Approach for participation by the public
Geek.Zone actively encourages public participation in everything that we do. Community is the reason we exist. Equally, Openness is very important to us, so everything we do is free and open source. We release our code under GPLv3 and everything else under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Those who are not yet Geek.Zone members can participate in Geek.Zone software development by forking the repository and then submitting a pull request for their changes to be applied. Alternatively, individuals can join Geek.Zone for direct repo access. We have lots of interesting issues ready for you to get your teeth into, so you can do this now!
We are currently working on adding wiki and blog functionality to /web so that all Geek.Zone members can edit and contribute to the geek.zone website. Once this is available, one will be able to contribute to any area by joining Geek.Zone. We want to encourage all talents, not just Software Development, so the addition of our wiki will allow everyone to contribute artwork, writing, music – anything. We will, as always, continue to encourage public participation through public edit requests, which, like our code, will then be reviewed by a Geek.Zone member.
Active Involvement
We hold community forums on at least a quarterly basis at which all stakeholders, Geek.Zone members and non-members alike, are able to have their voice heard. These often raise great new ideas for events and improvements. We also encourage members to take lead those events, empowering members to shape their community. Members are also encouraged to provide their feedback at any time so that we can practice continuous feedback and improvement as a community. We aim to foster Ubuntu culture throughout the Geek.Zone community.
Each year, ahead of our Annual General Meeting in November, the Geek.Zone membership are given the opportunity to vote for the officers that they would like to represent them for the following twelve months. All members are encouraged to participate and so we use online voting to ensure that doing so it is easy. The Geek.Zone Trustees are always eager to ensure that the community is put first and to never allow any single person to be perceived as “the boss”; we are all equal and all our views and opinions matter equally.
We are developing tools that will provide more direct and asynchronous decision making facilitates in the hands of every member. This will provide even greater representation for a fairer community.
Active Community
While we are working on lots of cool stuff, perhaps our most interesting software development project is /web. This has been contributed to by the following individuals.
We actively seek new volunteers through our community links and through our advertisements on CharityJobs. Additionally, our in-person events are always well attended. As above, this participants list will grow as we are able to provide more participation tools to our community and the wider public, so that they are better able to lend their expertise and experiences to their community.