This is a draft document for the creation of a new community contribution opportunity. Please feel free to edit and leave comments.
Why are regional chapters needed?
We are considering this role because community members in different parts of the world are offering to help us in ways that we don't currently support and there are regional specific ways people can contribute to Hyperledger. We've seen this so far in China where local community members are helping work through contribution barriers faced in that region. Other regions also have barriers – to pick just one example, contributors from South America who don't speak English face a language barrier when contributing to a predominantly English-oriented project.
What activitiescan regional chapters get involved with?
We are proposing to create a new structure in the community called Regional Chapters that would be run by Regional Chapter Leads. Activities for this role can include the following, although it should be noted that this will change over time as community members suggest new ways to contribute:
- Support local events and organize regional events
- In order to scale our meetup efforts which are currently being supported by one Hyperledger staff member, we can delegate authority to Regional Leads to support meetups in an area. They would be empowered to approve new city leaders, but would send requests to remove city leaders (based on some bad behavior) upwards to Hyperledger staff. This additional bandwidth to support meetups will be critical in an effort to ensure a positive experience for all meetup attendees and for raising the expectations we set for meetup organizers.
- They would also focus on doing things across cities in their region: for example, if there are special guests in the region they can notify the city leaders there and coordinate a "tour". Or they could run other types of regional events, including boot camps, work sprints, localization drives, hackathons, etc.
- Address region-specific contribution barriers
- Tools: There are examples where tools that are used in the Hyperledger project aren't accessible or used in a region. For example, community members in China don't use Google Docs so information that is posted there is not available to them. Identifying these hurdles and working with Hyperledger staff is a very important function.
- Time zones: Many aspects of the Hyperledger community are time-specific and are not equally accessible to everyone. For instance, the TSC call happens in the middle of the night for many contributors. Regional Leads can help address this issue – some ideas have already been floated, such as nominating a rotating list of local community members to stay up late to attend an important meeting and acting as a bridge to give input in that meeting and to take notes back to the local community.
- Language: Many regions of the world do not use English and this becomes a contribution barrier. Regional Leads can work with Hyperledger staff to address this. For instance, we may decide to translate technical and marketing material into different languages so this information becomes more accessible in a region and can be placed in region-appropriate channels.
- Other contributions opportunities
- Collecting local Hyperledger use cases to highlight (in local press, presentations, etc), to share in regional chapter wiki as well as other Hyperledger outlets like Hyperledger Blockchain Showcase.
- Please add suggestions and ideas for other ways Regional Leads could contribute...
Where do we want to launch regional communities?
We would not immediately put all cities into regional chapters, but would start with a few regions early on and grow from there. Regions will need to be defined, but we can sketch out likely areas for where we will want Regional Leads:
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The timing of when we go live with a new region will be highly dependent on finding the right people (2-3 leaders for each region) to take on this role, so the list above is a starting point for thinking about where we will create regions.
How can Hyperledger staff support regional communities?
How to support these Regional Leads is the big question. Finding coordinators doesn't seem to be the challenge – we're thinking through this process because we have people in different regions (India, South America, Africa, Australia, etc) approaching us and expressing interest in this type of contribution.
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- Infrastructure: We can create a mailing list and chat channel (following the community-NAME convention), meetings and space on the wiki for each region. Without this infrastructure the only way we've been connecting people is through emails I send to people in the same region with the subject 'Building the Hyperledger community in NAME'
- Budget and Travel Support: We could allocate a portion of the Marketing budget towards funding things that would help these Regional Leads pull something together.
- Official community title: Hyperledger Chapter Lead is an official community role that someone can place on their LinkedIn profile. We could also provide business cards with the title information on one side and the Hyperledger Get Involved links on the other so that they can serve as a useful hand-out at events.
- Staff time: We can make ourselves available to Regional Leads when we travel so that they can organize a tour with staff members. We can involve Regional Leads in other aspects of our work as appropriate – for instance, would it make sense to have language representatives in the Marketing Committee call to help us bring our marketing efforts to non-English speakers?
- Training: We can provide free or discounted access to the Hyperledger certifications that the Linux Foundation offers (details to come soon). This will help make sure that the Regional Leads are knowledgeable and can act as on the ground mentors for the local community.
- Swag: We can provide Regional Leads with a swag pack when they join so that they can have a Hyperledger shirt to wear when representing the community and so that they can have swag to take to events that they organize and support.
- Other ideas for support..
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