 We're gonna be showing some, yeah, not slides, but a real website. But stuff that has Yahoo confidential information. So, we on time. I'm Sean Roberts, I'm from Yahoo. I'm Kamesh Pemaraju, I'm with Dell. I run the Boston Meetup Group, started about the beginning of the year and sort of had the regular cadence of meetups. You know, I've been the prime, scheduling people to come in and trying to figure out what topics, who's the audience, what's their interest. So we'll talk more about it, but that's been my experience. I'll share some of the challenges and some of the things that we have learned along the way. So, we've been part, we started working with Citrix in the South Bay and Piston in the North Bay and I guess Rackspace as well, about a year ago. I took over from Citrix about 10 months ago, something like that. Even before we started doing that, we were talking about how do we reinvent our, reinvent our, thank you. Make them what they used to be, because they used to be really development hackathons and they kind of devolved into, people were interested in open sec architecture and marketing guys started showing up and even had VMware guys start showing up and so it just got very scattered. So, we immediately started brainstorming about how do we do this and also do our day jobs as well. One of the challenges I faced, I started in February of this year, there were about 100 people that were registered on our meetup site. One of the challenges we had was there were a variety of people coming to these meetups. There were people that knew nothing about OpenStack. There were a couple, I'd say a couple in the beginning, now there are about 10 core developers. Actually Red Hat has developers that are contributing to Keystone, they're contributing to Quantum and they would come in and so we had such a varied audience that we had trouble trying to figure out now how do we split these things up and initially the number of people coming in was very low, was about 10 or 15. It started off with Dell doing a lot of hackathon work. We were doing our own crowbar work, I don't know for those of you now. We have a tool called crowbar which is open source using which would deploy OpenStack. So we sort of did some hackathons around that prior to Diablo, we did a hackathon where we got a bunch of developers together and we actually did a complete install and deploy of Essex and Diablo. So that was a different audience. There were a bunch of whole developers who were doing that stuff. The meetups we sort of tried to extend it to that and then we found that all these people here just knew nothing about OpenStack. That was one challenge. The other challenge was Boston is sort of like San Francisco I'm sure is pretty spread out. There's the 495 128 corridor that's west of Boston and there's the downtown people. And when we started doing these meetups out of the 128 corridor, nobody was coming in from the city. And so we had to figure out just like you guys did it North and South, right? I mean, you have one in San Francisco and one up in the Bay Area. Yes, that's how you have it. So we sort of did the same thing. We ended up having a venue either in Cambridge, somewhere in the Harvard University area and lately we're starting to use the Microsoft Nerd Center. Microsoft has been very gracious. They've given us the venue and that's really working out great. And all the local startups, all the people in the Boston, Cambridge area find that a fantastic location. So our OpenStack Foundation party we did it there a few weeks ago and we had the best ever attendance because we told there was an open bar. So we had like 70 people show up that day and that was great. And then we were trying to figure out the other location. So we ended up in Newton, which is sort of towards the 128 corridor. So that's what we're doing. We're doing sort of, we're doing one month in Newton, one month in Cambridge. So we're sort of splitting between the two and it's working out fine so far, but it's still a challenge. There are some people who say if it's, I don't want to have a split group, but that's what it's turning out to be. So I'd like to hear your views on it, Sean, on how you're dealing with that. But those are some of the things we're seeing. Yeah, so I don't want to turn anybody away from becoming possibly a new user and expanding the user base of OpenStack because it should be one of the core fundamentals that we're always trying to encourage. Should help all of us that are already using OpenStack by expanding it further and further. So it's been a consistent problem. It turned off a lot of the devs that we're showing up and dev ops guys, dev and ops. So what we evolved into doing, and we started talking about this about a year ago, and it took us a little while for me to actually implement it, was we broke out the beginning session and the following session into two different meanings. There are actually two different meetup pages now. There's actually three meetup pages now, but I don't jump ahead. So the beginning session is Boris Rinsky from Brantus has been kind enough to offer to run them and he does some training and so there's good synergy in what he actually does as a business. He does more than just that, but that's part of his business. So they've been kind enough to do that and I think it's likely in the other areas you'll probably find some other integrators and or guys that do training that might be interested in helping you guys out and it completes the cycle. So right next door we have a hackathon. What has happened, we go back what was actually going on with the meetups involved into were just a bunch of guys from Rackspace and NASA that were trying to get OpenStack to work. So it evolved into, rather than just meeting up at people's houses, it evolved into meetups and they were just meant to be hacks. So that's what we're getting back in. I've actually been talking to some of the guys now that we've sort of established to get to Jesse and Vish and some of the other guys that are now at Nebula to get them to start coming back and some of the guys from Piston can start coming back down. But what I'd really like to do is to expand that idea to the other locations like LA, Boston, DC, Seattle and to start breaking off and start, really give the guys that come from the summit that are very interested in what do I do next. I've got some ideas or I signed up to be partially responsible for the blueprint. So what we started talking about is as soon as I try to get our developers to show up to these meetings at like seven o'clock, but you crazy, I'm not doing that. So it became obvious pretty quickly that for the guys that are doing this as a job, we need to treat it as an extension of what we do as work. So the same day we now have two hour advanced comp debops meetups where we actually talk about blueprints, typically blueprints. And the intention is from this summit, this has happened basically over the last three to four summits, we get a lot of great ideas, 25% of them turn into something, get people's commitment. There's some others that are just kind of outside of the range of what people have, the time or ability or but there are some people that are really interested in pushing it forward and they get pushed to the next summit and people talk about it again and gets pushed to the next summit. So the intention is to try to give these places a home and to talk about them and work debops meetups. And I already have a list of about 35 that I've gathered already. So the idea would be that obviously there's not enough time in the next six months just to do it in Sunnyvale, nor do I have the desire to do that is to spread the joy amongst all the different meetups and then to have us either use WebEx or some other great video conferencing system so that I could participate in the Boston DevOps and you guys participate in ours and Seattle guys don't feel like driving, or excuse me, at San Francisco guys don't feel like driving down, they can just WebEx in and have almost the same experience. But the idea being that a little bit more than popping into IRC a couple times over the next six months that we'd actually do a face to face, get people to actually commit to at least talking about if not showcasing, well, yes, I submitted this blueprint last week because I knew I was coming here and this is my intention and I'm looking for people who are gonna sign up and help me push this blueprint. So, yeah, so the other thing, I mean, this is great for dev and ops and one of the goals I had for myself was to try and build a user group, right? Which is hard to find in the OpenStack community. But that's what I started off with doing in the Boston area was to try to find actual users, whether they're infrastructure users or application developers or solution architects and start to bring them together and start to ask them about or get them together to sort of talk about what the challenges are in terms of bringing up OpenStack deployments, whether it's development or ops or just deploying applications on top of OpenStack. So there are people that show up. In fact, in the last summit, in the last meetup we had there were at least four or five solution architects from various companies. These are guys that actually build applications on top of cloud. And we were talking about high availability in that session and of course there were infrastructure guys and there were developers, they were talking all about the nitty gritty stuff about what happens under the covers. But these guys were saying, okay, what about this? I mean, how do I think about it from an application perspective? You know, how do I do this, that or the other? And I see a dire need. I don't know if we can collect our combined forces from various meetups to see if we can start building up that user community. I don't see that happening that much, but I think as we start to move to the next level of adoption of OpenStack, we need to start doing that, I think. And the whole, in fact, the Boston meetup group is called the Boston user meetup group. It's supposed to be a user meetup group, but it tends to be a mixture of, like I said, developers, advanced developers, people that know nothing about OpenStack and these kind of application developers. So the way, this is where our mind is going too. I think we need to start to split up the meetup groups, have an advanced hackathon type of guys that come and do development work, do blueprints and stuff like what Sean is talking about, and have a 101 type of thing. In fact, I did get a message from one of the meetup guys just yesterday. And he said, I sign up for every meetup group, but I don't show up because I look at the agenda and it says some Keystone, authentication, blah, blah, blah, and I don't care, I don't even know what that is. I wanna learn more about what OpenStack is. He sent me that note and said, can you set up a session where we can actually talk about that stuff? So that begs the question, right? Do we need to have a 101 session that continues to keep running in parallel and a dev ops oriented hackathon type of thing? And then I think very importantly, given where we are with OpenStack, some sort of a user group thing that we have to build. I don't think we can just do it in the Boston area alone, it needs to happen across all meetup groups in the US and across the globe. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, I'm tempted to say that it's supported by or strictly users could show up to the hackathon and we could kind of veer off and talk about that as well as, because it's very impromptu, at least up to this point, which is, so we tend to sometimes talk about, you know, if we had beer, then we'd really be distracted and get nothing done. So I don't want to get too regimented, but I think that might be off because the guys that are going to be writing code likely won't be too excited about the guys that just want to talk about user experience and how to, but there would be some of the right people there to, you know, bounce ideas off of as well. So they're going to ask me to tell you. You might want to use the mic. Use the mic, because they're recording stuff. Because they're recording it. So no, those agendas have already been starting. So in the email threads that happen, if you know, they're already there, just not for the overall group. Yeah, the other thing, so we did a day long virtual hackathon at Dell, you know, we sort of, we had like six different locations around the world. We had a virtual IRC channel going, there was a Skype channel going and we had exactly the same problem. There were people that wanted to know about crowbar about OpenStack, how to deploy this stuff, just at a high level. And there were people, there were developers that were talking about how to do HA, how do you build some kind of the new stuff. So we ended up doing two parallel sessions. The ones that are sort of one-on-one focused were much more structured. So we actually had a presentation type, you know, mechanism to get those going. And then we had Q&A sessions, just like a regular sort of a mini conference, if you will, that was mainly online. And the developer stuff was really more IRC. We actually had a phone session, we had a conference line, actually a couple of conference lines open. And we had topics that we had selected upfront. And throughout the day we said, okay, for the morning session, we will talk about this topic, this topic, this topic. We selected those. And then we had moderators that knew about that topic, that would become the main sort of people that were driving that session. So that worked great for the developers. And, you know, for the beginners and people that wanted to learn about OpenStack, the structured sessions really worked very well. There were more slideware, introductory, there were demos, we were showing them how the dashboard would work, you know, how would you deploy OpenStack, how Crowbar works. And there were lots of Q&A sessions that followed. I think that worked great from a virtual point of view. We also had actual physical locations in four different cities at the same time. Something like that, maybe we might wanna do that because there are six months between two summits. You might wanna think about organizing if you have a certain topic or on the area that we wanna focus on from an OpenStack perspective, we could think of doing something like that. Collaborative hack, or it could be more of an educational, you know, if you want to have users come and adopt OpenStack, maybe there's a couple of heart-burning topics that they want to learn about. Then you say, okay, you know, here, if deployment is an issue in OpenStack, you know, here's how, here are the things you need to consider. Here are some tools for you to look at. So that would be very. So, I was going to, for those that haven't seen meetup pages and maybe haven't seen what we've been doing in Sunnyvale, this is gonna show the way that we've structured it. Yes, please. The East Coast, and so any advice, so it's Greenfield in the space, I shouldn't know, there's some customers like Argon, et cetera, doing some work. Any advice you would give for kind of a Greenfield one-to-one centric, know your audience, right? So you're asking about starting one? Starting one, actually, now we're starting. One thing to be aware of is the meetup pages and launchpad and git, totally separate. So, okay. For us, when I started back in February, January, February timeframe, we had about, I'd say about 120 registered members on the meetup site. Today we have 300. And I think the reason why we had such a dramatic increase in not only registration but participation was, A, we had regular cadence. We said, no matter who shows up, we're having a meetup, right? And then you also have some topic and initially all the topics were one-to-one. We said, hey, we're gonna come and talk about what OpenStack is, what's happening in the community, what are the different projects within it, where all the summits that are happening and we sort of focused on those, initially, for the first two. And then once we started doing that, I saw a dramatic increase in people just registering. That's one. The other thing, you need to have some sort of a marketing strategy around how do you make people aware that this is happening. The meetup sites are great. What I personally do is I have my own blog page. So, every time there's a meetup, I sort of take photographs. I write up about what the meetup was all about. I take pictures, sometimes videos. And then I do my blog post and do a tweet. I tweet it, let the community members know about it. And then that's how the word spread. And even within the meetup groups, there's a lot of interaction. In Boston, we have lots of other cloud groups. We have Cloudy Mondays. We have virtualization meetup groups. So, word gets around within the meetup community. And I'll show you the meetup group in Boston, too. And we're very clear about what the agenda is. And the other part that we were successful in doing was to get sponsors. You need to get somebody to sponsor for the drinks. You need to find a place, a venue. And we looked at all kinds of different places. We looked at churches. We looked at universities. Harvard was gracious enough to give us some rooms initially. The Microsoft Nerd Center is now what we have finalized down in the last six months. So, if you look around Chicago, there'll be lots of places, universities, high schools. But the key is to find that magic location, which works for the majority of the people. It'll be hard for a big city like Chicago. You wrote it, right? You wrote it, yeah. That's exactly what we ended up doing. So, you need some sort of a promotion strategy. You need to have regular cadence. You need to focus on one-on-one stuff initially. And that'll start attracting more people that are already doing stuff in OpenStack. Then you can start to break out. You can say, let's have more nerdy sessions and more hackathon type of stuff. So, that's what worked for us. Just to what you said, that the OpenStack Foundation, now that it's in place, it's also thinking about what we had in session yesterday. They'll help, especially with regards to the promotion part. They're not visible on OpenStack.org. So, we'll have an excuse since you're here. One piece of content that you can bring home to Bootstrap is the things that you saw. They will be online that you saw that you liked, you've already seen and you can do it yourself, I think. Yeah, the other thing apart from promotion is, one of the challenges we saw was, our meet-ups are usually in the evenings, right? 6.30, 7 o'clock. After work. After work. And sometimes people that live far away in Boston area, sometimes in Nashua, New Hampshire or out in Worcester, it's an hour and a half drive to get to even the first location, right? So, I've had people that would call me up and say, that's a long drive, is there a way we can do it online? Can you have a web back session or some video session? So, we are started to experiment a little bit with that. It's kind of hard, in both locations, we have Wi-Fi. So, it kind of sort of works. I mean, in the last Foundation meet-up when we had the party, I wanted to get Rob Hirschfeld, who is a board member, to actually come in over Skype. We wanted to do a video half an hour, just have him talk about the Foundation. It didn't work. I mean, Skype didn't work. I mean, we had video problems. We ended up just doing an audio. So, I mean, that's some, we work, we need to find a way to make that work better. And if there's a nice video way or some way of getting remote people join in, conference calls aren't that great. If it's some sort of a video conference, that'd be fantastic. But yeah, we need to explore options of, the audio-visual stuff hasn't been very successful for us. But many people have asked, we want to be in these sessions, but we can't be there physically. How can you help us, right? So, we are looking at ways of making that possible. Yeah, I think a smart board's a great idea. We, you'd actually bought that up before, and I'd forgot. So, yeah, so you've been brilliant twice. So, that would be a great idea. So, yeah, it's really hard to collaborate when you don't have face-to-face and you don't actually see what they're doing. So, without that, it makes it highly individual. But the, sorry, the, what we've gotten at Sunnyvale, partially from Yahoo's, but also from some people outside of Yahoo's, from Australia and Japan, that really wanted to collaborate with us. And we haven't quite figured out how to make that happen yet. So, I'm very interested in how we could have a reliable way of doing that. So, if we do, we're able to spin up this DevOps idea and start sharing a schedule around that we can all participate in, basically, just like different meeting rooms. Just, it'll just be different cities at different times. So, that would be extremely useful. The other thing I would recommend, as we do this more and more and coordinate new people like yourself who want to start stuff, it would be highly beneficial if the coordinators of the various meetup groups, at least within the US, get together once a month, maybe. Have a conference call about what they're finding difficult to do and especially people that are starting fresh. They'll need a lot of content, a lot of help, a lot of advice on how to do these things, not just for them, even for us, right? As our communities grow and we're seeing dramatic growth within our Boston area. And I'm trying to figure out how best to cater to the needs of all those groups. So, it'll be very helpful to do that too. Once the IRC channel, there's an OpenStack-Community mailing list. The OpenStack-Community mailing list. Yeah, coordinators I think should be there. Okay, great. It's a, I mean, it does not substitute the meeting face to face or the experience, start experimenting something at that. Yeah, the other thing you'll get as you start to grow the community is you'll find sponsors, they'll come to you. It happened to us, right? As we started doing the OpenStack stuff, we had all kinds of companies, Canonical came by, they actually flew somebody from Texas to come all the way to participate in the summit. We have local companies that are starting to show interest, cloud technology partners, Orista networks, Dell has always been a main contributor to it. So, you'll start to find people pitching in. So, I had a question along that line. So, let's assume I don't want to organize, but I'm willing to host. So, a nice facility that can hold 100 people in San Francisco. How do I sign up and say? We would love to have people come and tell us, right? I mean, we had a tough time finding out a place to host these things. So, we probably need some way of people saying, hey, one way to do that is through the meetup site, right? So, on the meetup site, you can make a comment, you can say, hey, we'd love to either sponsor the next meetup or host a location for you. That would be helpful. Yeah, so actually that- There's gotta be a better way than let's post it on the meetup site. Yeah, actually, I'm being a little brain dead. So, there is a need actually in San Francisco right now. That's part of the reason why the San Francisco meetup is kind of petered off, because some people, some companies moved around and they don't have the space anymore. So, I think they have some of the space, but not for some of the larger meetings. So, I think they'd be very interested in taking you up on your offer. So, the correct way is to go, you wouldn't figure this out unless you hear it from somebody and it's being part of the secret club. Right. So, you go to the meetup page under OpenStack and you just send, there's an easy way of sending an email to the organizers through that and that's the right way of doing it. The meetup page has an organizer, yeah. Yeah, it's working quite well for us, you know. Well, I've been a little unhappy because actually there's been these, some weird problems like coming here. So, the meetups were supposed to happen actually tomorrow while I canceled them. I go back, I canceled them about a month ago. I go back last week, there's 30 people signed up for the dates that magically reappeared. So, it's not been without its problems. So, I like it when it works, I don't like it when it doesn't. So, maybe it's a, maybe we need to give them some money to get the premier support. We were fortunate enough not to run into any, those kinds of issues so far, but it's worked out fine. I've made a lot of changes from time to time because we have so many meetups up in the future that are scheduled. So, occasionally they just kind of magically revert. It's going to be a little frustrating. Yeah, there was some questions. Yes, sir, Tristan. It silos the information from the various meetup groups using their API or whatever into a portal of some sort that we can link to the foundation membership. And that's what we've talked about. And also, in the last year that I've asked exactly the same question, how do I get started? Something we've been trying to get together is, Steph can boss me around and tell me what to do. I mean, as long as we can figure out a great way that we can all kind of get done what we need to get done, I am not married to any of my technology. I just want to get it done. But to alert other similar technology people or groups in the area that you now have an OpenStack group, but it still does, it's city-bound, which doesn't work for us at all because an Australian group, and there's no way we can change that whether they won't let us have, meetup won't let us have an Australian group. It has to be Sydney, it has to be Melbourne, it has to be preferences. So when we schedule meetups, the time zones are messed up across the country. The OpenStack.org, there's a page that lists all the meetup groups around the world, right? That'll sort of give you a snapshot of what's happening. There's a lot out there, I mean. True. As I see it, it's gonna be increasingly difficult unless we sort of address the siloing. Yes, sir. You mentioned that some of your devops guys are about staying over time or... Ops complain? What? Of course, yeah. They're used to working out the land with free phone, I know, sweating. It's part of their job. So they're responsible for their goals and their commitments. So this is one of the ways that they can get their job done, get their job done in two hours without community involvement. I don't think it's possible, but it's still making it work with the community without actually showing up these things, and I'm more proud to tell them. The reality is it's not the way it works. So I'm perfectly fine with finding times that work for most people. If we're collaborating outside of Yahoo, there's a certain number of people that just can't show up during the day, and there's a certain number of people that just can't show up at night. So we just have to, much like the time zone problem, we can't just say, I'm too busy. So part of that is open source company. Most of the running on open source projects, there's occasionally we run into that. Education, if you're working in an open source community, you have to engage the open source community, otherwise you end up forking your code, and then when you do decide to push it back, it's a giant hairball. It's like, sure, so I can still mine after yours. If you go to OpenStack, excuse me, meetup.com and type in OpenStack. This is where you land. So, I guess it's hard to do this way. So we're running three different meetings. You can actually go back into history. You see past meetups, so you see there's 72 past meetups. This is one of the things that's curating this information would be really great because there are comments that build up on here and there's discussions that would be great to expose that and be able to search through it in some other way other than this, or in addition to this at least. This works really well for us being able to find information for just meeting, but for other purposes, like mining it for what you were showing previously, it doesn't have that. So the beginner track is what most of the people show up for. We have 1,700. It's the largest meetup group I guess out on the world. Well, yeah, I mean a lot of the development's going on in the Bay Area, so we're gaining. Last I checked, we're gaining about 20 people a week. Seems to be accelerating a little bit. Not everyone's truly active, so there's a lot of people that are just kind of lucky lose. I do have a problem with about three quarters to half the people show up. Other half to a quarter don't show up for various good reasons. I haven't quite figured out how to, I don't necessarily want to discourage people from signing up, but I'd really like if they actually showed up, so they can get kind of distracting. Every once in a while almost everyone shows up and we're like, ooh, kind of shocked. But it is definitely, if I have some topics specifically that gets people excited, usually I have a full house. And if I make the effort to publish it at least two weeks and maybe even a month ahead of time, word gets around and I generally, I go through a couple different mechanisms. I post to the actual subscriber list, there's 1,700 people that are on here and say, hey, guess what, in a week, month, we're gonna be doing this. I send it to our internal mailing list. I've been saying it to staff, although I'm not exactly sure with the right process anymore. So be a wordsmith and rewrite this stuff all the time and having it come out kind of gibberish because it's not like my, so basically what I've done is I've just come up with a generic format that's applicable to all three of the meetups. I just copy and paste it in the different ones and just say, hey, this is a DevOps meetup. There are two other kinds. Go look for them, they're over there, pretty much it. The thing that's been the biggest, biggest attractant is for anybody to show up I can say this for myself as well is publishing it ahead, way ahead of time, making sure that we have a relatively consistent organization around it that people know what they're walking into, that it's not, you know, I don't always start at 20 minutes late or 10 minutes earlier, something weird. Make sure that the room actually is the same as what people expected to be. As occasionally it will change and I've noticed that people, they see the first notification that goes out and they don't see the other six saying the room has changed. So that is about it. So do you guys have any questions about, I don't know how many people are actually familiar with meetup or interested in what this looks like or anything like that? We use the same thing too. Yeah, so I can show. I'd like to do more of that. Unfortunately, I just don't have the time to do that. So what I'd really love to do is to take the expertise that goes into these kinds of large meetups and spin that into the expertise into these things so we can do them on a smaller scale and maybe we could go with a company. Maybe I could convince some of the guys at Yahoo Screen to do it, but I haven't been successful yet, but we can just contribute that skill set because we do body so that's part of what Yahoo does. So I may be able to provide that as a service and then I can just feed them the data, say here you. That the challenge with that is it's not always one person talking. We're always having some sort of an interactive conversation or a whiteboard session and we're all very immature, amateur, photographer or videographers. So it turns out not to be such a great thing. Both. I'm immature too, so we're all together.