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 activities can 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.
- Working with local universities to help them learn more about Hyperledger and to help get students and professors connected to the community
- 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. Some regions will be established because we think it is important to grow the community in certain areas and other regions will be established because the community is particularly strong and well organized in an area.
To identify where we would launch a new regional community, we have the following criteria:
- The region represents a distinct language or geography of over 50 million people
- There is at least one official Hyperledger meetup that is active in that region
- There is a clearly defined vision for what the community in that region wants to do to contribute to Hyperledger
- There are more than 50 people in the region communicating together about the Hyperledger community
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 and having local communities that meet this requirements, so there is no roadmap about when we will launch a particular new chapter.
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.
Some ways we can support the Regional Leads include:
- 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'
- 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 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..
Note that support will need to be based on the activity of a Regional Lead. People who take this role who are not active, or are not representing Hyperledger in an appropriate way, would not be eligible for support and could be removed. Details of the criteria for measuring the impact and success of Regional Chapters will need to be determined so that leads understand what the expectations are for this role. This is a process that would be best done with an early group of Regional Leads who help us pilot and expand the program.