try to help with again so help you work problem G H bill learn out right so some of the talks that we had we had an intro to you max talk to chris webber gave and we went that michael there about came and talked with about our system D do you confident she studies open show showed and then i do what is that we had in brussels and we have a lot of times but in general maybe half or two thirds of them are gonna like it some of the project that people have worked on and we have one guy respond working on the G object bindings go programming language i didn't work on documentation and we had someone who are actually does that models i don't know does a lot of our video he recording for a free and open source work for inferences and so he was working on the system so we can streamline video and then i worked on documents we've had someone working on you know music and i'm working on some more right point had from that another percent working on this decay bindings we've also had thank you some of our members become involved in we are just about a two are actually participating in P W we see more people who are interested in you know open to the idea of using you know we don't get people generally have kind of move past a pass a huge you know and they we see a lot of people who actually actually what are the things that it really big difference was the introduction of fast and as much as i hate to say that was something that people would completely given up i'm going on using you know it was something that need them feel that so it actually have made a pretty big difference in terms of perception our community east i don't some of our members also become friends the community of people who we have all we actually have a lot of systems administrators cool come to our because which i was actually kind of surprised about actually didn't realise that a lot of sysadmins use linux on the desktop for and so what i was trying to teach people to cool for development in what they're like an extra i thought it was because i was a student make been using linux problem turn turned out that actually a lot of them were not about so i was surprised but i suppose like to we do have a lot of hype on community members we have students from local universities to come and the hackers so what we found is as we've kind of moved having a slightly broader for this that people are able to sort of contextualized you know basically it last as a project that is working they don't see as are working in isolation and making decisions just based on what we want to do they see us as people who are contributing to the larger as well also we found that people who may know something about free software for example allows users but i don't really know much about you know more about linux desktop are able to express interest from to our meetings and learn some things without feeling like i have to be axed so in the past we plan doing meetings monthly since september and to be as i said we started out with four members we have about fifteen people who are actively engaged in organising is and then we have various other people from not sure how many met members of all it's probably right and we've also found that the community feedback that we've gotten have become a lot pots so that's all i feel is even though in some ways i feel like we're not really have much to you know directly we are making a difference in the king in our in terms of how is see so so our plans for the coming year are owns some of our members want to start doing some packing only events we're going to do you to work that how we should and building the community and encouraging and supporting interesting often channel so you said i should talk to about starting so so so i would say that you last i think a free open source software is not as popular as it is in here so you may be starting from scratch that we that we were or you may have a all the next user group in your area you can get involved in any sort of actively talk about it will work of course you know so out there is a on linux user group then i would recommend that you probably try to start with a broader focus if you have a really small like we have website it you can go and set up pretty easily probably take about twenty minutes to start it up we use our mailing list a lot for a communicating with numbers for starting dates of our meetings for asking members to get a and the other thing is that you should convince your friends well just starting out especially we found that we had to give talks a lot and it was pretty hard at first to get people in the in the group to present and so you i would be willing to step up to back whenever there's an these five and just share your knowledge and trying to form so that people are become you know comfortable contributing what thing so the other thing that we think is that we see free software as something that people can use to enhance their if they can on learn they can use it so vertical they can read the source code you can modify it on they can provide they can distract through using and developing free software well one thing that we do it's not is that oftentimes people why and write your software at work first social media et cetera and so we try to not be basic we try not to be judgement we try to encourage people and keep it and that's our so you are the links and i give i talk really that's why we have any spend i but most what we use for which use should we have the existing more so actually but what happened was that there had analogue in the chicago area that had become that had that was no longer act that started that i at which is that school area and then it not and at the for a number of years and so we started out just doing they can you know and as we kind of found that was working as well we sort of resurrected a lot and so we did end up having some people who had part of a lot of what which was where i hope but we did and that fill sort of resurrecting like the philly sound that in building so this point you to or we just to we should what was no i would say i mean someone is i that hesitant about giving this talk to the you know because we started out really need don't focus and that was kind of my interesting being involved but in the and what we what we are doing is we're doing two hours of talks about three hours of have and the hacking events we have people work on you know and during the talks we do a lot of you know related talks and it's know that the people organising are gonna so i would say that in some ways we are exactly part of the you know we've sort of we've sort of had to broaden our for us because we have such a small well it's a will which will almost so we use you could use G really male but so what advice would you give to people were you know sort of you know from your experience starting out new groups and then you give a little bit of space already but which you would use you were to do it all over again which you start with how to focus on them i think for me the focus it'll kind of the reason why got involved and that's and something that spend really important to me and that i try to keep going and so i don't i don't think i will lose the focus on you know i think that is something that i feel is an important where but i do you think that i mean it it's hard to get people involved in software it's kind of at a help that a lot of ways we and so we sort of try to do whatever works is all making people interested and excited about just the gina project and just saw for in general so as a result of that i think you know i mean you know if you look at all of the projects that are okay you know and these are and do you buy these are things that people outside i can do you and so explaining how we fit into the larger free open source community has that really interesting thing i have sort of helps people to sort of what just sort of what you know in a certain place and there as a group that isn't just isolated elements making decisions kind of without listening to you but so are a group that's providing second used by thank you for your told to i everything that you to say that there's been some pictures used some possibilities for know quality about two works generally able to see how do you do you do face a to discreetly seasonal and how would you try to do these group of course try to do that to change the point of view a the altar for you so i think i think things that we did were first it's a a three stopper in general are the other thing that we try to do is to help people or how to use get a three and to talk about you know three and what's happening in the ghetto project and what people are working on and how the vision of the ball and sort of present what we want to have happen in the future and you know how to get project use itself and i think in a way that's sort of where we've seen a change and how to is when people start to see that this is something that we all people are working on and that this is something that we are actively contributing to because we have a passion for free software a passion for development and then we seen people's attitude share and become more open minded about saying well you know they'll tell us this doesn't work for me but they don't see that as being something that will not for me it's you know something that someone is form i'm not you know maybe three months in the future will be different and there will be improve any other thank you