A lot of FOSS events, meetups, devrooms, and community spaces describe themselves as community-driven. But what does that actually mean?
Is a community-driven event just an event organized for a community, or should the community also have a say in what gets selected, what gets discussed, and what direction the space takes?
This BoF is intended to discuss how much involvement the community should have in shaping community events. This could include talk selection, CFP review, public voting, deciding meetup themes, choosing discussion topics, setting the long-term direction of a local chapter, and generally deciding who gets to steer the space.
There are several things we could discuss.
Should talks and sessions be selected entirely by a small internal review group, or should the wider community have a visible role in the process? When does private review help maintain quality, and when does it become opaque gatekeeping? How do we balance expert curation with community participation? What are the risks of public voting becoming a popularity contest? What are the risks of everything being decided quietly in the background by a few people?
The key thing to resolve in this BoF is what “community-driven” should practically mean for FOSS and adjacent community spaces. I don’t think every decision can or should be made by public vote, but I also don’t think community spaces should become places where the community is only expected to attend, clap, and leave.
Ideally, we discuss models that actually work. This could include open voting, hybrid review, published review criteria, community feedback loops, public roadmaps for meetups, first-time speaker support, and ways for new volunteers to have a real say without making the organizer’s job impossible.
This BoF is not meant to be a complaint session about any one event or organizing team. The goal is to discuss how we can build healthier, more transparent, and more participatory community spaces.
If you organize meetups, run a local chapter, review CFPs, volunteer at events, submit talks, attend community events, or just have opinions on how community spaces should be run, this BoF is for you.
Discussion Format
Round Table Discussion. Ideally we’d spend at least 60% of the time discussing practical models and ideas that communities can actually use.
