Speaker
Description
This paper tells the story of GNOME Nepal: how it grew from a two-person effort into a 15-strong core team, hundreds of members, without funding, institutional backing, or existing open source literacy to build on. In a country where most university curriculum have never mentioned GNOME, and open source itself remains poorly understood, growing a community is not a technical challenge, it's a cultural one.
I speak from personal experience, starting as a non-technical contributor with zero exposure to open source, and gradually becoming an active technical contributor, GNOME advocate, and core team member. That journey shaped how we designed our community-building approach: workshops that spark curiosity instead of overwhelming beginners with a full software walkthrough on day one; deliberate collaboration with Fedora and Ubuntu community groups in Nepal to jointly generate interest rather than compete for a small pool of newcomers; and a repeatable growth cycle of awareness, hands-on sessions, and mentorship.
I talk candidly about what didn't work, the constant risk of demotivation, the difficulty of retaining contributors after their first event, and the slow work of turning short-term curiosity into long-term contribution through small, consistent incentives. I also cover how addressing diversity, language barriers, and localization directly improved contributor communication and retention, and how mentorship turned early participants into the leaders now running the community.
This talk is for organizers in similarly under-resourced, low-open-source-literacy regions trying to build community from nothing, not from an existing base of technical contributors.
Author(s) Bio
AI Engineer | GNOME Nepal Session Manager
Talk Description
This paper tells the story of GNOME Nepal: how it grew from a two-person effort into a 15-strong core team, hundreds of members, without funding, institutional backing, or existing open source literacy to build on. In a country where most university curriculum have never mentioned GNOME, and open source itself remains poorly understood, growing a community is not a technical challenge, it's a cultural one.
I speak from personal experience, starting as a non-technical contributor with zero exposure to open source, and gradually becoming an active technical contributor, GNOME advocate, and core team member. That journey shaped how we designed our community-building approach: workshops that spark curiosity instead of overwhelming beginners with a full software walkthrough on day one; deliberate collaboration with Fedora and Ubuntu community groups in Nepal to jointly generate interest rather than compete for a small pool of newcomers; and a repeatable growth cycle of awareness, hands-on sessions, and mentorship.
I talk candidly about what didn't work, the constant risk of demotivation, the difficulty of retaining contributors after their first event, and the slow work of turning short-term curiosity into long-term contribution through small, consistent incentives. I also cover how addressing diversity, language barriers, and localization directly improved contributor communication and retention, and how mentorship turned early participants into the leaders now running the community.
This talk is for organizers in similarly under-resourced, low-open-source-literacy regions trying to build community from nothing, not from an existing base of technical contributors.
| Category | Community Building and Diveristy |
|---|---|
| Pronouns | She/Her |
| Where are you located? | Kathmandu, Nepal |
| Do you need travel sponsorship from GNOME Foundation in order to join our event? | Yes |