We've received a lot of positive responses to an email sent to community members in Suisse Romande recently.
Unlike big metropolitan areas like Berlin, the population of Suisse Romande and the FSFE community there is divided between many smaller cities like Geneva, Lausanne, Fribourg and Neuchatel.
The model adopted in bigger cities involves having a monthly meeting in the same place every month. This is a good model when there is a critical mass in the same city but I'm concerned it doesn't apply as easily to the situation in Suisse Romande. There may be other regions like this, such as the north west[1] of England.
Another pattern that I notice is that people involved in FSFE are also involved in other local groups, for example, two people who replied to the email are also members of the local Debian.ch group and I also met several of the people at RHL'18 today as they are involved in Swisslinux. This raises issues of duplication, for example, some people may receive duplicates of emails sent to different mailing lists while other people may not receive any copies of some announcements. These questions are highlighted by the decision today to dissolve the association GULL and encourage members to join forces with Swisslinux.org.
One technical approach to a situation like this: encourage local FSFE community members to collaborate through a dedicated FSFE section on the Swisslinux forum rather than having a dedicated FSFE mailing list? This could reduce duplication and increase exposure to other people in the region.
An organizational solution that comes to mind: having a monthly free software meeting, same day of the month, same place, but with different organizations so that the meeting has critical mass.
Note that neither Swisslinux or GULL is currently listed[2] as an associated organisation either, maybe it is worth reaching out to Swisslinux?
Have these issues been discussed in other regions before?
Regards,
Daniel
1. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-27971552 2. https://fsfe.org/associates/