 Tom hasn't joined us yet, so I'm going to stand in. I'm going to be the stand-in Tom, so I'm Sean Roberts. We're going to switch. I'm a VP at Dev at Aconda, formerly at VMware. I've been in, well, before I start doing that. So we're each going to introduce ourselves real quick. It's a, I've been organizing the San Francisco Bay Area user groups for about two and a half years, so. Yeah, I'm Erwin Guerin. I'm marketing as a French user group and I work for Red Hat. Hi, I'm Kavit Munshi and I run the Indian user group and we've been around for the last three and a half years. It's glad to, just glad to be here. Thanks. Hi, I started with some people, the Chinese user group in 2012. I'm Akira Yoshiyama from Japan and I'm usually, I maintain our user group home page. G'day, I'm Tristan from Australia, founder of the user group down there. We're almost at a thousand people, so if you know anyone from Australia that's not in the user group, I think we're at 993, so if you give us another seven, we can make the thousand before the end of the summit. My name is Martin Kish and I'm responsible for the European user groups together with Erwin and I'm located in Hungary. Yeah, so I think Martin's gonna do a presentation, right? Yeah, I just want to show some slides because we did a huge work during the last one year. We nearly finished this OpenStack community portal and we can see the entire user group presence all around the world, so it seems to be that we have a lot of members and if you are going to the groups.openstack.org site, you can join with your actual OpenStack.org user account and basically if you are a user group organizer and you not fund yourself help here, please register yourself and we can assign you to your own group and basically the goal of this site that we can provide a lot of guides and tips for the user groups, how to organize them, how can they do different things and of course we can list a lot of user group events and you can track the site activity. For example, the user group owners can post different content to the site and it is a very good platform we can develop in the future and use for different user group related things. So basically one of the huge advantage of this site because most of the groups initially were registered in different social networks or meetup.com or other places that we can provide the center place for the entire user group activity and one of the huge advantage that we can gather some information and know the status of the community and know the size and I have a very surprising number. This is the actual size of the OpenStack community all around the world. I think it is a very impressive number and if we are seeing a little bit deeper we can see the numbers per continent. So it's obvious that North America is the largest community and Europe and Asia is almost identical in size and of course South America is not so represented and Africa is not so active but I think it represents the status of the industry and if we see the growth rate of the user groups we are trying to join all of the groups into this database so we can see that we have 47 new members daily and it means around 1400 new members joins to the OpenStack community. So I think those are very impressive numbers but basically we cannot see anybody because we are tracking the progress level of the different user groups and we have some user groups where we don't have a specific contact but for example I know some guy who is doing something there for example in Cyprus so we try to reach the 100% process level. We are around 68% so it is not so bad so you can see those data from that aspect. So can I ask a question? So what was the could you go a little bit of the evolution of how the group's portal started and what the initial objective was? Just a very high level might be kind of informative. Yeah yeah basically we wanted to move all of the information and data of the user groups into a central place based on a real open source solution. So I think this is the basic goal of OpenStack that we will try to solve the problems using open source software and the site is based in Drupal so it is an entire following the development standards of other OpenStack projects. So if anyone like to join Feel Free we are using the same policies so anyone can contribute anything to this portal. Basically we have some challenges here for example we plan the multi language site and we have some basic translations but as the translation solution is changing in the OpenStack community we will adopt this new translation tool as a Zonata or something it is the name of that. We're still supporting the other social tools right? Yeah of course so this portal doesn't mean that you need to leave the Meetup.com because we connected this site using REST API with the Meetup.com so if you have a very active community who is tied to Meetup.com feel free to use Meetup but if you are launching a new user group you feel free to use this tool and it means that you do not need to pay yearly or monthly fee for Meetup.com guys. It's true this costs a little bit of money. You guys got any questions or something you want to talk about the group's portal? I see the member data is grabbed from the OpenStack database or from the Meetup database. Yeah we are fetching it daily from the Meetup.com database. Really because in China we have four groups I think they have almost 3,000 people almost so I see the Asia and Pacific the total number is 7,000 so maybe a mistake I don't know. Yeah we can check it after. I think all the groups need to register with the portal I guess because I think we've got around 3,000 plus members in India and if you've got 3,000 plus in China then the number doesn't really add up. Yeah basically this jump is when we added the Chinese user groups. Okay. It is represented. That's a good point so there are a number of groups out there that are you know they're publishing themselves through social media but they haven't actually kind of been as involved with the OpenStack community as others so they're they're possibly not even known or well known by us and we've dug around and found quite a few but I'm sure there's there's gaps so as we find them as ambassadors we should I think I think the whole idea is to bring them into the fold and try and basically make make sure the messaging is correct across all the groups and we are all pushing in the same direction because I found that there are I think there was a group in India that was organizing events on around the same time as the main group was doing in the same cities and it was kind of dividing and dividing the user base and we've kind of the process we use what was we actually made one of the guys the an organizer in the main Indian group and said look just join us rather than so I think if we could if you know of groups out there and if any of you know of groups that are not a part of the portal may please ask them to join or contact an ambassador and we can help onboard them with the official user group process that's a good segue to the next topic good work and basically this is a it was a real life example so user groups are not static entities and and we saw a lot of issues that we need to solve for example there was this Vietnam issue when they like to start a new user group next to an existing one and and I think the similar happened in Portland or somewhere in North America but I think it is a normal thing and nothing wrong with that so so it is a it is a standard evolution of the user groups because they are communities so hey Tom so that's actually a good point to bring up so that the user groups are really you know they're very organic and there's there's nothing to keep anybody from creating their new user group in any community in fact there's there's three different open-stack user groups in San Francisco Bay area right now and they the two other ones they kind of started their own ones because they didn't really know in some way how to join which you know it's kind of I guess a partial failing on myself that I didn't I didn't reach out to them enough but but sometimes they have a slightly different agenda and that's you know that's okay I mean you know whatever so so the user groups are not owned by the foundation but what we're trying to do with the portal and Tom can speak to this a little bit more about the strategy I'm just kind of speaking with Tom's voice but but also that's what we're trying to do is we're trying to give them kind of a warm hug and give them some services and some ideas about what we've done so that they can be more effective in there you know when they have enough energy they want to spend their time to gather a bunch of people together and and work or rant about open-stack that we help them so they can do that anything else Antarctica Antarctica yeah but I guess it is it is but only in the summertime yeah the fingers the seasonal group I didn't know penguins were using open-stack that's awesome news it's to cross over as the polar bear yeah there you go and so we just started talking about the official group process you want to you want to talk about that a little bit we didn't have it just segwayed I just I segue it in yeah just as you came in it was perfect perfect time in your part apologies I'm late the session I was in just now run over and Tom Flyfield I'm a community manager with the open-stack foundation and basically with the official user group process it sounds like some you know evil ominous thing but really what we wanted to do was make sure that wherever you are in the world you can find an open-stack user group that's at a high level of quality we wanted to recognize that some of our groups are doing amazing things there they're doing things like organizing conferences where 2,000 people turn up just our local user group volunteers it's amazing and we want to basically share that experience across anyone and everyone who's running a user group and you know make sure that we also by doing this support people and get people connected with someone like one of these fantastic ambassadors who can help provide their knowledge about user groups to mentor them to greater heights and you know just to tick off a few things as well like is this group just basically a marketing front for a vendor and you know make sure that that kind of stuff doesn't happen but essentially it's about a mentoring process and making sure that all the information is available to the user groups and also to the people who want to attend them. I think also as far as the ambassadors are concerned they can help the user groups basically try and find speakers try and organize sponsors for venues and try and find try and connect you with the general open-stack community at large so you don't you don't kind of feel alone in your local group you you kind of feel connected with the rest of the world and the rest of the community and I guess there's also an element of ambassadors getting together to maybe bring together a regional event and I I guess coming to summits like this also helps but it's it's really important that there is an official user group process and there's an official body to mentor new groups into existence and making sure that they don't get lost or they don't fall by the wayside and they they are encouraged to do regular meetups I I think that's the even if the first few meetups aren't really successful it some kind of encouragement will help them keep going and find more users find more members. So one of the things I've proposed and we're talking about new ways of encouraging or maybe enabling is a better word bless you enabling the marketing people that are out there and they they have a tendency to bump up against us various points and either want to shower us with cash prizes or you know free car you know whatever they free t-shirts they always have they generally have something and they're driven by their team is there their marketing product that's based on open stack which is awesome and we don't want to discourage that but we want to kind of funnel it in the right way where the people showing up to the user group meetings aren't discouraged by saying how this is the pitch for product X and that didn't that wasn't about open stack so so the official user group process can be one of the ways that we mentor and kind of mold that group and start to funnel in some of the energies of the people in that area that are marketing oriented so that when they do show up and they they want to promote X product and say yeah that's great but you know this is how we want to do it we want to more promote open stack little less promote your product and not so I guess I just wanted to say that so I think I I think there are a few other things that have I come to light also I I think each user group also we needs to manage democratically I mean there can't just be one organizer that I I guess eventually we need to come up with a set of parameters that kind of gives a gives some kind of redundancy if the main organizer kind of stops being interested the group shouldn't fall by the wayside or if if if the organizer is employed by a company that kind of wants them to do things a particular way if there are more than one of organizers at least there is some community consensus and the agenda being pushed is something that is beneficial to the community and not just to a particular vendor and I I think we there might be examples out there of regional groups that face these issues and I guess I guess I guess we should try and make it a part of the official user group process where we try and at least have more than one organizer as the main one and I think we also need to ensure that the user group process is very inclusive so no one should be felt left out no one should be felt like they are being compelled to do something you know like like it has to be we have to be a very inviting and an open community because that is that is what opensack embodies it it's an open source project that that that wants to be the ubiquitous cloud cloud operating system for everyone and we should try and be a ubiquitous community for anyone who wants to join can I I don't want to just have it go back to me in the whole time but I would say that I've had some experience partially because the Silicon Valley the whole West Coast United States is super active and we've had some interesting disagreements on how to approach things and how to you know who's right who's wrong kind of things personality conflicts what seems to work in the development community actually works in this space as well where merit actually wins out so when there is a conflict and somebody's perhaps misbehaving in a certain way not being the most inclusive that's the events that they run they people stop showing up so and it it may take a couple months and it's hard sometimes when you see this happening not to say you know stop being a jerk but it that would be my opinion and it's not really my place in a lot of cases to say that even though well it's not my place so so by advocating a certain behavior and kind of waiting until the the merit of the group kind of ensures that the the participation dies down then actually if that person is amenable to being more participatory and including more people more organizers kind of happens on its own and if they don't then they basically get frustrated and they don't come back it's already happened a couple times for a new user group they they heard about this process and they directly asked to us what do we have to do what do we have to do to have the support of a foundation so with this process we can we can feel that the community want this support I was just gonna suggest that maybe you guys could work on codifying these guidelines some in in a spec similar to kind of a you know the foundation nice all right well that would be helpful that sir is helpful but but feedback on that is always welcome it's quite new it's only really existed for I guess the past six months or so so if you go to groups.openstack.org there's a few different documents there ones the official user group process ones like tips for organizers and especially that second one you know would really be great if we could get some love on that yeah yeah because I I think part of it I wrote two years ago so it could you could definitely use some updating and some love I still worked at Yahoo when that when that was written so that was a while ago and so that's that's an acute repository yeah so the ambassador program help user group so you can find some document on the on groups that OpenStack.org so we help few groups so in China in East Europe under in Africa North Africa we help to launch fire and also new Tunisian user group so it's just some few examples because it's all over on all continents but this group contact us to to know how to launch a group so we work together to to to give to give to the group some content some some way of organizing meetups communicate on the meetups so they have created their website and we we help for the two months ago they organized a big Tunisian user group it was inside a cloud day and we we help them to to get some to organize some workshop so we have some some partners some company in in Europe OVH they gave they gave they give them some some resources VM resources for workshops so it was 160 people for three workshops and we are we work on the content of of the workshop on give them some resources so this is one of the example of ambassador help for user group and now they organize one one meetup every every month so it's again still is something like 60 or 70 people but it's one of the group so you wanted to speak about China in China we have the first first user group is founded in Beijing after that we because you know in China China is a really big country so there are Shanghai and Xi'an there are there are so many open stackers there they are complaining about they don't have open stack events in their cities so after co-work with the open stack developers they founded their own user groups in in their cities after that I find that it's really easy for them to set up the events and we have the base the baseline of the event organization and the speaker speak list in China we have a little database of that I think it's a good progress for for the station in China after that after this user groups grown up they have co-work with the talker and messos use group they work together to have more completely the meetups in the in recent mouses so this is example are you're are they able to use groups that open stack that work like because the open stack obvious to slow in China so we use the beat up.com more often yeah okay so what's next in the general agenda memorized obviously yeah I think we can do a little bit about what we expect from the future and what we like to hear for example this speaker list is one of the most important things because it is a major problem for example for Eastern Europe. It was in Nordics in Europe in the there was a thread in the mailing list about I don't know it was Scandinavian user group Swedish and they had some problem to to find some figure and to find some sponsors so we said it's good to have a sponsor but if you don't have sponsor you can just make the presentation so for some groups it's not easy that depends if you have big community of developers in your country but some for some user groups it's not easy for this so perhaps in the bear it's it's really easy but in France it's quite easy also because we have lots of developer in Paris but for some small groups in small country it's not easy so yeah we have started to collect some data and it will not be easy to move the speakers that depend of region but it's possible sometimes to to make some remote sessions so it could be a way of an easy way of spreading the speaker for different user groups so we have started few few sessions like this but we yeah Martin yeah you wanted to build this this this list and share this list with a process to communicate yeah I guess the place of this will be this community portal and yeah basically it is a very interesting question whether we support this which is the best way to to listen the remote speakers or or you like to see the speakers up personally and there is a lot of questions regarding the travel costs and yeah it's interesting personally I prefer the personal presence it is much better to talk face to face yeah it's not easy but sometimes we use our network because we we know lots of people so it's more easy for us to ask okay can you we know this company so the speaker can have some phone with his company to move but yeah we do not have a budget to pay for this for this travel so it's not easy to to help for this but yeah we have remote session we can find a way of finding some money for this most of time yeah I think it is a typical gary auction but if we could get some of this budgeting we could arrange some road trips for the speakers the typical example of this open stock day we are doing that that the open stock foundation stop is visiting several several events in Europe and and Israel for example in a row and you can lower the travel cost that way so so I've been I've had a unique problem in the Bay Area that there's too many people coming at us it's a good problem to have but it can be a little bit overwhelming where it kind of turns into background noise so sometimes I'll get like a hundred marketing people will hit me in one month and it's so so what I started doing is there's a there's a lot of energy to be channeled there putting in the most positive way they all have some open-stack related reason that's why they're reaching out they're usually reaching out through meetup because that's popular tool in the Bay Area and other areas as well but they're they're also reaching out because maybe they look to the speaker list here or I used to be on the board and they knew I was in Bay Area so they'd find me in different ways or find the different organizers in the different way I'm not the only one but I'm the most active so nevertheless so I started working with some of the more active in the community marketing people in my area and at the time I was at VMware so what we started talking about was there was really two different kind of subgroups within the marketing community that could really help us one was more focused on delivering a single event where they could kind of almost like a mini-conference and we have this annual open-stack birthday party which is kind of turned into that and they're they're all regional or local generally put on by the user groups not always but generally and so that's a good focus for those people that have a marketing budget and they want to spend money and we're like well you know let's help you do that and so we can put on a really awesome annual birthday event and also a little bit of side love from that is that we can use some of that money during the rest of the year which is a tiny bit compared to that event for food and drink and stuff like that to help the regular user groups to go so that that group is more around sponsorship and that's but there's a separate group of people that are more focused on events and they're usually the guys that are affiliated with the an actual product team and they're so they're they're more focused about actually getting a certain number of events and a certain kind of headcount of getting in front of people's eyeballs and getting responses so that team typically are trying to do something very similar to what they're trying to find speakers and find trying to find topics that are similar to their product well that we just so happen to have this big huge list of talks that are submitted every six months which the speaker list is actually drive from so the idea and I have some guys from something guys from EMC are actively working on this with a slight EMC bent but we're talking about other people joining to do exactly that work with the foundation to actually start to organize that list and start to curate it and start start to have the the user group organizers in different areas be able to pick from that list it hasn't been quite organized it's more a theory rather than implementation but it's a it would be kind of an add-on to the speaker list to give it a little bit more umph and you know topics and and think availability potentially as well for the speakers so so this idea would be to harness the the kind of the marketing energy that could drive some of the user groups to have that extra help you know the people that are organizers have the interest and open stack that people in the marketing side have you know drive to kind of get their message out so we can kind of put them together and have synergistic relationship there also I think we've seen something similar in in the Indian user group in Bangalore because everyone wants event to have events in Bangalore but we have a lot of other cities that we also do cities and we don't really have as much luck finding sponsors there so we do diver we do do something similar where we divert some of the resources that are left over from meetups in Bangalore and do it in the other cities we also tend to collaborate a lot with universities and I think I think universities provide a very good venue and they usually have a budget for snacks and labels and they have they've got a projector and and they've also got students and professors who are always interested in something like this so yeah so where you can't find sponsors find try and find universities and that that works out very well you might need to you might need to I don't know work a bit hard to get a response from from them but once you're in I mean once academics usually tend to favor open source projects anyway so it's it's it's a very good thing for us I was talking to have some really great people at HP Lisa Namphee Rick Evans I left Yahoo about a year ago and as I did I lost my space because they weren't interested in you know longer story but so that I was hosting the meetups at Yahoo for years and so they basically jumped in with both feet and started helping with the space and started basically helping me which is great love it but they also had some mandate from HP to expand it and make it expand HP's user group participation to more cities so as we started talking about the sponsorship idea you know how would we organize the money who'd be responsible how would be allocated those kinds of like nitty gritty things but also you know what if we have money left over at the end of year what do we do with it so we started talking about why don't we do sister cities like perhaps one of the user groups that's need some help us sponsorship we could either have them self sign up or we could grant them in a way and and spread the money around and for some of the companies that's actually what they're trying to do so that would be aligned with their their intention so so I think if we do just essentially build in a couple of mechanisms to grab the right energy when people do show up rather than saying well come back I'm not quite ready for you then we could do a lot more cool things and maybe get this maybe not just the the quantity of this number but the quality of this number up so I mean any questions from the ground hey hi this is Ajit from Open Stack India user group so I just wanted to know few questions do you guys meet only in summits or do you have offline meet ups where you interact with community manager and ambassador and if yes then is there any way to track what was discussed and what is the objective that has been set to for each of the ambassador and it becomes more clear on the community size how each ambassadors what are the you know to do list and where are they now and so that community can expect more okay where the ambassadors and what are the next few things that we are expecting in next you know few months first question is this if you have offline meetups and are you going to share the agenda with the community the second one is a very common you know problem that we face and I'm sure that many people would agree on that that we host meetups and the number of people they show up in the meetup are very less compared to the number of people who are SVPDS right and as these are free events we cannot charge so sometimes people they don't you know value anything that is given for free right and it becomes very difficult to manage community where we stop people beyond the numbers right but and the end of the day we end up you know stopping some people those who are genuinely interested than those who didn't show up so how do we you know solve those two issues I don't know if your second issue first I mean I don't know if I have a solution except for like banning people my experience has been about 50% if we don't we generally have every other Thursday so people actually don't even a lot of probably half the people don't even check they mean a page to show up because they know it's gonna be there's a cadence that's HP Centerville show up on every other Thursday so those people that's that's usually about 40 to 50% we can get 50 to 60 people usually just by you know if we change it we have to send out like five emails to try to get all those people's attention they don't show up when there's not one but if we we advertise at least a couple weeks if not a month in advance we're gonna have a speaker and make it very clear what the topic is and even better if it has something to do with a hot technology like when I bring in Vish when he was Nova PTL or I bring in one of the other PTL's we had Morgan in he's the PTL from Keystone we had I think about 220 people showed up it was oh yeah I guess we're done for time but that was about probably 80% of the people at signed up so you know just it depends on it depends on that so I'm not sure what you meant about offline I said you guys just meet in the design summit ambassador and community manager or do you meet offline as well we have had meeting we have had regular meetings I I guess they're actually public we've been meetings we've been a little haphazard yeah but yeah we they're actually posted out on yeah like any other project and the agenda is available on the wiki indeed and as we've out of time for the session right after this basically we're going to be having a meeting in room 224 I believe and we're gonna be just working through a bunch of things we need to do but anyone's welcome to come and please come and join us yes thank you very much and see you guys room number thank you