Philip Ballew

This talk will discuss the practical ways that someone who is wanting to grop either a community or a meetup around their project or distro they use. Aimed for developers who might be more into the back end side of things, this talk will attempt to show people ways that are both often overlooked and easy to implement for the both the average user and the experienced developer.

Have you ever wanted to grow your projects community, both at home or on a global scale? This talk will go in depth about the problems most people face when they attempt to grow a users group and discuss the areas that people can easily work on to make their users group, or even community as a whole, be a thriving member of the free software world. If you have thought that running meetups is too much work, and afraid to try, this talk will show how meetings and gatherings can plan themselves, and ultimately become the best way to grow your projects community. I will mainly focus on the Ubuntu users groups I have run in the past and still run today. This will be the place where most of my examples come from and where my information will be from.

I will be presenting a practical guide that shows an overview of the ways that Ubuntu offers support to their users and relate this to how other developers and distributions can help out their users.

Ubuntu is a distribution with a great number of users, who all need help in different ways. I will be going over these different ways that Ubuntu offers support for users through the great community of Ubuntu, and in the process allowing people from other distributions to see the some opportunities for them to ways that they can adopt some of our ways. I will be going over several different platforms and communities, including but not limited to: The Ubuntu Community as a whole and the ways that the community can come together to help each other. Some of these areas that the community uses to benefit all the users are : Ask Ubuntu, Ubuntu Forms, Ubuntu Lo-Co's, as well as the parts of the Ubuntu Local Communities that are best to help users out with. This will be done in an effort to allow people to see how they can adopt Ubuntu's support strategy to their distributions in ways that they need.