Call for volunteers for organizing regional communities By: Juan Linietsky

Godot communities keep growing steadily around the world. As a result, in the past years, many local groups related to Godot usage and development have started to appear in different continents, countries and cities.

Each of them usually has their own model and activities, but often suffer of visibility problems, as it is difficult for Godot users in those regions to know such groups exist and what they do.

Connecting the communities

After much discussion, we decided it could be useful for them if we could keep track of what they do and publicize their existence and activities in our official channels. This way, nearby users can find about those groups and engage in their activities, or use other groups as models to create their own if none exists.

Additionally, having a better idea of where Godot communities are can make sure the project can help them in a more "official" way, from encouraging and helping them to participate in local gamedev events, to creating materials they can use for workshops and talks.

Regional Communities team

Unfortunately, Godot as a project does not currently have enough experience or resources to be able to do this task, and the project management is too busy coordinating the engine development itself. Because of this, we came up with the idea to do a call for volunteers, hoping some experienced organizers may be willing to take on this task.

The plan is to form a Regional Communities team that can work together on these tasks. There are no rules on how this team will assign responsibilities to its members. As most things in Godot development, it will be up to the volunteers to discuss, agree and organize.

The Regional Communities team would be composed of organizers of regional communities, and any other contributor interested in helping with the meta-organization of all Godot communities.

To clarify, we'd like all existing regional communities organizers to join the Regional Communities team, if only to share information about your own community. And then we'd want some of the team members to help with any infrastructure, web development and communication work needed to make regional communities visible and efficient.

Tasks

Our initial idea for tasks in the Regional Communities team would be:

Reach out to all Godot communities around the world.

Work with the admins to create a more centralized flow of information of what is going on. If activities happen in those communities, use our social networks to promote them.

Work on a local map of communities and representatives, similar to this one, that we can put in our community page.

Make the user groups page a more fancy portal, and help fill missing content.

Investigate video game development events around the world, large or small. Some may require asking people from different regions. Contact the event organizers to propose them Godot talks, then see who from our community would be willing to speak at each event.

Help local communities organize Godot events, game jams, workshops, etc.

Help communities share materials they created for use by other communities.

Volunteer profile

The project expects to find volunteers matching the following profile as best as possible:

Always being nice, able to listen and able to express your views politely.

Significant experience communicating with others, good social interaction skills and being a polite person.

Having a significant understanding of the game development communities in general.

Having some experience assisting game development events.

Joining the team

To get the team started, we created a #godotengine-regional IRC channel on Freenode, where we invite everyone interested in this new Regional Communities team.

For those not already familiar with IRC, we suggest using the open source Matrix communication platform (and its Riot.im cross-platform client app) which is bridged with Freenode IRC, and lets you have persistent logs even when you're offline. Once connected on Matrix, you can join the bridged channel which is named #freenode_#godotengine-regional:matrix.org .

Eventually some motivated members of the Regional Communities team could look into ways to also bridge this channel with the official Discord server, to lower the entry barrier for all community managers.

From there, we can brainstorm together on additional tools that might be relevant to efficiently handle the team's tasks.

See you around in the Regional Communities channel!