Guwahati 27th September 2018
The name buildandtell is not confirmed. Please feel free to suggest any other name for the community.
Links:
buildandtell is an educational community primarily focusing on tech events/meetups, free software and getting more people into computer science by resource sharing.
- About
- Audience and how to reach them?
- Online Services
- Primary Playground - The Forum
- What we lack?
- Issues
- Roadmap
The utopian buildandtell community will be one where a bunch of learners come together with the things they built and tell other members how they did that, resulting in an interactive learning experience. Since majority of learners are not building things already; so initially the community is about teaching learners how to build things through open source contributions, tech events and online and offline interactions. Also mentoring school childrens is one of the secondary goals too.
Not only will this help learners learn better and get better opportunities, it will also help in better activism and bonding in the state. Take example of how the developer community in Kerala came together during 2018 floods to build Kerala Rescue
Key questions like "Do we want to get people for the sake of growing, or do we want to just have our doors open for anybody who finds what we do interesting?" or even "Do we want a society out of this? (Not only in terms of structure, but how people see themselves and others in it)" may well determine the direction of buildandtell. - slightly modified comment from Vikrant Varma's blog
- People who love communities
- Contact these people directly
- College students in computer science/related fields
- Through college clubs
- Through college events
- Organizing events for college clubs
- Industry professionals who are into communities
- Asking them if they’d join in and conduct talks and meetups/sessions
- School students
- School sessions
- Organizing events for school students
The website, wiki, wikifarm and the forum will all be in one server.
- A website(homepage)
- should have a license page like this
- A discourse forum to start discussions
community.buildandtell.org
- A wiki for resource sharing for the community
wiki.buildandtell.org
- A wikifarm to provide wiki hosting to educational institutions on request.
myschool.buildandtell.org(free)customdomainname.tld(₹100/month)
- A Newsletter service
- 2emails/month to all members
- A chat group on telegram
- Just for quick updates or questions.
- A facebook page
- A twitter account
- Will also try to run a tor node
Other services: http://bend.hackersguild.us/#page-main
Questions:
- Should we use docu wiki or MediaWiki? Docu will be super light on server. I'd vote for docu.
The primary place for keeping in touch with the community will be the discourse forum.
- Quality of the forum should be maintained.
- Members should be interacting with each other
- Every once in a while we should try finding the ‘pusher’ in the community who will become more than just a member but will help in leading the community.
- Initially seed forum with content we’d like to see, also do the same for the wiki
- Decide on CoC and rules for forum, I don’t think the community forum will be a good place for pure technical questions (internet has enough of those).
- Some random ideas:
- What are you working on this week? [Ask BT]
- What problems are you facing in the community?
- Who would you like us to invite for an AMA? (Hangouts/Text AMA)
- Introduce yourself to the forum
- Ideas on how we can use tech to solve current problems in Assam
- eg. A friend recently deviced an excellent prototype solution to Rhino poaching
Offline, the most important playground to grow the community will always be events and meetups.
- We need some connection medium to initialize the talks with schools; schools are different than colleges in our context because they usually don’t have ‘tech clubs’
- Many members will be new to the concept of community, have to install the sense of community so that they can grow it.
- Funds for meetups ( I have no idea what to do about this one)
- Must not let a communication gap be created within the community.
- i.e inactive forum == nono
- New online members should be comfortable with the wiki/forum, a friendly and warm welcome can always help. This will eventually increase trust in the community and chances of members attending offline meetups will be more.
offline events are shown like this
- September 2018
- Buy the domain 💸
- Setup all online services 📡
- Seed forum and Wiki with enough resources and contents 📑
- October 2018
-
Organize 1-2 offline events at colleges and spread information about the community
- People joining the forum should comment on the Introduce yourself post, and post a question from their field related to the community. 😃
- Find at least 3 mentors based on community member interests from the intro posts :squirrel:
- Send out first newsletter 📣
-
- November 2018
- Hold the first AMA on OSS 🍼
- Newsletter 📣
- Hold the first online hangouts learning session 🎥
- Keep the forum active 🏃
-
Reach out to local firms in search of technical solutions which can be built by a beginner 🙋
- Newsletter:mega:
- December 2018
- Interesting discussions in forums 🐶
- Newsletter 📣
-
Deliver a solution made by a community member to a local firm 🎉
-
Have first meetup during winter break! 🎊 🎅
-
Hour of Code ⏰
- Introduce mozilla and other communities to to our community
- Newsletter 📣
These are a variety of different tasks, will help us decide which one works and which does not.
Till december 2018
- expected active members: ~10
- expected total community members: ~30
Quoting Paras Pundir:
"It can be a life changing initiative if worked consistently with a proper strategy."
I am already e-meeting amazing people from Guwahati and nearby places, I hope this community works out and we can have a great community here. :)
Quoting Akshay:
"The spirit of Mozilla is when people use the internet to overcome barriers like money/geography"