 Hey, everybody. So my talk is on a special anniversary I recently had, which is the 10th anniversary of Seabug, the Seattle Blender user group. And hopefully I have some valuable wisdom that I've gathered over 10 years on how to make a user group that stands to the test of time. At the end of this talk, I'll be at 24 hours without sleep. So I think endurance is the theme here. So I am a little better about me. I'm a professor at a school called the Lake Washington Institute of Technology. We have a gaming program. We have a design program. We're getting an illustration bachelor's. We have a lot of cool stuff going on. And I work there. It's like my day job. It's really fun. I'm on the internet at Ogbog. So you can tag me on Instagram, Twitter, and I just hang out. And you can also get the slides for this talk if you care about them. So what you will hopefully learn in this talk is what is a user group and why do we care? So some of you might want to start a user group. Some of you might have a user group in your town. I think one of the easiest ways to find out is just Google your city plus blender user group. And you might discover that it already exists. And you can jump on that bandwagon. And if you're already running a user group, this is something that takes a lot of work and a lot of love. And hopefully there's some stuff here where you can learn how to keep it going in the long run. A lot of them have come up and gone down. And then if you already have one, also, what can you bring to the table that's new and maybe make your user group a little better? So I don't want this to be, this is like the softest of soft skills talks here. So I wanted to have a little bit of crunch. This is animation nodes for how I make this stupid text change color and go along in this stream. So start using animation nodes. It's the future. It's pretty cool. So first up, you don't really need a lot of experience to run a user group. This came up on my time hop for when the 10-year anniversary happened when I first ran it. And I had no experience doing any sort of event planning or emailing people, all the soft skills stuff that goes with this. I was also only a year and a half into learning Blender. So I was also a bad Blender user. And what's cool is a user group is a great way to sustain your constant use of Blender. And you can go from bad to OK. So yeah, you should do that. I started Cbug, the Seattle Blender user group, because I was working at a small indie game studio. When they hired me, they said, throw your education away and learn Blender. And like many people, I got angry at the left click. And then I drank the Blender Kool-Aid. And I used Blender in the pipeline. And the problem was that it was an indie game studio, where oftentimes you're the only artist on the team. And it gets lonely, and you have no one to talk shop with. And it's such a fun subject. And you want that camaraderie. And I just thought, there's got to be other people out there. So let's find them. So I found them. We started off at the Art Institute of Seattle, which is now dead. And we slowly, eventually an old professor of mine asked me to come start doing it at Lake Washington. And he really got it, Robbie Gilbert. And he was trying to build up the culture for the gaming and animation program there. And he knew that it takes people in the seats, and it takes a thing that's not on the internet to have that happen. So I moved to Lake Washington. And this ended up leading to my later teaching job. This user group has sustained a lot of stuff. I had kids over the course of that 10 years. And there is nothing like having kids to have that hobby time that you spend one month, or one weekend a month, doing Blender. And suddenly that time goes away. And so it took a lot of effort. And it took a lot of community help and the people who come to Seabug to make sure that it's sustained. And it's really cool to me that my daughter is almost at the age where she can start using Blender. She likes the sculpting tools. And she's helped me shoot some HDRIs. And again, eventually, I owe Seabug a lot because I think a lot of my current employment is based on the fact that I ran a user group. I spent five years doing this user group before I got hired at Lake Washington. I say that they hired me because other teachers didn't want to come in on a Saturday to open the door. And so they hired me so they could give me a key. But I felt like I got trained in how to teach, which is a totally different discipline than how to do 3D stuff, long before I ever started teaching. And so now I teach in all the fun classes. I teach drawing, painting, design, 3D stuff, photography. I torture these photography students with photogrammetry. And this is my class. They're all blocked out for FERPA reasons. But we're at the Fry Art Museum where you get to do fun college stuff. It's great. So should you run a Blender user group? And I think it does require thinking about what kind of person can do this. This is something where first off, you have to think of a user group as a loss leader, to some extent. It's something that you do for free. You do as gratis. And then other things come to you. And it's different than when you have the old schtick of don't work for free if you're doing creative work. Because your name is in the marquee. And when people walk in the door, you're the first person they see. So it is something where you build a lot of connections doing it. So I like to think of my Blender user group as a loss leader. I've gotten clients through it. I've met connections. I've met some of my best friends. They're all here in the audience. And yeah! I mean, Blender users are the best. You also should be an extrovert, I think. You're going to be doing approximately, like if you were doing my model, three hours of bureaucratic email a month, followed by three hours of public speaking a month. For some people who don't like public speaking, that is torment. So don't do it if you're going to hate it. But you might be able to find the guy in your community who does like it. And you can connect. So the people who are introverts at Seabuck are like a symbiotic bond with me, where I do the talking and they shout out what I got wrong. And we love it. You also do need to have time. So this was something where I experienced a dramatic shift in time when I had kids. And I was a stay-at-home dad for a while. And I think that's something where if you already have a full-time job, you might not be able to do this. If you have that plus kids, plus you're doing karate on the weekends. So you should have a Saturday a month that you can budget for this. Or at least a Saturday a quarter. But also, do you want to hang with your favorite people? Like the people who can talk shop with Blender, I can't talk to my kids about this. I can't talk to my wife about this. My students are expecting me to talk at them about it. And it's so fun to be in a room with people who can like really talk shop about this stuff. So why do we need Blender user groups? Number one, it's networking. It's good for you and it's good for the people who attend. I have gotten jobs off of doing this and client work, but I've also seen people who come to Seattle Blender User Group do this too. Deli Valento has come and talked about the gaming book with Mike Pan. Yeah, Ian Hubert has shown Dynamo and Blender Open Movie Projects. At one point, like the Pixar guy who writes the Render Man code plugin for Blender came, his name is Brian and he works in Seattle. And like he was talking all this stuff that was super intimidating and it was so cool. I think Blender user groups are incredibly important for noobs. How many of you had a terrible experience with your first experience of Blender? I did and it's so nice if you walk up to somebody who has no idea what they're doing in Blender and you just show them right click or what is now left click. And you can just help them over these hurdles so they don't get on a forum and post angry messages, you know? And we can advocate for each other. So for instance, Delver is made by Joshua Skelton and some other people. And he comes to Cbug and every time he comes there he's like, look at this cool thing I'm working on for Delver. So all of you guys go on Steam and buy it, it's great. And it's cool to see all of us supporting him and him helping us out. And all the people who come to Cbug help out and it's less work for me and it's just a really good ecosystem. And I think comparing and contrasting your software options is also a thing. When you talk to Maya users, they're not talking to Blender users. They're in a Maya bubble just like we're in a Blender bubble and we can all hate the things that we hate without ever blending those bubbles. If you have a friendly place where you can actually show this stuff and it's just like, you know, it's eye catching and it instantly reads, right? I do this at a college where we have a Maya based curriculum and Maya based teachers. And the best experience they have with Blender is when I just show them, look at this cool thing you can do. And they're like, how did I, how do you do that in Maya? You figure it out. And that's when they first realized that this software has value because they don't exist in a place where they see that otherwise. So I think it's very important to do this in a place where other people can see this outside of the Blender sphere. So get off the internet, please. I also think that we need bugs because it's something that keeps you fresh. One of the things that I do is like, if I don't know what I'm doing this month, I just get on Blender Nation the night before and I find tutorials, I check the release notes and there's always something cool that I can learn in 10 minutes before Seabug and show off and it takes up 30 minutes of time. And I also think this is sort of a holistic thing that Lake Washington Institute of Technology focuses on a lot, which is the four connections. And it's just something that has to do with student retention and it's more about pedagogy than it is about 3D or art. But what we've found that's had a dramatic change is the thing that makes students successful, the thing that makes students feel like they belong in a community and prevents them from dropping out, from being disengaged, is actually having a human connection. You can't get that on the internet. The number one thing that prevents students from dropping out is learning their name. So do it. And you can't do that over the internet in the same way that you can in a user group. So if you're ready to start making a user group, here's some of the stuff I would suggest for getting the word out there. I think meetup.com is my first choice. Meetup.com is a big, robust system where if there is a city that has no blender user group, but other people have tried entering that text box, they're on a big list and the instant somebody shells out to create a blender user group for Cincinnati, they all get an email and I've had meetings where I blast Facebook and Twitter and meetup.com and we're on Blender Nation and the forums and I reach out to other groups and then there's a big crowd and I ask them where they learned about us. Meetup.com is usually the number one source. Facebook is also good. There are problems with Facebook. What I like about Meetup is that you can set things so that they recur over and over. So I have very little gardening I have to do with Meetup. I only have to actually get on here if somebody comments or if I have to cancel and that's it and that's really nice. Facebook, you have to make the event every damn time and that sucks. But Facebook also has value in that a lot of those face-to-face connections you make aren't gonna go on the giant blender Facebook group and ask a question. They like to go to the little place and ask it here where they actually know somebody and you can actually come to the next meeting to work on that problem together. It's also somewhere where they might feel more comfortable sharing their art. So this is by Matthew Herbner who's an artist who comes to Seabrook and he makes all these really cool psychedelic stuff and it's our banner. And I love seeing what people are doing because it lets me know I don't have to work as hard next week. Blender Artist is also important. I think everyone should have at least one forum post about your user group and then subscribe to it. So maybe you only did it once back in 2016 but if somebody comments and asks is this still existing? You'll get a little email saying you need to check on that and then you can go respond. I also, there's some other things I would say Blender Nation is really good and I don't know just face-to-face stuff. Twitter's good but meetup.com is really where it's at. And then I also keep a giant email list. So sponsorship is something that I was surprised to learn a lot of other user groups don't have and I oftentimes don't and it waxes and wanes. You don't need it to run a Blender user group but it really is nice and it doesn't hurt to ask. So if you look up your city there's probably many technological industries in there. Puget Systems is a company in Seattle or not Seattle but greater Seattle area who makes custom computers built for specific workflows. So they've tested every hardware combination for doing, you know, Agisoft photo scan or now it's MetaShape. Agisoft MetaShape photo scanning and they built the exact computer rig to give you the most power so that you don't have to build it yourself and you don't have to learn that a second graphics card didn't do anything for you. So they gave me 500 bucks for the year and that's really cool and go to the link. It makes me look like I'm their friend. The venue is also a place where you get a certain level of sponsorship. So finding a venue is something where you're gonna have to email a lot of places and it takes a while but try and pitch it as they're doing some sort of worldly stewardship where if they offer you that classroom for a week or just, you know, one weekend a month then you'll say look at this great college that you should go visit or look at this great business that is selling cool things or is, you know, a space that you can rent office space from. So what do we spend our sponsorship on? I think the number one thing that I like to spend it on is users but you have to start with your web cost. I don't like running a separate website but I do have to pay meetup.com and back in the day they had a giant worldwide page. We don't have that anymore. But I think it's like a hundred bucks a month. After that, I think you spend it on the users. Get a bunch of t-shirts, get a bunch of stickers. One thing I love doing is buying add-ons on Blender Market and then offering them up to anyone who's willing to just talk for a half hour and suddenly people are like, yeah, I want to make Nebulas. Yeah, I want the Gaffer. And suddenly they'll totally just help fill up space and it's less work for you. You can't have one person talking the entire Blender conference. And lastly, keep it simple. 500 bucks buys you about two and a half hours with a lawyer asking how to set up a nonprofit. I think if you get sued for money laundering that $500, you can just pay it out of pocket. It's not something that matters and when I surveyed user groups, every single user group agreed that don't make it an official charter thing, don't collect members. You're out there doing the work and people will usually just say the person who's gonna do all the work, yeah, they can do whatever they want with this user group. And that's the easiest way to do it. So keep it simple. Don't worry about legal stuff. So some general advice for running your user group. I have some embarrassing stories here. The number one thing I want you to do if you're running a user group is check the calendar for the institution you're at. When I was at the Art Institute, things were going great, seabug after seabug. And then on the fourth seabug or fifth seabug ever, I got there and I was so excited. I had bought some name badges at Bartels and I get to the campus and all the doors are locked and there was one security guard in there who explained that it was the day of the year where they wiped the entire campus computers for the entire school and everything was gonna be shut down. So I had to just like put a pathetic sticky note on the door saying it's canceled. I had to try and get on my phone and cancel it over there. The same thing happened at Lake Washington later on and it was my fault because I just didn't check my work email. In box zero, man. So it turned out that the campus was switching their summer hours and wasn't gonna be open on Saturdays. So I showed up, it didn't work. That time we ended up having a better solution which is we just went to a coffee shop. This brings me to my next piece of advice which is you should cross pollinate your user group. What I mean by cross pollinating is that you don't need to stick with one venue and one time slot forever. You can mix it up. So when I had experienced that first summer with Lake Washington being shut down, I knew that it was coming the next summer and I emailed all the other campuses in the greater Seattle area. They were all cutting costs by doing the same thing during summer quarter. So none of them were open on Saturdays. I tried businesses and I was really starting to think that we would have to cancel CBug for summers from now. Then I found Academy of Interactive Entertainment which is in Seattle Center. They have a gaming program as well and they also run the Seattle Indies user group. So they said, yeah, sure, we'll just open a lab. There's a guy already there monitoring the school for Seattle Indies and it was great. It was fun to see them. And I've cross pollinated other places. So at times we've skipped CBug at the college because we just set up a table at the Seattle GNU Linux Fest and running Blender in front of people who are only in code is really fun because they have no idea what a good artist is or a mediocre artist. So you blow them away. Same thing with Linux Fest Northwest which is a little north of us in Bellingham. And also like we've taken months off because some of us are going to SIGGRAPH or some of us are in Amsterdam. And we come back and we share those stories. So I think next like two weekend, like next weekend, CBug is happening. The weekend after that, SIGGRAPH is happening and I'm talking about Krita and all the Blender users are going to be there. I would also use a simple formula for how you fill up three hours. I think three hours is the right amount. Hour one, if you have no idea what you're going to do you can always rely on this as a way to make sure you have three hours of content. Number one, just look at the release notes. Blender is amazing at having fast new stuff. And every time there's something new just look up and read the release notes the night before. And then suddenly you're the person who knows about this crazy animation notes plugin. You've learned the basics of grease pencil and you can show other people how it works. This is really nice in that like you're never behind on development if you stop using Blender for a while because you always have the release notes that you read. I don't think I do that for other software. I only do it for Blender. Hour two, try and show some projects. Show your project. Try and get other users on deck to show projects. And the more you do this what's nice is you get a deep bench of people who can help out. And hour three, I would do Q&A. People are coming to these places oftentimes because they don't know what that stupid little 3D cursor circle is from back in the day. And so they need you to explain it. And they have like really really simple questions like what is a normal? Or what is a vertex? And you can help them out with that. And I think helping out in noobs is really, really important. What you can do if you don't want all the pro users to be bored during that is run a one hour speed challenge. Like give a theme and say everyone make a Santa robot. And it's really fun to see the results from that too. And then, yeah. Again, another thing you can do to just spread out as a general advice is instead of Cbug you can do Seattle free open source graphic software user group. So you don't have to just stick to Blender. It's really fun to branch out. Krita is something that we've demoed a lot. I talked to, or I was one of the volunteers at the Krita booth at SIGGRAPH a few years ago. We've done Alice Vision, which is mesh room, and done free open source software for photo scanning. Basic Python skills. It's a huge hint for panoramas. There's lots more to the free open source software graphics world than Blender. And then lastly, persist. You will have a user group if you do it every month where only one, two, or three people show up. I have two people carpal with me, so it's nice because I always have at least two people. And you know what? The first Saturday of the month is sometimes 4th of July in the United States and nobody wants to go to a classroom on a nice sunny day where there's fireworks and dogs are running at the beach. So don't feel bad. If you have one bad meeting, don't decide that you're done with this extra effort every month that you have to do. So I did a survey of other user groups. We had a lot of help. This was largely through the World Blender Meetup Day group, which has lots and lots of user groups. We have one day a year where we make 24 hours worth of tutorial content, which is really fun. And first off, how old is your user group? We have a couple that's seven and eight. Apparently I'm at 10, but I think if you Google, if you looked it up on Blender Nation, there's older ones. But it's cool to hit this 10 year anniversary and I look forward to hitting 20. How often do you meet? I was surprised to find that monthly is definitely not the winner. Quarterly is, and that suddenly seemed like kind of luxury. I think when I had my kids and when I was really at their babies who can't survive on their own stage, I was effectively doing quarterly meetings. And the other thing that was nice about having a deep bench is there were days where because we had students who were on the campus and in the programs, they were able to run the entire user group without me being there. And that was really, really nice. Where does your group usually meet? Apparently, co-working spaces are really popular. Again, a lot of times Google or something in Seattle will just sweep in through the Python user group and be like, everyone gets a hat. And good job. I really think campuses are the ideal. Libraries are popular. I think because we need to advocate for beginner users on an equity level, it should be a room where there's computers available that you can install Blender on so that people don't have to bring their own laptops. Laptop parties are fun, but not everyone has a laptop. And Blender is often times for people who can't spend money on software. And on that note, I just wanted to say that I really love Lake Washington. It's just like this weird, weird coincidence that as a Blender hippie who loves all this open source, you know, creative common stuff, I landed at like the perfect place. And this is why I think you should reach out to universities if you're thinking about running a Blender user group. A lot of the technical and two-year and community colleges in America right now are trying to advocate for student equity. And a lot of the equity gaps are based on finances. So they're pushing OER or open education resources. If you can use texts that are freely available to everyone, that means that the student doesn't drop the class because they can't afford a $100 Spanish textbook. Open pedagogy is this other thing that we started where how often have you had a class and at the end of the quarter you put your research paper in the garbage and you never read it again. Open pedagogy is a system where you make students design their own assignments, release them into the creative commons and then do that assignment. And it's so cool because they have assignments that last into the future. They might not be able to build an amazing Blender robot but they can write an assignment and that assignment is valuable creative commons also. And then a bunch of other stuff like four connections. Again, I think like I was immediately on board with four connections because the user group is essentially that. It's trying to make this dangerous, insulting place where you feel stupid into a friendly place where somebody says, oh, you just have to right click. Left click now. And then lastly, what day of the week? Definitely Saturdays. I think Saturdays are the best. How long does your user group meet? Three hours is generally what I would suggest. That aligned with what I experienced in college and what I teach now, which is the class that you can sink your teeth into is three hours long. And do you have sponsorship? Again, I'm surprised that a lot of them don't. But again, you, if you are running a user group are in some ways a sponsor. So somebody actually summed it up. Me paying the meetup subscription and sometimes beer. So if you show up and like, I love seeing this in user, in the other people, a lot of times other people will bring a box of donuts or coffee and then it's like, cool, I didn't do that. But it's spread beyond me and that makes me feel good. Do you have a legally official organization? 100% no. Again, just do it under the table. Like there's not a lot of money on, like if you're getting a hundred bucks in sponsorship, that buys a bunch of stickers and you know, it's not really worth tracking. How do you promote your user group? Again, meetup.com, definitely something that resonates with all of the user groups is something that gets results. Facebook is also popular. Blender Nation is very important. I try and like just have a list and I go through it. And then a lot of times if I forgot and it's like Thursday and I need to do it, all I end up doing is sending the email and the Facebook group and I feel bad. But in an ideal world, you just go through all of this. And definitely keep a mailing list. So one thing that I try and do every time there's a Blender user group is sometime around the midpoint, when we take a little break, I ask people if they wanna join the mailing list and get them on the mailing list there because they're not gonna respond after the fact. And I don't know, how many additional months, hours per month do you spend on this? The usual response is around three hours. And that's been my experience. It's about an hour of prep beforehand. It's about an hour or two of sending out the emails and about an hour of preparing content if I didn't have anything. If I'm working on Blender projects for work or for school, I can oftentimes just show that and so it's not extra work. It's work I already did. But if I haven't been doing that, let's say I'm teaching like photography and drawing and I can't think of any Blender stuff to do in my classes, sometimes I have to force it and I get around Blender and do something. And then lastly, how would you rate your return on investment for running a user group? Usually people said it's really good. Kind of middling, but pretty good over there. I personally, I feel like I owe almost my entire career to this. It's not just that I networked at Lake Washington and got a teaching job that I really enjoy. It's also that I was trained for that teaching job beforehand. If you do public speaking enough, like the reputation just beats out the fear and then that's all teaching is, standing in front of people and talking a bunch. And then lastly, does your bug have a deep bench? Does it run and have content even if the main organizer is out? Kind of a mid-split between yes and no. And if you said no, this is something I would ask you to work on. Try and think about good users who come consistently, who have been there for years, who make awesome, awesome content and see if you can convince them to shoulder the load a little bit so that you might, maybe you're sick or something. And if you are in the right institution, if they're involved in that institution, you can even get to the point where they can open the door and lock the door and you don't even have to be there. Or you could do it at like a coffee shop. And then lastly, do you have a dedicated website or just use third-party stuff? Resounding no for the most part is the main thing. I voted no because I'm not a web developer. I have a terrible website for Seabug where I was learning HTML for some reason and it was just experiment. So it was like, oh, look, if you hover over the text, it gets big. I expedite that to meet up and Facebook and stuff. Let other websites figure out how to make this stuff. Question? Oh, we got a website. I am an HTML God as the first one. Nobody voted that. We have a website from one of those user-proof spots like Weebly or WordPress was also pretty popular. And meaningless option one has 28%. And then lastly, do you cross-pollinate? So far, the majority of people said no. And this is one of the number one things I would say you should try to do. You're not in a solitary bubble of blender stuff. Look around you and you'll find adjacent stuff or other arts, but it's normally expected to be Maya-specific or Photoshop-specific. You can just go there and show your content. Try and find people who are connected to the open source community. So I've talked at Eusniak's Liza. I talked at Oskan. And it's just open source people are your people and they like seeing this tangential world. And also just go volunteer somewhere. And this was just survey results of is there anything else you would like? So it's always fun to organize. People should know about World Blender Meetup Day. So if you start a Blender Meetup, please join the World Blender Meetup Day and make a little bit of tutorial stuff. And it's really fun. What else is on here? It's rewarding and provides an amazing opportunity to learn more about Blender and be social with people in your local city who also love Blender. Again, there's a certain energy when you're around other Blender users and you're like, oh, we have this love, this deep love for the same thing. And we only get to see each other like twice a year. And you can have that energy once a month. Anyways, that's my talk, I don't know. Any questions? All right, cool, I'm done.