 Thanks for joining today. I know it's a late session and we've been here already for today so you're probably very tired. I hope this is fun and that you enjoy the presentation as much as I did preparing it. So maybe I want to know who's a player of Stardew Bali. Yeah, wow. Who is the community organizer or wants to start organizing communities? Great, great also. So maybe I'll start with a quick introduction for the people that do not know what Stardew Bali is. It's a great game that was released in 2016 and it was a huge success during COVID especially I guess we were all home. So it gave us a sense of community because the game is especially good for that. There is a nice community behind it so it's great to play and it gives you a sense of being with other people even if not people and the idea is that you inherit a farm from your grandfather and it's run down so you have to rebuild it, you have to rebuild the community center that's in the game as well. So it's really fun to play and I really enjoyed it so some of you seems you did as well and that's why some people are here probably and I hope this also can help us to be an analogy as how to help build your communities. So this is a little bit about me. If you want to use this profile maker it's very nice. I work at Grafana Labs, I'm a developer advocate. Mostly I'm passionate about building communities and I organize quite a few communities in Barcelona. I co-organize them of course. Softwarecrafters Barcelona, Cloud Native, I'm a Grafana of course. So I really like building communities and helping people connect with each other so this is one thing that I like doing. Another fun fact about me apart from the time of Bruce Springsteen fun is actually a farm well. I was born in this farmhouse in the middle of nowhere so the game for me is very realistic. I used to milk goats. I know how to plant potatoes and harvest them. So for me when I play the game I find that's very realistic sometimes. So if you want to know that's my farmhouse. So what we're going to see in this session is a little bit of a story about Cloud Native Barcelona, our farm that we have to rebuild. Some lessons that we learn while rebuilding the farmhouse. What we plan to do for the next seasons because you know that it's good to plan when you're playing Stardew Valley for the next seasons. And finally there's a Q&A with some surprises. We have Stardew stickers and some flying chickens that will give to the people who ask questions. So let's start with the story of the farm. So actually the story started here at Kupkan in Amsterdam last year. I was at this talk. This panel was very interesting with Kim, Lisa, Bart and Sharon. They were talking about how they built, how they were building the communities after the pandemic and where the difficult points. I also discovered that Kubernetes community days existed. So I got very interested also in organizing community Kubernetes day. So I left here thinking, you know, these are very interesting things. I knew that we had rebuilt our software crafters Barcelona community. And when I was thinking what's the community that I like before the pandemic that it's now dormant, it was Cloud Native, the Kubernetes one that we had in Barcelona and I knew the organizers. So when I went back home, I went to the to the salon. I went with Dimitris Capanidis. He was the Kubernetes organizer before the pandemic and he still had a big meetup with 900 people. But it was dormant until there was no talk since 2019. And we thought it's time to restart. And also Pablo Chathin from Grafana, he joined us and we were discussing for a few hours and a few years. And we decided, yeah, it's about time to restart the community. We think we might be able to. And we were also discussing we always wanted to organize some kind of event like a Kubernetes community day that we didn't know existed annually in Barcelona. But we wanted to know if the community really wanted that. So we said, let's start organizing regular meetups. And if we see that the community comes back, then we'll decide if we do a Kubernetes community day. The other thing is that there was like in Stardew Valley, you know, there are the elder people that it's good to talk to them. So they always give you good hints. So we knew that there was another community, Cloud Native Barcelona. There were actually two communities, one in Meetup and one in the CNCF community side. So we decided to reach out to Rael, who was the one that was leading this community that was also dormant, to merge the both communities. So we would not leave anyone behind. So what we don't is that we merge the communities. The next thing was how do we relaunch our Cloud Native community. So we decided to organize a nice event like in the style of a Stardew Valley, in the X festival. Stardew Valley has a lot of special events in the calendar. That's where the community gather. So we thought we need to find something that it's a special event to get the people interested and see if they show up. And we were very lucky because my colleague, Niki Manuredakis, joined Grafana and she was in the TAC environment sustainability. And she was actually planning for the Cloud Sustainability Week that they were planning to do to raise awareness on sustainability issues. They wanted to do local meetups. So they wanted, they were looking at having one in Barcelona. Because this looks like a very nice event that will attract speakers and new members to the community. So we actually got a very nice event in October last year with six speakers doing lightning talks and we saw that there was interest in the community. So we decided to continue organizing. So what we are now is we organize meetups every two months. We have the meetup site and we have the cloud native site. So we have not lost all the members that we had in both sites. In the meetup site we had like 900 and now we are over 1000. And in the baby site, in the cloud native site, we still have like doubled the members that we had there. And we were also even able to organize a KCD. So now in June, we will be, we are very lucky that we will be able to have a in person KCD in Barcelona. So that's, we think that our community is back thanks to all these and we'll continue doing that if we can every two months organize a meetup and try to have an annual event so we can gather the community. So to the lessons learned from this. The first for me is that community matters that you should not do this alone because it's fun organizing meetups with other people doing it yourself. It's more difficult. I would say if you want to do something fastest you can do it on your own but it's not going to be sustainable and it's not going to be fun. So if you want the meetup to survive and to exist years after now, you should gather a big group of organizers. If you know starting Bali, there is a community center that you have to rebuild. So if you, you can rebuild it yourself, it's more difficult. But if you count on the community that's in the Bali, it's easier to rebuild the community center. So in a similar way, if you have more people, it is easier. So this is the current list of organizers. Some of them are here. Why we actually need a lot of organizers apart because it's fun if there's more people. You know if you organize meetups that it's events, it's a little bit difficult to find hosts, to find speakers. Sometimes you cannot go to the event and someone else to go. So all these people help in different ways. For example, Dimitris was the one that gave us access to the Kubernetes meetup. Nicky was the one that brought us the first event. And Raelle and Roe, for example, organized the meetup in November because Raelle works at Red Hat and he said let's organize it in our office because it's easier if you have someone in the organization already working at an office. You can more easily ask, can you give me the office for a meetup? And Roe was the other one that gave us a talk because also it's very difficult to find speakers when you start because you need to show that you can organize the meetups. But it's easier if you have a lot of people in the organization, it's easier that someone jumps in and helps you find a host, helps you find speakers. So I do recommend if you can to have the speakers as much as you can. And then for KCD, we also have a big organization. For example, Almudena, she was the one that introduced me to Jorge, we see, and Jorge did one of our meetups on his own. He doesn't live in Barcelona, but he offered to come to Barcelona to speak at a meetup. He offered their office to host the meetup and even found other speakers. So sometimes you get gifts, so accept the gifts. Make it your life easier. And after that, well, the other speakers have volunteers, so it's something that really helps you get things started if you have a lot of people in the organization. For example, Jorge the other week, I was out sick and I could not go to the meetup, but I was not up for speaking, presenting, setting up with a host, cleaning up, so Jorge took care of that. So having a lot of people in the organization will really, apart from having fun, will help a lot. The other thing that we do and I recommend is have your own recipe. Meetups are very local. So try, you know, in Stardew Valley, you get these recipes on how to do things. You have the ingredients, but sometimes you have to adjust them to locally. For example, in Barcelona, we tend to organize meetups from Tuesday to Thursday. It has to be better late in the afternoon, if you can. Some locations are better than others. So if you write down everything, this is a checklist of what we do to organize a meetup that's in here. So if you write down what you do, it's easier for other people in the meetup to actually help you out. So, for example, for us, usually a meetup starts with finding a host, or if you find a host that can host you on a concrete date, but you don't have speakers, you can ask the host if they have speakers in their teams and can share something. So you have a date and maybe you have a speaker. Then for a meetup, usually you have two speakers, so then you can start looking for other speakers. If you don't find them in the community, because we have a very big organizing team, someone will volunteer if they don't find anyone in the context, so it helps a lot. And the other way usually is if you have a speaker that offers to speak at a certain date, that you need to find offices that can host you. For us in Barcelona, because there's a lot of offices doing meetups, what we do is we visit other meetups. If we like the office, we network in that meetup and try to get them to host the next meetup that you need hosting for. So once you've done that for a while, you have a big list of hosts, so it makes it easier once you keep doing it, they know you, and it's easier to continue doing it. And then what we do is also, of course, plan for the next season. I mean, like in Stardew Valley, you know, you have different seasons. And for example, in winter, you don't usually harvest anything, so you prepare each time to upgrade your tools or to do other things that you cannot do in the winter in a farm. So same with meetups. For example, for us, the summer is two months that we don't usually do meetups in Barcelona. So those two months are very good for you to do a retrospective, to plan the dates for the next year, to try to start finding hosts for those days. So if you plan in advance, that helps a lot. So you decide which are the events that you want to have. So make a calendar, and then we start working on that. So it's good to know your seasons, when meetups work, when they don't work, but that's very local, as I said, usually meetups are very local. The other thing we do a lot, like when you plant crops in Stardew Valley, is knowing how long it takes for them to grow. The same with the meetup. At first, we started organizing meetups maybe two or three weeks before the meetup, and that was very stressful. So now what we try to do is organize like three months in advance. So then it's not as stressful because we already have a host, we already have speakers, and it's a little bit more relaxed. So for example, now we did a meetup last week, and we already have secured the host and speakers for the next meetup in May. So now until September, we don't have to do all that. So it's also most sustainable for you to do that, if you can. So what do we plan for the next seasons? The first thing, you know, the Stardew Valley has a mode where you can play on your own, have your own farm, you harvest crops, you do whatever you want on your own. But they introduce the co-op mode where you can play with its multiplayer, so you can play with other real players in the same farm. So this is a little bit what we'll do with our meetups. For us, what it means is do joint events with other meetups in Barcelona. It helps us broaden the community. We will reach out to other communities. For example, we're thinking on some affinity meetups like the FreeSoft World Barcelona or the Grafana one. So meetups that make sense to do an event together. We can try to organize that, and then it's easier because we collaborate. Maybe they have hosts, maybe they already have speakers as well. So if we organize events together, I think we can make this more sustainable and it's also nice for the communities to work together. And the other thing we noticed, I think probably everyone has noticed that how native is not as diverse as we'd like it to be. So in Barcelona, we see the same, so we'll try to work a lot on that. Like you have this diverse Stardew Valley mode where you can make your community more diverse and give voices to other people. We'll try to do that. This is a talk that really inspired me a lot from Liane. Some of the things that she says, how to build better communities, we already implemented like having a call of conduct and making it very explicit. And we'll try to work also on getting underrepresented groups to speak. So I do recommend if you haven't seen it, that you have a look at this. And I think that's it. It was very fast. This is what we've seen, community matters. So don't do it alone, especially. Work on your own meet-up recipe. Plan your meet-up season ahead. And multiplayer mode for the future, that's what we want to do. And work on having a more diverse community. So now for the Q&A, we have some time. And as I said, I will leave some chickens, flying chickens. Oh, lots of questions. There is a mic around or I think. Okay. So I jump on the mic. I will take the first. Thank you for sharing your experience. I have maybe two questions for you because I experienced that in the past. I tried to build a community and I failed for two reasons. First, a lack of commitment in people that wanted to organize. And second, we lose a pace in terms of, yes, we were super eager to organize our first meet-up. And then the second one happened never, ever because we lose kind of a momentum. So do you have some advice for me, maybe? Yeah. Which chicken do you want? If you want any. Oh yeah. A blue one, please. Blue one. So the blue one for you. Thank you. So very good question. Thanks. First one was, for me, it is difficult indeed, but I find that having so many people in the organization, it makes it easier. Because if you're two people, the meet-up, before was two main leaders of the meet-ups. And one of them stopped. So the other one, Dimitri, said, I don't want to do it on my own. And we met him at the bar and we were talking with him, said, I'm willing to restart, but I don't want to do this with two people. I want to do it with a lot of people. Because then people come and go, maybe there's three months that you're very busy, but other people can take over for you. So for me, the first recommendation is try to find enough people that want to join. For us, we started with eight people and now we are nine. So one of the teammates, Christian joined later and he actually found us, the work he was working, he found a host, he found speakers. So be open also when you go to the meet-ups to make it very open that, hey, we accept people in the organization. We actually want more people. And some people show up for that. Of course, some people will disappear, but if you have enough, maybe, I don't know how many people you were when you organized. Yeah, maybe that's, if you couldn't be five, six, maybe that's a little bit better. And the other question was? What's about the phase for the organization of meet-up because we are super eager to organize the first one. It went quite well, but we lose the audience because the second one never showed up. Yeah, well, we do that with other communities they have is try to stick to a calendar from the beginning. Like, yeah, we want to do every two months. And what we did in this case, because the second meet-up, we didn't have a host, we didn't have speakers. And one in the organization said, Rael said, okay, I will put the office, I will put one speaker, let's find another one. So try to do it between the organization, try to find someone or reach two other communities that have a lot of people reaching out to me when they don't find a host because I organize other communities and we have a list of hosts already because we've been doing it for seven years. So then you have a lot of hosts. Reach out to other people and say, hey, I really need a host. Can you give me a contact with one? And if they do the introduction for you, then it's very easy that they will help out. So usually what I do when they ask me is send an email saying, hey, this is an organizer of another community. Can you host their event? Because sometimes it's the problem is you don't find a host, you don't find speakers and it's very difficult. And if you ask the company that's hosting for a speaker, sometimes they are willing to have a speaker. So it's very easy then if you can do that, but probably there's no... Thank you. Better way. So who else? Questions? How does KCD Barcelona feel about international speakers? KCD Barcelona is co-located with this year with the VCN, so we accept international speakers. It's going to be English and Spanish. The problem is usually we cannot pay for speakers to travel. So that's, for me, that's an unfair situation sometimes because sometimes we can only accept false that their company will pay for the traveling. But in this case, if the company pays for traveling, we accept speakers for sure from anywhere. Awesome. Thank you. I wanted to ask if you had any sort of tips on how to encourage regular attendees to move into leadership roles so that you can continue to grow the group, like the organizing group. For me, I guess what we try to do is when we... We use them at working part of the meet-up a lot and we try to recognize frequent fliers. So the frequent fliers are the ones that maybe they don't want to belong to the organization in the beginning, but they say, hey, maybe my company could host you. I said, okay, let's start with hosting. And then if they like the team because well, we try to meet from time to time if we can. So having some in-person gatherings helps. If it's not in the meet-up in between, that might help. But yeah, there's no... So like adding a personal touch to it, like recognizing who is there and maybe speaking to them directly in addition to or separately from a general call for... The general call doesn't work even for speakers. We have a forum for speakers. We never get a single talk in there. And we always share the QR in the meet-ups. We do everything, but what really works is at the meet-up say, hey, where do you work? Oh, I work here. What do you do? Oh, have you shared what you do in the company? No. And then, oh, why don't you? And then... But yeah, it takes some time, especially if it's the first time someone comes. They might not be really open to that. But yeah, for us, at least in Spain, it's a lot of personal contact and saying, hey, this is good for your career as well. You can start sharing a meet-up. It's a very safe place where you can do your first talk. So I usually try to promote that saying, hey, this is a safe space. You can try your talk. You can improve your talk, and then you can apply to a conference with that. Also, because sometimes they are recorded, it's something that you can show that you have already spoken at the conference. So we try to share all these with speakers, depending on where you see they are not so willing to do that and say, hey, depending on the person, it's like, hey, maybe for your career is good. Maybe, hey, you haven't done a talk yet. We can help you out. So trying to be like, hey, convince them, hey, this is a safe space. Sometimes it's 20, 30 people. It's not very scary. It's very casual. So it's a place where you can actually fail. It's not a problem. And they like the feedback. So say, hey, you'll get feedback from your talk, and it's good for you. So we try to be very personal with specifically target people. Because if you say, in general, please, do you want to speak to everyone? No, no, no, not me. Thank you so much. Thanks for the question. Which one do you want? Okay. Hello there. I have a question, like two questions, if you can share some practical tips or just something from your experience. One would be more general. The other one is a little more specific. More general. The first one would be, how do you keep attendees or like in general, your community continuously engaged and contributing? Like not only organizers, but like people that are there, not only like the consumer mode, actually wanting to give something to the community. You have to assume that not everyone will come back first. So maybe half of the people come once and say, yeah, that's not for me. Or they are busy or wherever. So I guess it comes again with being, I mean, when you see people that keep coming back, trying to build this one user networking part, try to talk to them, introduce them to other people, connect them with other people. So they see the ideal is value to come into this met up because I was, I needed this question answered and they point me to the person that can answer that. So try to listen to people and what they need, where they are here for, why, what they want and try to connect them because the community is also about connection. So if, if you know, start knowing your community for me, it's trying to point them to the right direction. So they feel included. They feel they are included in the conversations. Good catering and drinks also help. So if we try not to have any meet up without catering and refreshments, otherwise that's also a problem. If you don't have, because I know some, some places it's difficult now to get that. So we try to ask our host, please provide us with good pizzas, whatever, take care of the vegan people, vegetarian people, be very mindful of the different people that are there. So they feel welcome and they will come next time for me. We're not perfect doing that. But we have some frequent fliers that probably bring other people in and that has helped to keep the community alive. The also, the other thing is probably sometimes have some hype topics. If you do a cross-plane talk or a carpenter talk or some topics, if you do in the meet up, you know that will bring people in. So also depends on, on what's in fashion, unfortunately. So that also helps us. And the more specific question would be, if you would have to start a community for an open source tool that absolutely nobody knows about by now, but you want some kind of community to work together on that, how would you start that? Like apart from, I like your idea with the affinity groups, like you can probably meet up together with them. But do you have like any other idea, how you would go about that? For me, I would try to find in my city who is using that, if you can. But like if actually like, how do you go about the problem that nobody knows about it? So nobody know. If you go to other meetups, yeah, that's try to find out if, by any chance, another another meetup is doing a talk related to that. But otherwise, I think it is pretty difficult thing, because if you cannot locate who likes that tool, maybe you can organize the first meetup. But then how do you advertise it? If you have your, if you have social accounts, that can help, maybe spreading the word, but maybe you don't get enough people. I've never done that. I've been lucky because I've been in communities that were already big, like software crafters or cloud native. And Grafana is a new community that we started, but there's enough people in Barcelona that use Grafana. So we didn't have the problem, but that's an interesting question. I don't think I have an answer. Thank you very much. Sorry. Yeah, my question is kind of similar, but I couldn't have known. It is like, how would you go about stopping being that lone farmer that you have to avoid being, because on the game, it's a thing I absolutely love. You just walk up to someone and press a, suddenly you have a conversation. That doesn't work in real life, sadly. And what I tend to do when I try to do community things is I write something up on social media, get a bunch of likes and boosts, and then it goes nowhere because no one actually stays interacted or keeps interacting with it. And like, do you have any tips for how to avoid that? That's a good question because I'm probably very old school. So for being social networks, I've used to promote the meetups after we do them, but before I do prefer in-person connections. So maybe I'm lucky. What I did with Cloud Native, I started with my own company. I knew that some people would love to organize these meetups, and I got Pablo, we got Nikki, we got Ross, so we got some people that would join. So that was a start. And then for me, the only tip is you need to start small and use your contacts. But for me, I use my personal contacts, people that know me, not from social networks, but in-person, because also this is local. I mean, because I go to a lot of meetups, I end up knowing a lot of people. So probably it requires a lot of effort on your part to be known in-person, in other meetups, finding people who are interested in the same things that you are, and then say, hey, shall we grab a coffee sometime? And then say, hey, I'd like to organize these. Would you be interested? Thank you. So first, thank you very much for the talk. So I wanted to know, in your experience running meetups, have you seen people either self-organized or perhaps through more structured environments, to get new speakers to come? Have you seen people mentoring other people or helping them support you, like newcomers, and how to get... Oh, I'll stop there. You got the question. That's the word question also. We have a previous experience with Software Crafters Barcelona. It's an annual conference, but we also have meetups. And we wanted to have more diverse voices, because people are not willing to speak. And what we did is a sort of workshops in another meetup, Women Techmakers in Barcelona. It was like four different workshops where we took the people that came there from losing a little bit the fear of public speaking, to creating a call for papers for a conference, to actually presenting it. So in four weeks, separated maybe two months, we got some people to apply for the conference that were from different groups. What I plan to do, because that's one of the ideas that I didn't share, but next season I'll try to do that, but with meetups in Cloud Native. Try to organize with other groups. Again, work with other communities, not on your own only. And try to organize a series of meetups where we can bring people up from writing your own bio, deciding what can I speak about, because many people say, I don't have anything interesting to say. Yes, you do. But we need to show them that they have interesting things to do in a safe space, where they're filled there with other people like them, and they are not being judged by anyone. So I think that could help, because it helped in the past. So we'll try to do that. I'm not sure if it's going to work out, but we'll offer them to speak at our meetups so they can build their confidence and then see if they continue and apply for conferences and things like that. But if anyone else has any ideas, I'm more than happy. Thank you. Thank you very much. First of all, thank you for the presentation. I have a question. Do you have an online communication channel between community members? Because we have a community and I'm trying to convince the communication ladies to switch to a channel, a different channel, other than a telegram group. So yeah, do you have any suggestions? Thanks for the question. We use the CNCF Slack channel that we have there. CNCF Barcelona is the group channel for every member, and then CNCF Barcelona is for the organization. But I don't think we do that a lot. We use the Slack to promote our, because there's some Slack in the Barcelona community we know are very good if we promote our events there. So they are seen. So what we do is a lot of research. If you go to my blog, you'll see that, that we research where we should publish our meetups so it gets to the right people. So we have investigated a lot of, what's the Slack channel that allows external events to publish? Because if you go to the CNCF channel, for example in Barcelona, it's probably not, there's not a lot of people there. So not a lot of people will see it. And to keep people engaged, actually I have a lot of people reaching out to us directly on Meetup. So they usually message you directly and say, hey, I'd like to do that or this and that. But we don't have a channel where we all speak apart from when we do the meetups, to be honest. But I don't know what's your problem with that, so maybe you can explain further. Yeah, like we have a telegram group amongst like community members. And I think it's a little bit sketchy. I don't know. I'm like a poet here, but yeah, it's your message or your, your message will be drowned amongst other messages. So it's kind of hard to voice your opinions or your suggestion. So yeah, that's one of the problem I see in my community. Yes, I agree with you. We have this course, we have telegrams, but it's very difficult to communicate like that in general. So usually the community members actually reach out to us directly if they have suggestions or things like that. But it's very difficult sometimes to speak in the open. Thank you. Hi, thank you for a nice presentation. I'm also a community leader. And I want to ask you actually about the simplicity and volunteers. So when you want to keep it in low scale, it's easy to organize. You just need a volunteer to move pizzas or stuff like that. But when you want to scale up, take it a level further, things get complicated and the motivation recognition getting challenging. So what I mean is in my community, it's easy to find an engineer who can help with simple stuff. But when we need a UI designer for such nice lights or a front-end developer or a videographer or a lawyer, right, it's difficult to convince them to support us, a community, non-profit, dedicate their time. Did you end up in the situation and how do you deal with it? How do you convince them to support your community when you need these kind of resources? Thank you. Thank you. For Cloud Native, we haven't needed it yet. Luckily for us. But we do have an NGO for software crafters, Barcelona and other community. I mean, a part of. We try to have a very diverse team of people. So for example, we have someone who's very good at design and he helps us. So having a lot of different people in the organization also leads you to bring more people in. So for me, the more diverse people you have, the more easy it is that they will bring different skills to the team. Again, luckily for us, people are not there for recognition. So just being in the website as organizers is enough and they are happy with that. You can also give them badges, like greatly badges, things like that. But in our case, people seem very happy to volunteer. So we didn't have that problem yet. Done. Okay, thank you very much for staying till the end. Have a nice evening.