Start an ALC Chapter

So there’s no ALC chapter in your town or city yet, and you’d like to start one. Wonderful! Here’s what’s involved.

Before you apply ¶

Check the map first. There is a single ALC chapter per town or city. Look at the list of chapters to make sure one doesn’t already exist in your location.
For large metropolitan areas (for example the San Francisco Bay Area, or Los Angeles), more than one chapter can make sense. The ComDev PMC reviews these requests and decides on a case-by-case basis.

How to apply ¶

The formal application steps are maintained on the ALC wiki, in the Process to establish an ALC Chapter document, linked from the ALC program page. In outline:

Confirm there is no existing chapter in your town or city.
Follow the process linked at the above document.

Once your chapter is approved, add it to this site so it appears on the map.

Adding your chapter to this site ¶

Each chapter on the map is a single Markdown file in source/alc/chapters/ in the website repository. To add yours, copy an existing file and edit its front matter:

---
title: ALC CityName
city: CityName
country: Country
lat: 00.0000
lon: 00.0000
status: active        # active | proposed | dissolved
started: 2026
last_activity: 2026-01-01   # YYYY-MM-DD of the chapter's most recent
                            # activity. A chapter with no activity for over
                            # a year is marked "dormant" — a distinct color
                            # on the map and a badge in the list (not hidden,
                            # so it can be revived). Organizer names are NOT
                            # listed here — they live on the wiki page.
links:
  website: https://example.org/
  slack: "#alc-cityname"
  wiki: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/COMDEV/...
---

A short paragraph about the chapter, its focus, and how to get involved.

The map and the chapter list are generated automatically from these files, so a pull request adding one Markdown file is all it takes. By default a chapter does not get its own page — all chapters are listed together on the chapters page, each linking to its wiki page. When a chapter has enough content to warrant a dedicated page, add build: {render: always} to its front matter and the list and map will link to that page instead of the wiki.