 If you do, you can sock me on the internet, all those places, and I'll tweet out these slides so you don't need to take notes or anything like that. This talk's called Get Your City Together, so if you're interested in getting in your country or your neighborhood or town, but maybe there's not a Get User Group close to you, this talk's going to give you everything you need to do to start a Get User Group where you live, and so I hope it's useful for you. So what you're going to learn is how to bootstrap, how to get the resources you need, like when you space, or new companies that donate food so people actually show up, or all those little things that make meetings really happen where people want to hang out, and they have internet and they have some pizza to eat, and things like that, and also how to be sustainable as a user group because that actually is the hard part. It's very easy to start a user group and have one meeting. That's a lot more challenging to have a user group and keep having meetings every month, so some tips I've learned, and I've definitely had failures in the past as well when you learn from them, so some of my failures will hopefully be your learning points. So my origin story is I started PDX, PDX is the airport code for Portland, Oregon, so that's like our nickname for our city. I realized that some people didn't know that, so Portland, Oregon is where I live, and I started the first Git user group because I saw that my town didn't have a Git user group, so I solved that problem. Well, why did I think this was a problem? I went to the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit in 2010, and kind of randomly, the World Git Developers Conference was just after that, so I went to that. I met all these amazing Git developers, super smart people that are like a thousand times smarter than me, and I just kind of sat next to them, I learned a bunch of stuff, and I got really excited about Git, and I just wanted to have a Git user group, and big thing about it, but I didn't do much, and then the next year, they also had it right after the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit. They kind of bundled them together so that the thousands of people coming from all over the world, there was a big overlap between Git and the GSOC Summit. Also, Git is a part of GSOC, so it was a nice, it was a cool thing for two years that they did that, and then no more. After 2011, the Git together, they had some in Europe, and then kind of, they didn't have them anymore. It's called something else now, it's in Paris once a year now, so it's not linked up to the Summer of Code Mentor Summit, and I was sad about that. So I needed to start the user group Wednesday, so it finally got off the ground. February 2012 was the first Git meeting. So that's just kind of the origin story for the Git nerds in here, and where the same came from. So what's the infrastructure? I'm actually going to give you stuff, like you're going to be able to fork a repo, and you're going to have a website for your Git user group in 10 minutes. So it's GitHub Pages, which if you've not heard of GitHub Pages, it's a very convenient way of having a website inside of a Git repository, and each time you push your changes, it just updates the website magically. You don't need to go into the server and move files around and do all that stuff, so it's just like all those FTP nonsense problems just goes away. You edit your Git repository, you push it to GitHub, and GitHub Pages makes the website reflect the repository changes. So it's awesome, and it makes your life way simpler for keeping your website up to date. It uses Twitter Bootstrap, so GitHub Pages is that mechanism of having your repository hooked up to the website. The actual HTML, CSS, all that stuff is Twitter Bootstrap, because that's kind of the standard. It was the coolest, hottest new thing when I was building this. Now there's cooler, hotter things, but it looks cool, and it's maintainable. I'm not a front-end person, actually. I refuse to learn CSS until CSS 3 or 4 came out, maybe. So Twitter Bootstrap makes things really easy for me. I can actually edit the website in CSS, and Twitter Bootstrap makes it easy for my non, some of that's not really a CSS master. Fonts Awesome is an iconic font, so if you notice many, many websites on the web now have iconic fonts, and what that means is, no matter what resolution you zoom in or anything, it's perfect. It's like a vector graphic, instead of having an image where an image, if you zoom into it enough, you get the pixelation and all that. So Fonts Awesome, and this is all open source stuff. You can find Fonts Awesome, it's on GitHub as well, and then of course Git. So Git is with Python, all these things together, and we've got a cat in a tube. Just make you guys laugh. Okay, so kind of a subtitle, it's not gonna be getting free stuff. How do you get free stuff? Because you're basically just gonna go to various organizations, companies, people, and you're gonna ask them for free stuff. And what do you need? You need a venue, you need it somewhere to have your meeting. You need to have food, if you don't have food and drinks, no one's gonna come to your meeting. I'll just tell you, have something, even if it's some pretzels and water, just have something, okay? So then you can say, there's snacks and drinks, even if it's pretzels and water. And Shrag is that slang for just free stuff, like the USE drives or some kind of, I don't know what they get out today, what do they get out today? T-shirts. T-shirts, USB drives, CDs, all that stuff that companies kind of want to give out to get their thing out there. They want to give it to you, so you can give it out to the people at your meeting. So they want to give you free stuff. And the philosophy you should have is they want to give me free stuff. I just need to know who to ask and how to ask to make them want to just throw free stuff at me. Because they do, if you ask them the right way, they will just think, they want to help you, it's fascinating. And the other thing that, you know, you don't have to have publicity. If you know everyone that wants to come to your meeting, like if you're five friends, then meeting publicity doesn't matter, right? But it's actually pretty interesting if you do get a little publicity, because then people will come to your meeting that you have no idea. You've never met them before on the other side of town. Maybe they're from the other side of your country or they speak a different language, but somehow it was on some Facebook post or something and they found out about it. So, and that's kind of the whole point of this thing is to bring people together, right? So, I do think putting a little bit into publicity, well that means just sending an email to a few mailing lists, you know, maybe write a log post or something and don't try to do it all yourself and get some help out of it. Just talking really is a lot about getting free stuff, so that's going on. So, I had to put this here because I couldn't find a good meme for this. The most interesting thing is my dick. Okay, so how do you find sponsors? So, in your town, find companies that depend on Git. If you find a company that depends on Git, they will inevitably be hiring all the time people that know Git. So, they want you to associate your Git user group with their company. They want to give you free stuff and this has worked for me. So, companies that want to hire, which I think is the next one. Who's on a hiring frenzy? What company is hiring the most people right now in your city? That's a very good person to go ask for free stuff because usually, that means they just got a funding round. So, they have lots of money, they don't know what to do with it. They're just throwing it around and trying to get 10X engineers and whatever. So, that's another good kind of ad you look for. We just got a funding round and then that's go ask them for money because they have a lot. Now, a different tack is who's the underdog. So, there's certain companies that they're not the cool company in town. There's some other company that's the super cool company. People want to work for them. Well, they have motivation then to get their name out there to say, you know, we're helping the community or we're doing cool stuff. So, actually, you know, the funding round people, those are usually the hot, cool new startups, right? So, sometimes they're too cool and they don't want to talk to you and you can go the opposite direction is who is the underdog? Who is not getting enough publicity in this town? Maybe, once again, a little more. Those people will be motivated to help you because, you know, you just say thanks to Company X for giving us free pizza and they are happy, so happy for that and get free pizza. So, another great thing is find other user groups in your town and ask them who sponsors them or if they just have recommendations for who might be open to sponsoring you and really do use that tribal knowledge because every person that runs a user group knows an immense amount of things that they're never going to tell anyone unless someone asks them because they're running around managing, pack-earning, doing stuff as Roland probably knows and, you know, people that run user groups know an immense amount about the intersection of technology and social, but you have to ask them because they don't have time to write a book about it or anywhere to tell you. So, other user group leaders introduce yourselves to them and get their advice. That is a great thing to do. And specifically, for cheap venue spaces, you can't find any companies, libraries, community centers and universities on. You should be able to, hopefully, anywhere close to one of those three things, you should be able to get a free venue space there. Hopefully, Matt. Yeah. Speaking of, we've put in the plug, yeah, the university, I'm not going to talk to anyone, it's just nothing with this. Yeah! Awesome, see? So, because we're awesome free open source hackers, people want to give us stuff for free because we give them stuff for free. These companies depend on our code so they're motivated to give you stuff for free. You just say, oh, did you use some of my code or some of my properties code? Because that's how free, so just give us some leads, or something. You're not going to need to notice. And then, there's so many Mozillaans here. We have a Mozillaan track. Go find your local Mozilla office. They are a great place for your venue. PDX has had some of our meetings at the local Portland, Oregon Mozilla office. So, if you have a Mozilla office anywhere close to you or if there's any Mozilla volunteers or anything like that, go talk to them and they probably can connect you with resources because obviously, Mozilla is dedicated to open web and if you're having to get user group, it fits in the ecosystem. So, they're there to help. All right. Is there any questions on that? I just said a lot of words, I guess, maybe. We're good? No questions. So, asking organizations for support is not solely limited to Mozilla in this case, right? No, it's not. There's a Mozilla office in a lot of places and there's a lot of Mozillaans here, so that was my thing. But, you know, how many places does Wikipedia have offices? Is there lots of those? There are 40, there are trappers in 40 countries. Well, there you go. So, there's a lot of Wikipedia offices. I think Josh is saying that Wikipedia wants to pay for your get user group, so you should talk to him. Um, we don't have much yet. Don't try it. Your development of Wikipedia really is considered. Okay, so, here's maybe a little more abstract thing, but I'm a mathematician, so I like some abstractions. Self-organizing communities. Git is a self-organizing community, the actual Git core. So, the way Git works, they don't use GitHub, okay? That GitHub is not the way Git works. Git is a mailing list, a chaotic mailing list. Thousands of emails per day. And that's how they make it all work somehow. So, embrace chaos then. If that's what, that's, the core of Git embraces chaos and they somehow make it work. So, don't work against chaos. If you have a lot of it already, embrace it. Make it work for you. That's the way Git works itself. Another one is Boston Bar and Talkative Events. I think that's one of my personal values as well, but the people in the meeting that do things, give them authority, give them the commit rights to update the website, allow them to help you and talk to the venues. If you try to keep everything yourself and not give people merits that they deserve, then you're not gonna have as good of a user group as you could. So, the people that do stuff, make sure you recognize them and thank them. And if you have someone that's maybe loud, noisy, squeaky wheel and complains a lot, they don't actually do anything just ignore them. They're ignoreable. If they're not contributing but they're complaining, they're not bringing merit to the group and ask them to contribute and then maybe you'll take their complaints more seriously. But there's a lot of people that'll complain in the world and much fewer people will give you constructive help. So, just ignore the people that are complaining and not complain. And then, uphold transparency. Yeah. It looks like you're not popping. No, it's cool. I didn't. Okay, I think it's around tonight. Or what's the time? Are we... I think you're gonna start eating the next place. Okay. So, that's it. I'll go. You guys wanna leave? I will not be offended. It's all good. Uphold transparency. Uphold transparency. So, we're in the free and open source world. I think we all believe in transparency. So, it's not this topic that is foreign but really make sure that you make decisions as transparently as you can. So, if you can, just make everything public on the mailing list. You say, like, hey, I talked to this company. They're maybe gonna give us something, but I don't know. And then I talk to this other one. Instead of just keeping it all in your head and then you're the only one that knows it. And maybe some other person is like, oh, why aren't they telling me what they're doing? You know, the more transparent you are, the less miscommunications there can be. The fewer just potential misunderstandings. So, just be more transparent than you even want to. I mean, you're not dealing with national security matters. So, just be more transparent if you can. Things will probably be better. So, that's my song advance about transparency. So, community guidelines. I'm not gonna give you, you know, these are the guidelines and you should take these guidelines to your community, but these are meta guidelines to create your community guidelines. So, define them publicly, put them on your public website, let everyone give input and say, I think this is good, this is not modified in publicly. So, if they're on GitHub, you've already got it. Basically, the system I'm gonna give you is gonna allow you guys to do all these things, but these are the core concepts. And this, I think, is the most important and hardest and people are not willing to do it sometimes. But, if someone is being a real ex that I won't say, you need to enforce your community guidelines in public, because they were being that bad person in public. So, imagine you have a manliness of 100 people and one person says a bunch of really mean nasty things to one other person on the manliness. Then you, as a moderator, you privately email the bad person, all those other people kind of don't see that and that can cause weirdness, it can cause things in different directions, miscommunications, people will say, oh, you didn't stick up to that person, I'm leaving the group, or all these other things, you know? If you just do it in public and you say, hey, you're not, you know, we don't allow these things in our community and if you're gonna continue to do this, we're gonna remove you from the manliness. Just make it a public mail, just send it to everyone. It will dampen the effect. If you just send a personal email to someone, they'll just, they could be just as mean to you back in that personal email, right? It's not as much in the public record, but if you email the 100 person manliness and you say, hey, we actually, that's not okay, we don't like that, and that person then responds to the whole manliness again and is very angry at me and then you just remove them, you know, and then everyone knows, oh, that guy got removed because he was really mean and we know why it's there, you know? So that is hard and sometimes you might need help and that's okay if you don't wanna be the person to enforce it publicly, ask someone else, hey, like, I know that you're, you know, Russian tumble and you don't care about yelling people on manliness, like, can you just tell this guy, like, totally not cool and do something like that. That's totally a good avenue of attack as well. All right, any questions about that stuff? Also, this is a like-in, which is a symbiotic organism with many communities and things looking together. That's why it's there. All right, five minutes. Sweet, stay sustainable. So one thing, some of my failures were, I got burnt out, I got full-time jobs, I got married, I moved, all kinds of things happened and because I was a single-pointer failure, I was the only one doing everything. Whenever something happened in my life that made me busy, there wasn't a meeting or the group suffered or just, there wasn't as much activity as I would like to have a live user group just keep going forward. So rotating leadership, I think, is really cool. It's really a good idea. So what I mean by that is, I think there's two different flavors of that and you can have, for instance, if you have three leaders and they each take one quarter of the year, like they each take three months of the year, right? That means that the other three leaders, they can go on vacation, they can start a family, they can start a new job in the first six months of a new job and you're not doing anything else but flipping that job. So the rotating leadership makes your user group sustainable. You can prevent that one person burning out, the whole user group goes away, okay? So you're removing a single-pointer failure. Another way to do this is just to have three leaders all the time, they show up to all the meetings and even if two of them just don't show up, you still got one leader all the time. So that's more redundancy. The first method relies on one person more for each time interval and the second method relies on them all the time but in a lesser amount. Maybe one leader to deal with the venue stuff, another leader deals with mailing lists so you can kind of split up things like that. That is really important for sustainability. One person can run a user group themselves for three, six months a year but then over the years like people change, they want to move and the user group should still be there. It's useful so that's a way that you can keep going. Another thing is sometimes it's just like, oh what are we gonna have to talk next week? I don't have any ideas for who to invite or whatever. You can have projects that you guys hack on and have some focus and just say like, okay, like for the next three meetings, like let's all work on this thing or even you can have, let's everyone work on a few different projects. But having some focus where there's multiple meetings that are about the same topic where you kind of come back and do something that helps there be this flow to the future because it's like, oh I want to come next time and see what has happened or what people have added and modified so it gives you a little bit of forward movement. And then another, just meta things, mix things up. Don't have the exact same format every time. Don't do this exact same thing at every meeting. Just make one meeting totally different. Like hey, let's just all hang out. We don't need a presentation, let's just come here. And then another time just have 10 liking talks instead of one long talk, you know, and just mix it up and that, and it helps with preventing boredom, I would say. And this goes in there. So you kind of do the one long talk thing which that puts all the work onto one person and if you can't find that one person, you don't have anyone. So lots of small talks is the opposite spectrum. I find that like two or three reasonable, small-sized talks works well, but you have to find two or three people for each meeting. So all of these things have plus and minuses. You can also do kind of like a co-hacking hackathon meeting like that or you can make it a purely social meeting to say we're gonna hang out, there's no itinerary, there's no topic, there's no presentation. We're just all gonna nerd out about getting the same room. Maybe there's drinks involved or something. But just yeah, the world is your oyster. So here's the checklist, up and going in 10 minutes. github.com slash pdxgith slash all that junk. You can fork that repo. That is a github pages repo. And this is what powers pdxgith.com, okay? So you fork that repo on github. Then you rename it to what your organization name is, okay? Then you update the links in there and you can actually use this redjack except you want it in VIN. I'll show you how. I did do a little rickroll at the bottom. Ooh, that's okay. So that's what you get for rickrolling. I know I rickrolling. I know. I know. I know. Okay, so that whole slide is how to start your user group. You get a webpage, github pages, Twitter bootstrap, you get all of that just in a few minutes, okay? And you have your website going. You can also register domain name and these details, not so important. You can create Facebook and LinkedIn pages. Probably a mailing list is good. Write in tips. Don't try to do everything. Try to have rotating near tips. Have someone that helps in one aspect so you're not doing everything. Align with conferences. If there's a conference in town, move your meeting so that it's the weekend of the conference or right before or right after, you'll get a whole bunch of people in your meeting. It's a good friggin' tactic. Make sure you're having fun as well. Also, these people I could have done this, the stuff with, Ben made the website pretty. I did not. Bart Massey made the awesome logo. And these guys have also done a huge amount of help and note-taking and just giving presentations. Good stuff like that. This is EGAL Pushboy, one of my good friends. He's not with us anymore. And this talk is dedicated to him because without him, I wouldn't have started the PXG because he really pushed me forward. So I just wanted to make sure you guys know he is. And this is me getting her social, Twitter, website, email, all that junk. Leda Labs is my company. I do get version control consulting. So if you're at war with your company, need some help with that stuff, come find me. And that's it. Mahalo, thanks. Oh, I'm not just setting up. Oh, okay, yeah. Maybe there's a question. Questions? Oh no, this guy's out of the user group. I just made it when he started one. I put a link to your website, wantpxgith.com, but I still need to do stuff. Do you have a question? No. Just wait. Okay. In case none of you do, there is a Singapore get user group. This dude right here runs it. It's called SG Grumpy Gits. It's on Facebook. I'll show you guys and find it. So you do have a local get user group and please come talk to me if you, if this is not enough to help you start your group, come talk to me, email me, tweet at me. I will help you start your get user group. So I'm your resource. If you want it to be, it can happen. Just ask me, ask other people in your community and it'll happen. Have you had anyone else that so far like use of your framework or just a little near? What's been a, it's a, the framework's been there for a few years. I think people have used it for other user groups because really all these things apply to other user groups. So even at GitHub pages, you can fork and create a KDE user group with it or something like that. So it's not specific to that. And I think maybe some people, some non-get user groups have used it. But yeah, it's not been by the thousands of people for being popular in GitHub or anything. I like that. Yeah, come find me. I'll be here and I'm in town until the 18th. So I'll be here for after the conference as well. If you guys have more time after the conference.