 Hello everyone that is on Okay, no sleeping. I saw that yawning over there, but it happened before we started talking. So it happens again Yes, you Yawning up a storm or we'll keep you awake. We promise But but if these questions aren't the ones that are keeping you awake feel free to jump up to one of these microphones We want this to be interactive Because we are your community organizers We we first we were at scale I think when we first thought about this this talk and because we all get a lot of questions I'll let everybody introduce themselves in a second But you have the people who bear who run the three largest user groups in the world between San Francisco with over 55,000 hundred fifty-five hundred members five thousand five hundred La has about a thousand Seattle has a well over a thousand So large user groups and I even checked I looked at China I looked at a bunch of the other ones that I like no we really we are the largest so We have built these communities and and sustained them and kept them going for for years all of us And we're gonna share with you a little bit About how we did that Also, we're going to cover a bunch of other things questions We guys asked all the time will cover, you know some definitions some kind of address some community responsibilities We'll cover budget because that's always a fun one and some of the tools and resources that are available to you that you guys might not know About and some content related things. So With that why don't we have folks introduce themselves? I'll start at the end Sean Hi, Sean Roberts. I work for Walmart and I'm part of the San Francisco user group To Zuluca course from Blue Box and IBM company and I am the Seattle user group leader Oh Gary Kivorkian, I am with Cisco on the events and marketing team and I run OpenStack LA and I am Lisa Marine Amphi everyone calls me Lisa and And Sean and I have been running SF Bay for probably four years from when you started I'm I am currently at Hewlett Packard. And so he'll pack it to enterprise. Sorry and SF Bay user group and the online user group Okay, so I think we'll we'll start out with a definition. There's there's a lot of confusion between user groups and meet-ups and so It's a topic or a little bit passionate about so why don't I actually have Sean kick off this topic? Okay, so There's a It's been easy in the US to use User groups synonymous with meet-up because that's a tool that a lot of people use it's an easy way to get a lot of Eyeballs and get more people showing up that aren't typically part of the OpenStack community But there's quite a bit of work groups outside of the US that don't actually use meet-up and some that actually don't even have access to it so We just thought it was good just to at least bring it up that I purposely try to Say user group as much as possible rather than the shortcut meet-up because it confuses people so OpenStack user groups are not one-to-one with meet-up so Because anybody can just go on meet-up comm and create a meet-up But that doesn't necessarily mean you would be a recognized OpenStack user group There is actually criteria on the opensack org Foundation website to become an official OpenStack user group and so we want people to go down that road and The other thing Sean and I deal with in San Francisco in the Bay area. It's a large area I think you deal with this a little bit in LA too people wanting to Fork the community will call it Because you know, we had an East Bay OpenStack thing pop up recently and operators of OpenStack and you know We get it everybody wants to be their own Administrator of their own meet-up comm group, but you really don't want to do this trust me You don't just like you guys just love it when people fork OpenStack, right? It's kind of the same concept We are stronger together. There should be one meet-up site so for instance SF Bay area includes the East Bay and San Francisco and We encourage those organizers of those other groups to join us and to be organizers of our group and to have one calendar It's so much better for our users So that happens in other areas to really try to resist having that happen Even if you think you're an hour away a drive in traffic It's just still a better thing to use one meet-up comm site for your community user group but it's in the way that It's taking a little while to get the steam going but groups dot open stock org exists to Organize the the groups and that give Everyone a place to go that centralized that's not specific to any one tool and if there's many groups It would have a tendency that people wouldn't know where to go and don't understand the difference And it just confuses them when they're trying to learn so last thing we want to do better together community Okay, and so some of the tools that we rely on to build this community You know, we don't love meet-up comm but we're kind of married to it And so hopefully if anyone wants to that should be open source and people should be able to improve Meet-up comm and that'd be an awesome idea. It may disagree just a tiny bit, but Sure, so one of the things that in fact We're talking about this is ambassadors, which is I'm not sure if everyone knows what an ambassador is But it's basically the the most active user groups get typically a little bit of extra help from the OpenStack foundation There's about 12 ambassadors right now. They're basically just very active user groups. So but the conversation is about it'd be ideal if actually from Groups that opens back at org if it was capable of being the source of truth for new events And it would actually we'd be able to have it send information out to meet up in G groups and Facebook and all these other different places that people are used to using So that it's that's we can get more people more people involved more people know about meetings I guess you wanted to talk a little bit about some of the other tools Developer, yeah, we're gonna talk about you know the importance of things like github or IRC But I don't know that necessarily that after now having been sitting through a lot of sessions this week I don't know that we actually need to go there on the last day of the conference I think everybody's pretty been inundated with with the technical tools that it takes to build this community So the the main tool is groups that open stack to org. So if you if you all go there and Check it out, then you'll be able to find all the events no matter where they're Hosted whether it be Facebook or meetup Okay, so I'm gonna ask Gary and Tisula some questions now because maybe Tisula can start because she's the most Organized of the of the four of us up here. So why don't we address, you know budget? Like how do you run a meetup if you have zero budget? So you make somebody else pay for it very simple very simple You ask them it's a it's a pay-to-play situation you ask for sponsors and you allow them to bring their swag you allow them to Mention their company at the end of the presentation. It can't be a sales pitch But you do give them a little bit of freedom to show who they are because they're buying dinner that night and And they'll provide the logo. They'll provide a lot of support to you in return I started running the LA open-stack meetup Sort of getting thrown into the deep end the the previous organizer was leaving LA And was looking for a successor so he handpicked me so every Thursday night Or every fourth Thursday of the month. I'm busy and my wife is not that thrilled about it but some of the challenges that I found were That budget issue, how do you do it where it's no out-of-pocket to you as an organizer? No out-of-pocket to your people that come in but you still give them great content You still give them a reason to show up every month And one of the things that I learned and actually dealing with HP early on Was a lot of the companies that we work with and have had come in actually have community outreach programs And you can find the right people within each like for example, I'll use HP as the example that Not only did they send a presenter? They sent you obviously paid for dinner in the pay-to-play model. They sent swag They sent a raffle gift. They sent down a laptop to be raffled off to my group at the end of the session And you just have to learn to ask I've had at OpenStack LA probably in the last eight months. I've had Mirantis. I've had Red Hat. I've had Mitokura Avi Networks big switch every single one of them willing to come in pick up the tab for dinner pick up the tab for drinks come in give a great presentation mingle with the group and It it's a lot easier than you think you just have to learn to get past the point of being Afraid to ask and that that was actually my biggest challenge was trying to figure out where you go Who to find and then make the ask and though there are more than willing to come down and help sponsor the meet-ups Yeah, I think for us. I actually see it a little bit differently We have we meet twice a month and although in the last month and a half It's been almost every week and I don't want to discourage that that kind of Enthusiasm and and community participation and when someone comes to us with a topic a really good topic Or if I'm doing something completely upstream like we had Adrian Otto speaking on Project Magnum I asked him to come I always will ask ptls to come and they're not going to come and represent You know he didn't talk about rack space So I'm you know he didn't pay for that one and one of the criteria that I like to use to have people join our group as Organizers is you have to be willing to host meet-ups and to pay for content that is upstream and that come from other Companies that don't necessarily I mean for instance that HP also I don't really have a way to cross-charge people for the security For the beer, so I've always paid for those those things So now and I was lucky, you know Sean did a yahoo the years before that and I've done it for the last two years at HP And I was lucky that I actually had a budget that I could leverage Since we had our company split and we don't have as much budget for things like that anymore I have had to get more creative about it So we try to move it around we had one at IBM a couple weeks ago There there was one at Walmart a few weeks ago We had our next one is going to be at the VMware campus So if you move it around that way you can also share the love and the expense and get somebody else to pick up the tab Well, I was I was actually we may get to it in a second But I'm going to get to the moving it around issue, but we'll we'll get there down. Okay Logistics and to seal is the queen of logistics. So I'm also going to Queen keep talking Lisa Yeah, so logistically I am the one that that like kind of took the reins and have not have not stopped Refining my program to make my life easier. It was purely selfish but I had when I first came in I also took it over from someone else and There was it was one of those things where it was a labor of love before I got it and it was great And it was wonderful, but there was no actual plan and since I'm a marketer I like to have a plan so I made a plan and I made a checklist of what every speaker is going to need when they come in and Everything from the type of equipment that they're going to bring to the flash drive back up of their presentation that they're going to have To where I'm going to want them to stand when they get to IBM So it's been really helpful for me to send that out to their event organizer Whoever I'm liaisoning with to have them fully prepared by the time they get to me And I also have them send their presentation in advance So I can review the slides and make sure they work on our system because we're going to plug them into our system Our AV system and to make sure that they're not too hyper promotional, but we'll save that Go ahead and want to just dive into that one right there. Yeah, okay one of the things that I It took me a while to get accustomed to was being able to tell a presenter that what they want to come and do is not right Because I anybody who has been to you know, especially something like an open-stack meetup The developers the coders the the guys that are running open-stack in businesses Are gonna run like rats when you turn on the light in a garage if someone comes in with a real sales he presentation So it took a while to be able to help You know, even as I reviewing their presentations just like to Sue does to be able to have someone tone it down and I actually periodically have to moderate a presenter when they sort of Send me one thing and then show up with something else and you have to get you have to sort of get them back on track and You know, I probably sort of segue into where we're going with content and what we like to see But you know my sort of stuff is under the hood lessons learned You know take a technical deep dive on something show the people show the attendees something They're not used to seeing and taking them sort of behind the curtains and showing them really what's making open-stack Tick and what's making it easier for them to deploy in their businesses Yeah, so I would just add one of the things it's early on when I was at Yahoo And I was working to build a culture around open-stack at Yahoo And that was my ulterior motive. Also, we needed somebody to run that the group since the person that was was moving on Did I organized a bunch of hackathons and it was actually we focused a lot more about Riding code and how to commit so I trained a lot of people One of the things we did is we tried to find people jobs. It was you know, it was pretty much just gorilla open-stack so Then as time went on and things kind of evolved a lot more We started bringing in all the local PTLs or core reviewers Like we've had recently. We've had Mike Perez. We've had Adrian Otto We've had bunch of different people who are fortunate that these people are in the area So if you do know Yeah, people well, that's definitely true But even better to help build the local community that if you know that you have Core reviewers doesn't have to be a PTL, but or somebody who is a really active contributor in your neighborhood You know ask him to speak, you know do it as much as they can they feel comfortable doing it people really like that it is all about the content and we used to Toggle between having beginner sessions and advanced sessions kind of that's why we were doing it every other week And it just got too complicated to try to do it that way But now we just really publish what the content is going to be ahead of time So a couple weeks ago We had a couple of cores from Keystone come and speak and it was a very very technical Discussion and so we even gave our user group homework before we're like go to this website is because we knew You know if you were a beginner or if you were just there looking for a job You know this was not going to be the meetup for you and and every time before we do a meetup I stand up and I talk about what the next five meetups are going to be so people do get to Know what's coming ahead and on that one especially I was like this we're going to go deep on this one It's going to be very very technical and so many people came up to me after that meetup And they were so grateful for that level of content So I would say you know go as deep as you as you can I mean that's people are in this industry because of the technology and so Don't be afraid of the of the seriously deep technical dive. Maybe not every time but um And then just let your community know that that's what's going to happen Um, I have a few more questions, but if there's any burning questions from the audience Uh, we can take those or not burning questions any Small any sizzling questions Oh, no, no questions yet. Maybe I should start asking the audience questions So, um I see somebody from uh, hp sysco IBM you're also hardware sellers. I mean you said don't let a vendor go specific Into their product, but what if you wanted so okay, del has here's their solution Well, here's and have somebody from hp and give their architecture solution or any of the other I mean from randas comes in, you know, they're going to be talking about fuel Do you find that that's okay or if as long as they people know up up front Yeah, I I didn't usually tell the presenters, you know, keep your keep your slides community oriented upstream But obviously if you're going to show a demo, it's probably going to have your company logo Somewhere on that demo, you know and and and if the demo is as interesting technology and it is relevant to open stack We get a lot of requests for things that shawna. I have to say what what does this have to do with open stack? But if it's relevant for open stack, then of course, that's fine and the swag thing too at first Um, when I first started hosting at hp I was a little bit careful about just passing out swag because I didn't want it to seem like it was a big marketing event Um, but after the community was coming over and over again, and then was trusting us Turns out they love swag. We've given away a lot of t-shirts a lot Yeah, there's those glowing cubes. My kids love them. So they much appreciate them the way I look at it is when I run my meetup. I'm gary the meetup organizer. I'm not gary from sysco I run I run it independent. I run it independently. That's why I don't have an issue with Badges off is the yeah one of the exactly it's a completely neutral environment and anybody's welcome to come in As long as it makes as long as the content makes sense um, I just wanted to Circle background on the on the sponsors thing, you know, um, I run the one of the user groups in the uk and um, you know, we so far over the last What is it 18 months two years? We've pretty much had a stable set of sponsors They're not quite as generous as the sponsors in the us by the sounds of it. Do you guys have um A stable set of sponsors or are you rotating them for each event depending on who's speaking? I would say they rotate just depending on who's willing to give the money on that day um, I we don't tend to always tie it to speakers, but um, and I wouldn't say it's stable they've But you know, we've been running our user group for five years And so it's a revolving door of different people all the time and you know We've had marantis in there in a big way in the past and they're not so much anymore And and we've had, you know swift stack and we've had a lot of great companies, um, sysco So it kind of goes like this a little bit and sometimes you have to pass the hat around there's a way of fixing that. I'm I'm I'm trying to work. I had I had this kind of air cover from my finance department when I was at yahu Um, so they they cover pretty much anything I wanted to a large extent. So that got me spoiled Um now that I don't necessarily have that anymore, um, but I have a version of it at walmart So I'm I'm training a finance guy to be Um, essentially my banker Um, and I I want to do it actually for all of us in the west coast. Um, so The idea is yeah the idea is that we um, we all Basically dole in the money and it gives us some breathing room in between. Um, you know the the peak the valleys but also, um Lisa heads um with each most HP's help, um, and some really great, um, event organizers organize some awesome, uh, birthday parties in the past But the problem with doing that is that it's in a massive amount of work to gather the money and to get everything paid So just running that through HP is a nightmare and makes it undo burden on her As opposed to putting the burden back on the team. So, um, so I'd like to do that Partially so that we could when we do have these birthday party events or larger events that we can Build up the slush fund to support that ahead of time. We actually know the budget It's not You know something we have to go asking for people afterwards saying, you know, you said you're gonna pay could you please pay now? so, um, so just just that so Yeah, and we'll um, so we have about six more minutes. Um, we will take this question We'll also talk about some of the um the the tools available to you and we didn't really address things like Burnout, you know, one thing I would say is you need multiple organizers of your of your community user group And I mean you said your wife is not too pleased with the frequency I think we're all married to open stack really if we want to know who our first wife is It's been a labor of love. And if you don't absolutely love this community, you will burn out really really quickly But just trying to spread that love around has been, you know, really Essential to to not being completely burned out all the time. Um, but okay, let's take this question I was just curious is this These user groups, are they a show and tell or do you also get into kind of a brainstorming? Let's work on a common problem that matters to the community So, you know, it's not like one company or, you know, any one presenter Presenting and maybe a Q&A at the end, but it's like, you know, the whole audience is the panel Yeah, this this is actually something that happens almost every single meetup that I host That we have a longer Q&A than presentation I actually have to kick people out sometimes because our elevators lock at a certain time and we do not want to be staying there for all night But yes, when when the presentation is over and the speaker asks for questions And there are definitely plenty of questions directed to the speaker But you will also find that there are plenty of questions questions directed to each other because people say Oh, I'm from here and I do this and I do this This gentleman at my last meetup last month literally showed up and just said my open stack is broken help And like he had like six people running over to him during cupcake time, you know to go to go help him So it was great. We have cupcake We have a kegerator and cupcake You have food and a Seattle beer in Seattle You need to go to Seattle But yes, that that happens very often organically. It's not something that we honestly plan, but it definitely always happens I mean another scenario. I mean a different kind of scenario, but yeah, I think to Sula's point every meetup turns into probably a longer discussion than presentation and The other thing that I've tried a couple of times and has worked out really well is just as opposed to a single presenter Getting a group of my regular Participants and we do a series of lightning talks Everybody gets 10 minutes at the mic and That that also becomes a little problematic because the 10 minutes goes by very very quickly and the q&a goes by very You know generally wants to go longer than the presentation itself. So Um, you know, that's another thing to consider too because the one thing I've learned after a lot of years in tech Is that people in tech have no shortage of ability of talking about what they know about so But you have to they're also shy I mean this is you know, we've done it both ways But we find if we have at least 10 minutes of prepared remarks and I mean the beer helps too, but It does and when that second beer kicks in people get a little bit unshy less shy But it helps to have some sort of prepared Thing at the beginning just to get that conversation started But I mean, I was just going to add to that that you know that that interactive part of it I mean for us certainly is as important as the actual speakers I mean, you know, we we try not to pack I mean we kind of do two two speakers per event But we specifically have you know a big chunk of time there There's just for people to drink beer and talk to each other because you know that's half the point That's the community part of it So one of the things Kind of pitched something that we've done before so it's it's part of the upstream university that Stefano and luik started a few years ago and it's now On the front end of every single conference. It's just super awesome So I snagged a little part of it the the lego activity. I don't know if anybody's sat through that, but it's super fun And it requires a lot of legos about $2,000 us of legos But I've done it like five times now. I did it at a university that I work with on And I've done it a few other places and we we did it last year At the opens.com Our user group as well For those who don't know it's it's this fantastic game that helps you Understand how to participate in this community upstream called the upstream legal game or something like that It's not really a game But it's a way for people the lego is really just a tool that's being used to have people Understand how to work together and I mean just really quickly Why don't you explain just the three groups and because you guys should take this idea for your meet-ups? I'm sure it's and it's actually on slide slide share as well But it did the basic ideas that it teaches at adult agile agile method agile methods So you break up into a couple teams to create a project and it's essentially creating a building That's going to be attached to another building Um, and you have some people that rove and you have some groups act as companies But the um, and you go through a whole build process a couple cycles of it But the the whole point of it really is to not only teach how open stack works in a unique way without actually writing any code um, but it it It's like a hackathon without code and that's really How I got started getting in uh, that getting involved with the community And actually I really want to bring it back. I'm getting to the point where um, I can have enough time to bring the hackathons back So we can actually have a set time Twice a month where people just know if they show up this place There's going to be some guys working on code and um, they can help with the commit they can Talk about a particular feature that's getting pushed in a project. That's um of interest and you know, we just get that set schedule down, but um Anyway, that it's a lot of fun I'd recommend it if anybody Wants to reach out to how it's done. It's it's pretty straightforward, but um, and I'd be actually if somebody Wants I could actually even fly out Walmart is more than willing to have that happen. So Um, I've run it as long as four hours, but it can be a little bit less We did it in about two and a half that night So this is what we did for our fifth birthday party So there were cupcakes and you probably saw some pictures of it scrolling through on gary slides. Yeah, the the biggest um The the well the biggest thing is the the amount of legos. So I have I have six huge boxes of legos My kids love it actually um, so And then you know You could if you wanted to if you wanted to do it over again You could a region could maybe pitch together get a couple sponsors to help them buy the legos and then user groups could share So we've actually talked about doing that for the east coast united states Yeah, so in the spirit of sharing content one of the things Sean I've been talking about for years But we really love to to get it implemented this year It's a way to share the content that we do out of the bay area with the other groups around the world And so um, I think you started this with the training when we were kind of cycling through the the eight weeks of the open Stack training that you can find on the docs open stack dot org But we we do want to have a way to share the slides to you know Because presenters will fly out and and if you if you make the request But you guys are very talented as well And it's sometimes it's just content that people want And we do know I mean we do One of the questions we didn't get to was do we google hangout or do we not google hangout? Like we have to google hangout because we have people from all over the world that that pipe into the sf bay one Because of the content But we want to find a way to share that content with the other user groups So we're going to work on that this year and if you have ideas then ping us It's just out of curiosity. How many of you have ever been to a meet-up or a user group for open stack? Good. Okay. Good. Good. Has anyone not? Ah, okay. Okay. We're what area are you based in? Ah, okay. So Doug Helman ran that one for a long time with Keith burger and uh, yeah, it's pretty robust. They're awesome Yeah, but they're looking at doing um In uh, what is it called Buckhead or Bucktown? Buckhead is Buckhead. Yeah, okay So I think the maybe the red hat office there is going to start hosting it. I don't know if that's closer to you But ping Doug Helman. He's a great guy and He runs a great community and you'd be surprised how many are out there So if you live in a place that's not a real big city like where all of us live Just look for it and you'll probably find it I'm out. I'm curious. We're in the uk area We're in the uk You got a pretty you got a pretty big community. Yeah, I mean Manchester's a big tech hub. So, you know, there's a lot of a lot of people there and A lot of people working for people like red hat stuff from home. So, you know, and the uk is not that small So, you know, lots of contributors who are living in the uk. It's not that much Manchester was one of the first official user groups actually got your designate before we did we were a little bit lazy about it But but you guys you guys are over there. So congratulations. Who else runs user groups community organizers? Okay, give yourselves a hand because wow, it's hard. Yeah Seriously, good job. Well done. Where's your user group? South Florida, okay, and philly. Oh, I want to go to the philly one. What a great town Not that I don't want to go to south florida, but That's always awesome, but philly. We should do another we were going to do the operator summit in philly last year We didn't do that. What happened Who's mid-cycle the operation was in philly that was two years ago. Yeah. Yeah, because we was in Palo Alto last year I decided not to travel we spend a lot of time working out of suitcases Okay, so any other questions because I think we're at the end of our time Okay, we go to I don't know We're the last that we could just keep you all night. So in meetup style, we should have brought beer and pizza What what what did we do the one thing I the one thing I'd like and I made notes only because so I don't leave stuff Well, she's got a book. I just have a piece of paper torn out of a notebook. So I'm actually more impressed with her That there are a lot of resources available to organizers that a lot of people just don't know about a lot of them directly through open stack Um the ability to post your event on their event page um What shan was talking about a couple of minutes ago was the difference between a recognized And I don't I don't want to call them independent but there's there's a new process that open stack is instituted to Get your group recognized by open stack that makes you eligible for additional things that they can help out with You can get into the swag store and buy open stack stuff to have it your to have at your group Um, they have a little stipend in the month of july Which is the open stack birthday month and recognize groups get a small chunk of cash very small Well, I well this shirt is from my july from my july birthday meet-up last year. Um Um, and I think one of for me and again going back to when I first took over the group Finding people to come to your group to do present presentations Is they've actually just now created sort of a rudimentary I'll call it a rune entry speakers bureau where you can actually go and find resources And look at people's profiles. Look at their presentations and actually help You find the people that can come help It's No, it's it's actually i'm trying to remember now where it is Is it is it okay, but yes, and it's it's an alphabetical listing and you know This came up in a discussion when we were in tokyo and it was a community meeting there And I I brought it up that that was my biggest challenge as a meet-up organizer when I first took it up was finding people to come in And you know, I'd like to see it maybe even elevated to almost like a yelp status where the you know We're an organizer of a group like myself could actually rate the presenter to help people make decisions Is it in that is okay, that's right Um, and the other thing I would just say I mean, I know we're all not thrilled with meetup.com as Our basic tool, but I think for me one of the things that I have found real useful is The ability to look at the other groups that my members are involved in by looking at their profile Because that's a great way to help cross promote your events with the other groups create sort of an extended community between You know, I've got open stack la. There's devops la There's a container group in la and now we're all sort of starting to work together to You know cross promote our groups and our events that is super super important You know the we had a we did a cloud sling meet-up the other day And so we had the docker group promote that because we were you know spinning up Apps with you know in containers in core os and so take your content outside of just open stack I mean as as we're all going up the stack now with we've mixed our cloud foundry meet-up with open stack A couple of times and you get a nice cross pollination of communities and that will keep your community going The mobile version won't let me see it Any any other questions you have yeah, so the one so we in in philly we got in the rut of One or two presenters every time from some company kind and and one of the first things we've been looking at doing is the lightning talks And uh, we're looking for more ideas for hands-on stuff the lego thing is sounds awesome. Um, And we're trying to find some other smaller hands-on stuff like labs because we get at least in philly we get some contributors, but a lot of just More on the operator side So we're even trying to look at like maybe labs or something like that that we can go through even for end users So have you seen any good resources of other things you can do at a meet-ups besides talks yeah, so Yeah, oh it's cool. So, uh, so what we started off doing is very similar. Um, so When citrix is still involved, um, we got into this and I'll probably like four and a half years ago now, but um We got into this rut. It was a good rut for a while where, um ewan meller who is running the that user group at the time and um and a few other people and myself uh Would just give like basic open stack talk over and over and over again And then some people started showing like yeah, you know, I've seen you talk on this four times Can you not do that anymore like do anything? You know, um, so what we started doing is, um, we tried to break it out so that The newcomers would be able to go to one talk. In fact, I was for a long time at yahoo I was holding two talks at the same time which Like almost well it hurt me for a while because it was a lot of work to do it But I'd have um one group that was all the newcomers Would we give the the pre-can talk and then we'd have the hackathon in the other room And so everyone that wanted to hack code go off in the room when we'd break up into smaller groups and Usually about half of those people wanted to actually understand how to contribute And then some others were would kind of show up and ask python questions And then there was a smaller group that would break off and work on some particular problem Like they'd grab a bug off of the queue Off a nova or something and just toy with it So it was usually not super advanced the hackathon, but it was it was generally people getting together to learn so so Maybe something along those lines the so it's the reason why I started the training project Training guides it's still out there. I'm not involved anymore because I kind of moved on and there's another team that's supporting it But it that actually the activity of starting the training guides project started a whole bunch of other things So I would recommend either getting involved with that and starting to use it and maybe contributing to it And that could be just the activity that you do out of the user group just that in itself That would help you understand how projects work better on a fundamental level An alternative would be to maybe hold some python training sessions Like test driven development on python. There's like four or five really good resources and you could kind of hold python training With the intent of contributing to open stack because tdd is a really good way of learning python Um, I don't know just a couple ideas sure You alluded to this before but um, and maybe there's some guidelines Somewhere on groups, but what's the best? We don't have any money yet, but we've had offers What's the best way to handle finances? Do you get you don't bank account for the group or cash in a box or We could probably give four different answers So I I don't touch their money ever I send them a list of Restaurants that they can order food from in my neighborhood and I tell them You know send me what percentage you want me to tip if you're not there to to greet the driver But we will not be paying for this if you don't we will cancel the order Etc. Etc. Like hands off because our accounting team can't deal with that sort of thing It would be a nightmare But you always pay for the beer and I always pay for the beer we always we always take the hit for the drinks Yeah, of course, but We're usually a couple hundred bucks Those open stackers they drink a lot. No, I pretty much work the same models to sue I I don't want to see a credit card number. I don't want to see cash Um, I would say maybe the one exception to that is when you do the open stack birthday celebration They'll pay you out via paypal account And then then then there's that whole Transition to how you actually spend it and yeah, they'll ask for your I just connected them with my accounting team for our birthday last year And again, I didn't touch any money that I bought cupcakes and stickers Yeah, but it is funny though. I mean I've been on the phone with people and they're like, do you want my credit card number? Well, yes, I do, but you know not for why you want to give it to me Um, but yeah, so I generally try to stay away from that as much as possible and just let them take care of that And honestly, that's one less thing I have to deal with And all I know is that at 6 15 the food for the meetup is going to show up it's taken care of And yeah, the other part of that is the person who is presenting probably is as Distanced from that part of the process as possible. So it just makes life a lot easier See and I just I guess like to make life really hard But um, I take the credit card number because I want control of that whole thing because we have a big facility We have security people that we have to deal with we have to escort the caterers in and out It's just a lot of logistics that that we do deal with and we don't want the presenter worrying about it So in the few times that I have taken money for somebody else to host on our site It's just been the credit card number for the pizza And then we call it into pizza my heart and then I give that person the receipt at the end of the night So, yeah, it is pizza. We didn't meet these ones They have a gluten-free pizza. So we stick to pizza. They haven't poisoned me yet Um, I know I'm the worst meetup person. I'm gluten-free. So I can't do the beer or pizza. So it totally sucks Do you is it really somebody brought me a gluten-free beer once and it wasn't it wasn't as gluten-free as it should have been Yes, but you guys have whiskey in your in your office too. And uh, bear was nice enough to Broadcast that I think we have similar stories to tell about stuff that's now hidden in desks I will say nothing So and I mentioned before that, uh, I'm training one of our finance people to be my banker So, um, with the intent to take this burden off of all of us because it's a pain um, so I was lucky enough when I was at yahoo and I got it started that, um that uh It was they were very very flexible. Um, it allowed me to do all kinds of things. So I I could pay for pretty much anything Um, it's not as much the case and I technically don't want to actually deal with the numbers and the details either because it's Um, a finance person is much better at that. So I did some of that before Um, I wouldn't recommend it. Um, so anyway So if you can if you can start training your own finance person to uh, say hey, would you love to take this on? It's going to help the business, you know How many people do you have at your meetups? I mean 15 people you can also just go to a restaurant or major to bar Yeah, and then everybody kind of pays for their own and that's most meetups started that way Awesome. Yeah, you'll grow fast trust me. I I took over la open stack and we were 400 members And that was just two years ago and we're approaching the thousand now. So you there is a big demand for knowledge and I don't know where how yours works, but I usually get about 50 percent of my regulars And then about another 50 percent of just newcomers each time just wanting to learn more. So It'll grow trust me It is a lot of fun, that's the most important thing have have fun with it It's a community one of the questions we didn't get to is like what do you do with the heckler in the room? How do you manage, you know crowds and yeah, so we and we can have fun conversations about those things later When we have our next round of whiskey, right? Right But there's all sorts of tips and tricks and and things once it grows and you start You know, we have about 100 people that come to our meetups pretty pretty regularly So it's but it's important to that's that's the community. That's the whole point So you got to embrace it all all the quirkiness all the strangeness Diversity was another thing. We didn't really get a chance to talk about really really important to have your presenters be a very diverse You know women people of color people of different, you know Gender identifications. That's probably a seattle and portland thing more than in other parts of the world But have you been to LA? True. That's right. Yes. Well, Mike Perez used to run yours. So everybody feels comfortable At the LA meetup But anyway, that's super super important for I have a lot of women come up to me afterwards Or they ping me before saying are you going to be there because like I'm going to go if you're going to be there Like, you know, you made me feel comfortable in this community And and we're trying to grow our our female population and do things like women of open sex scholarships And and I talk about things like that at our meetup And it really helps to include everyone Can you? Yeah, Ken is awesome. He's he's a good guy Okay Oh, well, I know but you know, we're here for you. So I gotta go to my working group that I'm waiting for Speaking of ambassadors. He was supposed to be in the ambassador working group thing right now But okay, thank you everybody. Thank you everybody. Thank you for coming