freeCodeCamp Hong Kong - Large Scale Community Building

Our informal meetup took place this Saturday night at a coffee shop. We were joined by a special guest, Miya from 猿生态, who shared her experiences with spreading freeCodeCamp in China.
Miya is originally from Suzhou, China, and is part of the team that created freeCodeCamp China, the Chinese version of the original freeCodeCamp.
One of the team’s motivations for taking on the translation project was to make freeCodeCamp available to those whose first language wasn’t English.
“A lot of campers need to either use Google Translate or dictionaries to understand the problems,” explained Miya. “Even then, it’s hard to get a perfect translation.”
“Also, when each camper is translating the same thing, we’re repeating a lot of the same work. Why can’t we just do it once? Now, campers don’t have to do their own translations anymore, so the time saved can be used to solve actual problems. The time saved per camper is already significant, and added up, this number becomes astronomical.”
It was interesting to hear about leading a community on such a large scale.
How do you manage such a large community?
“Currently, we have 36 local groups in various cities in China, and each of them can have up to hundreds of members. We travel from city to city to meet with local groups, but even still, it’s obviously impossible for just me and my team to oversee all the small details. We’ve delegated management of the local groups to local organizers, who help keep the community alive.”
What are some of the challenges you face?
“It’s tough to keep people motivated. Originally, we only had pair programming sessions, but as our members’ skills grew, they wanted more challenges. So now, our groups frequently host competitions and hackathons. Our local organizers find local sponsors to provide venues, prizes, swag, etc.”
“It’s also tough to get everyone to participate and contribute. Sometimes, a lot of people just work through the lessons, but never really interact with the local community. We feel like having these challenges are a good way to encourage participation. Once people feel like they are part of the community, they are more likely to continue to interact with other members, help out with planning, and even contribute to freeCodeCamp on GitHub (e.g. fix bugs).”
What are you working on now?
“We’re currently working on a manual and guidelines for establishing and running local groups. With this, hopefully the task will become less daunting and more manageable. We hope to see more local organizers taking the initiative to establish local groups!”
For More Info
Currently, freeCodeCamp China is looking for volunteers to contribute to translations / fix bugs. For those who are interested, be sure to check out their GitHub account.
Pair Programming

We also attempted to do some pair programming. The biggest challenge was probably matching everyone with someone at their skill / knowledge level. It’s a problem that doesn’t have an immediate solution, but hopefully we’ll be able to figure out an arrangement that works after a few more tries.
Initiation Rite — Contribute to Shared Site
A lot of people have said that they’d like to contribute to projects, but don’t know where to start.

So, we came up with the idea of creating a shared members page on GitHub that would change and grow with contributions from members. Members would make their edits and create pull requests. The moderators would then review and approve these changes (by merging the pull request).
How do I join / contribute?
First, complete the initiation rite! It’s not available yet, but once we establish a framework and guidelines, we’ll also provide a set of instructions for you to follow. By the end of initiation, you’ll know how to use GitHub to add your own photo and bio to the members section.
The main benefits to this are:
- It’s a good way to get people to learn important version control tools such as Git and GitHub for collaborating with others.
- It’s a good confidence booster for those who want to contribute to projects but don’t know where to start. You’ll be ready to contribute to other projects in no time!
During our regular monthly meeting on Wednesday, we’ll be discussing this more in detail and establishing a framework and guidelines for it. Stay tuned!
For those of you in Hong Kong, if you haven’t already, join our Facebook group and stay tuned for upcoming updates!
