By Bal Krishna Bal,
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Subir Bahadur Pradhanang,
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What is a FOSS community?

A set of people, in general sharing the same idea that Free and Open Source Software(FOSS) should be promoted can be termed as a FOSS Community. A Foss Community may comprise of developers, FOSS advocates, experts, end-users etc. This Community is assumed to be actively involved in interaction on FOSS issues both formally and informally – through emails and internet, formal meetings and discussions, gatherings etc.

What does a FOSS Community do?

A FOSS Community in general acts as an information center for answering to the queries and problems on Free Open Source Software. Besides, FOSS Communities could also facilitate the conducting of awareness campaigns and trainings on FOSS. In addition to this, it also could be a common forum for filing bugs and correspondingly discussing and providing the bug-fixes. Hence, a FOSS Community has a wide sphere of activities for involvement.

Why build a FOSS Community?

Despite the gradual increase in the popularity of FOSS in the recent years, one of the bottlenecks of the wide usage of the FOSS is lack of adequate technical support. As evident, FOSS Developers are basically enthusiasts and volunteer programmers, who tend to not dedicate time for developing proper documentation on the software they develop. Besides, they also do not see reason to document on things they know or regard simple enough to be understood by their partner programmers. This has had a negative impact on the potential users of FOSS. People tend to shy away from using FOSS because they find the proprietary ones richly furnished with the required documentation. Besides, in terms of installation and troubleshooting too, they find a plenty of people to turn up to, who can easily fix their problems as opposed to FOSS applications. Usage of FOSS applications still remains to be feasible and accessible to a limited number of Linux/Unix geeks. Hence, such a scenario, if not counterchecked by the FOSS supporters, the divide and inaccessibility of the general users to the enormous benefits of FOSS continues to exist. Building a FOSS Community could be the first initiatives to provide a solution to the above problem. As the FOSS Community grows up, the technical support required for the deployment of FOSS becomes more feasible and more accessible to the general masses.

How to build a FOSS Community?

There are various ways of building a FOSS Community. The most common of them being the member of Linux User Groups (LUGs),GNU/Linux User Groups (GLUGs), Free Software User Groups (FSUGs), BSD User Groups (BUGs). In addition to this, these user groups also may be created locally under someone's initiative for some local purpose. Usually, people from the same city or country form a team and thus create a group. These people meet regularly and organize various kinds of meets or events like installfests, thus providing the technical help and support to the local people. One way to give continuity to the groups is by maintaining the mailing lists, where people can ask questions, provide answers to them, and make comments or suggestions and so on. Online forums are equally popular for asking questions and getting the answers. Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels are also available for most FOSS Projects where people can consult with each other regarding their respective problems. Wikis are equally an important medium for sharing the knowledge. Other important mediums of active communication and contribution include Concurrent Versioning System (CVS) and SubVersion (SVN) for the management of the source code. The error submitting tool or BugZilla is important tool for filing bugs, patches , issues and so on.

FOSS communities may be created both locally and globally. For instance, in terms of celebrating the Software Freedom Day (SFD) on 16 September, communities could be moderated both in the national and international level. In the local level, if there are organizations working under FOSS Projects, they could take the initiative for creating a platform of common interaction. Talk programs could be conducted to which more and more organizations, educational institutions and other stakeholders could be involved. This creates a base for the development of a Free and Open Source Community.

Efforts in building FOSS Communities in South Asia

Although locally there may be several groups and communities formed in the different countries of South Asia, lately there has been some talks going around as to how individual country FOSS groups and communities could be assembled under one common umbrella. The email group forum This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it is one of such initiatives. It is basically a network to link Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS, or FOSS) advocates in South Asia, with an intention of building regional links and specially encouraging localisation efforts in this populous part of the planet which can really benefit from the power of free-as-in-freedom software. This is a sub-group of the wider BytesForAll Network. Currently some of the major FOSS Communities working in the group include BytesForAll[Fredrick Noronha], South Asia, FOSSFP Pakistan, Sarai India, FOSS-Nepal etc.

Acknowledgement

This writing has been extracted from the Localization Guide, June 2006 developed by the Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya, Localization Team and due to be published and supported by the PAN Localization Project.

 

Note: The writers are respectively the Project Manager and the Development Engineer of the PAN Localization Project being run at the Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya, Lalitpur, PatanDhoka, Nepal.