Speakers
Description
GNOME Nepal grew to a community of ~400 members without an established GNOME chapter or a local roadmap to follow. Building from that position meant experimenting constantly: reaching students, introducing people to GNOME and open source, creating opportunities for newcomers to participate, and learning which approaches actually sustained engagement.
This talk is an honest account of that process — including the experiments that worked, those that failed, and the assumptions we had to change along the way. Rather than presenting community building as a repeatable formula, it shares practical lessons from building GNOME in an emerging ecosystem and what we would approach differently today.
Talk Description
Community-building stories are often presented after the hard part is over. Successful events are remembered, membership numbers go up, and the years of experimentation in between disappear.
GNOME Nepal's experience was not that straightforward.
We started without an established local GNOME chapter or a ready-made community structure to inherit. Instead, we had to figure out how to introduce GNOME to people who were often unfamiliar with the project, how to turn initial curiosity into participation, and how to keep that participation going without significant institutional or corporate support.
Our approach involved experimenting with student and campus outreach, community sessions and workshops, contributor engagement, localization, and creating opportunities for people to participate at different levels. Some of these approaches created meaningful engagement. Others did not. Some required considerable effort for very little return.
This talk examines that journey through three questions:
What did we try, and why?
The early experiments in outreach, events, onboarding, and contributor engagement, including what we believed would work at the time.
What actually worked?
The practices that helped move people from awareness to participation, particularly through student engagement, community-led activities, contributor opportunities, and connecting GNOME with people outside the traditional FOSS circles.
What didn't work, and what did we learn?
The initiatives that failed to gain momentum, approaches that were difficult to sustain, and assumptions about newcomers and students that turned out to be wrong.
The talk will also look at the realities of building a community in an emerging ecosystem: limited access to experienced contributors and mentors, low awareness of open source contribution as a pathway, limited institutional support, and the challenge of developing both technical confidence and a culture of participation at the same time.
GNOME Nepal provides one example, not a universal model. The same approach will not necessarily work in another country or community. The goal is instead to share the reasoning, mistakes, adaptations, and lessons behind the work so that organizers — particularly in South Asia and other underrepresented regions — can take what is relevant to their own context and avoid some of the mistakes we made.
This is a story about building a community while still figuring out how to build it.
Author(s) Bio
The speaker is an organizer of GNOME Asia 2026, foundation member, maintainer of the regional GNOME localization effort, and an open-source advocate. They lead grassroots initiatives transforming computer science education by introducing localized GNOME and Ubuntu Linux environments to primary and secondary schools. Their work focuses on early open-source adoption, desktop internationalization, and building university-to-K-12 community pipelines across Asia.
| Category | Community Building and Diveristy |
|---|---|
| Pronouns | He/Him |
| Where are you located? | Kathmandu, Nepal |
| Do you need travel sponsorship from GNOME Foundation in order to join our event? | Yes |