Our open source community was born online. And our campers are adept at using the internet to communicate. Most of this communication is just short text messages back and forth. But there's a lot of it.
![A screenshot that reads "Over the past 24 hours, 4,502 messages have been posted by people, plus another 475 messages from integrations, and 43 files have been uploaded. There are 222 people reading and 106 people posting out of 2,801 people on your team.]() |
| We switched to Slack 3 weeks ago, and already a lot of our campers are active on here. |
![A screenshot showing a chart from our Slack. 122,000 messages have been shared since we started, with 52% of those messages in our channels, 2% in groups, and 46% in direct messages.]() |
| To put this number in perspective, Harvard's CS50x course, which has hundreds of thousands of enrolled students, launched a Slack in March. Our total message volume is already double theirs. |
![A screenshot showing Free Code Camp's twitter profile. We have 92 notifications, 1,069 tweets, are following 35 people, and have 12,800 followers.]() |
| A lot of our campers use Twitter to communicate, too. |
Still, there's something about hanging out with people in-person. You get higher-bandwidth communication. You can sketch things out on a whiteboard. You can play ping pong. You can give each other hugs or high fives.
Our community is scattered across the globe. The closest most of our campers have come to "hanging out" is pair programming together on Screen Hero.
![A world map of where our campers are located. In some places, like Australia and Africa, we have as few as 120 total campers, but in other places, such as North and South America, we have as many as 33,000.]() |
| More than half of our campers live outside the United States. |
But that's about to change.
The Power of Meeting In-person
We've always encouraged our campers to go to hackathons and after-work coding events. Many of them live in cities with Hackerspaces or Makerspaces where they can rub shoulders with other coders.
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| In big cities like San Francisco, there are coding-related meetups several nights a month. (photo from Girl Develop It) |
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But telling our campers "go check Meetup.com" is only so helpful. From the beginning, we've wanted a tool to connect you with other campers in your city, so that you can coordinate going to big events together, and even plan events of your own.
We considered Eventbrite.com and Meetup.com. We experimented with coordinating local groups on our (now retired) forum. We even investigated a "Campers Near You" feature to our main site.
Ultimately, we decided that the best solution was a tool that you're probably already familiar with - Facebook!
![A screenshot of Free Code Camp's Atlanta Groups's Facebook Group page. It shows Stephanie Jackson Brown has recently updated the description, and has the Free Code Camp banner as its wallpaper.]() |
| Camper Stephanie Jackson Brown created the Free Code Camp Atlanta Group, |
Yes. Facebook. That baby photo sharing app that your parents use. That app that swallows up nearly a quarter of Americans' time spent on the web.
Well it turns out that Facebook has a really well-designed Groups functionality. It's ideal for managing local groups.
- It's free
- It has easy-to-use event creation, member management, messaging and photo sharing
- Almost everyone already has a Facebook account, so joining the group is as easy as clicking a button
See for yourself. Join the Free Code Camp group in your city (or create one if it doesn't exist yet)
here.
We look forward to lots of hugs and high fives in the coming weeks!
-Free-Code-Camp-Atlanta.png)