Safe as Milk

GNOME user groups around the world

March 9, 2007 5:05 pm Dave Neary gnome, marketing

I used one of those sites that generates a world map from country lists to see what amount of the world was covered by GNOME User Groups:

I know of a few smaller groups (like in Seattle, although I don’t know if Lion has actually done anything with that) and there are certainly countries represented by GNOME Hispano and gnome-fr which I haven’t put in there – I’ve tried to limit myself to countries where I know that there are GNOME User Group members.

There are some surprising absences from the list – the US, for a start.

It seems like US-based GNOMErs think of the foundation as their GNOME User Group. This year, there are exactly 0 US residents on the board, and only one North American (who’s actually an Iranian). So don’t let that myth take hold.

We need local volunteers like Eitan and Brad to man stands and spread GNOME Love thick in conferences like LinuxWorld Solutions, EclipseCon (kudos to Billy Biggs and Ben Konrath for taking this on), OLS, SCALE, the Desktop Linux Summit (which probably isn’t going to happen this year) and OSCon, as well as a decent contingent of people representing us at things like DDC, desktop architects & FSG meetings.

I would love to see an initiative to create a GNOME US Users Group, or even state-wide GNOME User Groups (or even US LUGs who let us know they were fans of GNOME).

This echoes what Jono Bacon mentioned about the Ubuntu community – up until a few months ago, there were no grass-roots Ubuntu advocacy groups in the US. Anyone have any ideas why that might be?