How To Help

There are many ways that you can help out the Meetup.  First of all meetups requires a good and easily accessible location.  Even with a location, we cannot have a meetup without presentations.  Last, but the most important is yourself.  We cannot have a meetup without people attending, so please do come by and give us a visit, and maybe you can find that job that your looking for, or the answer to the problem that has been bothering you for days.

Meetup Location

Its important for a meetup to have a good meetup location.  A good meetup location will attract new and interested people, and will retain the old crew.  Its important that we have a stable location where people can meet and socialize with each and create a community.

• Easily accessible, LRT, train, highway

• Food stalls nearby
• Nearby parking, preferably cheap
• Capacity for a maximum of 40 people
• Projector for presentation/slides
• Whiteboard
• Internet Access, perferably wireless

General

If you can't help in any of the above, the least you can do is to attend the meetups.  With peoples support and interest, we can feel reassured that our meetups are a good cause.  So please do attend.  Ideas and input is greatly appreciated by the community, so don't resist holding them back, and voice yourself.

• Business cards, and a pen ( for taking contact details )
• A friendly attitude
• Spread the word around!
• Tell your friends and colleagues about us!

Presentation

You can also help out by holding a presentation for us.  Here are some common questions to hopefully jog your memory and get you going, you DO NOT have to answer all of them.  Also adherence to the typical "presentation with slides" defacto standard is not required, if you believe it is possible, then adhoc sometimes works best.  In fact we don't just need a presentation on HOWTOs, perhaps if you are working on an upcoming FOSS project, and would like to tell us more about it, then you are more than welcome.  We are seeking development topics hoping to foster more FOSS development in Malaysia.

• What
• What does this program do?
• What is its purpose?

• What are the advantages?
• What are the disadvantages?
• What cool things can I do with it?
• Cron job, scripting, pam, ldaps, database, pdf, etc...
• What are the conventional uses of the application?  Unconventional?
• What are its statistics?
• How many downloads?
• How many programers work on it?
• How many lines of code?
• How big is it?
• Market penetration?
• What desing patterns/principles?
• What programming language is it written in? Why?
• What is the scalability of the application?

• When
• When was it developed?

• Where
• Where are productions machines used? ( give examples )
• Where can I find the program?

• Why
• Why was it developed?
• Why should we use this program?
• Why not use program X instead?
• Why the name?  ( Perhaps its something funny like 'GNU' );
• Why the license?

• Who
  
• Who are you? Introduce yourself, name, career, things you have done/hacked on.

• How
• How portable is the code it?
• How is the development cycle like?
• How is the supporting community?
• How does it work?
• How can I help?

For more ideas on how to help the FOSS community, please give the MyOSS Magazine ( Edition 4 ) a read, as inside it exists an article on how else to help.

Still interested?  Then give me an email at aizat.faiz@gmail.com, and I'll do my best to make things work.  I hope this has helped you out in how best to help the FOSS community.