 Good afternoon everyone. I'm Manuel and we're going to talk today about finding and organizing a great Cloud Foundry user group. I got Animesh and Daniel from our team. Just before we get started, just a little background on us. We work for IBM's open cloud technologies organization and our mission is to do first of a kind open cloud projects, engagements with customers. And then what we do is we take that knowledge, we take that experience and we'll go out and try to give it back, feed it back to the community, feed it back to the development organizations. Part of our teams do actual development on Cloud Foundry, on OpenStack, on Docker. But in addition, beyond the working on specific contributions back to the community, we also try to give back to users and people actually running, operators running the technologies. And a couple of the ways we do that is we specifically work with the summits, try to give sessions, try to give feedback. At the last OpenStack summit, we gave a couple talks on Docker and OpenStack. At last year's Cloud Foundry summit, we talked about some, gave a couple technical presentations. Next week at OpenStack summit, we have a couple more. But the other big thing that we do is we run a bunch of meetups and we try to touch the users, the local users and try to get feedback and also give them a lot of our experiences. So today, we want to talk specifically about meetups and about how you guys can create one if you're interested in creating one or how you can contribute to one. Okay. What we're going to learn today is we're going to talk about two big things. We'll try to teach you and sort of convey our experiences. But then also, Animesh will go through an example of a Cloud Foundry summit, I'm sorry, a Cloud Foundry meetup that he runs here in the Silicon Valley. So what we'll start with today, Dan, we'll start talking about why meetups are so popular and why you should get involved. We'll see where you can find active local meetups. And then finally, if there's nothing local, no meetups that are local to you, how you can create, how you can organize and really the big thing for us is how you can sustain a strong community. So before I continue, I just have a couple questions. Who here has been to a Cloud Foundry meetup? Okay, awesome. And who here has been to any meetup? To OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, all right, awesome. And who here runs a meetup? All right, good. Awesome, that's great. And so just a little bit about us. Dan lives in the east coast. He runs the New York City Cloud Foundry meetup. He also runs the PHP meetup. You also run an OpenStack meetup in New York City. The Cloud Foundry meetup has 643 members. He's been an organizer since March of last year. Animesh runs one of the biggest, is it the biggest Cloud Foundry meetup? And Dave, by the way here, Dave Nielsen. And they have about 1200 members. He's been an organizer since June 2014. Dave started it before that. I've been running the Austin Cloud Foundry meetup since January. We've had two or three meetups since then. Actually, Dave's got done a couple of workshops for us. And so we're coming from a point of experience. And our team itself is running the Boston RTP and China meetups. So our team is a lot of experience doing that. So now let me hand it off to Dan so he can walk us through this. Can you hear me? Okay. Thank you, Manuel. So I was glad to see that several people have actually attended meetups. But for those who haven't been part of them, meetups actually have a history of root in computer user groups that have been around for almost 50 years. Every time there's been technology out there, there's usually been a group that's been founded to basically help people use that. In fact, IBM runs still one of the oldest user groups out there, which is share.share.org. For 50 years, it's just continually been operating to to help folks learn about IBM technologies. Meetups, they're basically about once a month events that just repeat in either a local venue or a restaurant or some office. Usually pretty informal. They have a simple speaker. They're scheduled after work hours. But there's no real hard and fast rules around them. You'll see a great variety of companies hosting really elaborate meetups like Netflix. And they do it maybe once quarterly or once every six months. And then you have some other folks that do it twice a month, just a repeating meetup, sort of an office hours type of approach. So there's plenty of different formats for what's out there. Here's an example of a good meetup content that's probably the prototypical example of the ones we've been running and the ones we've seen. Here's one I ran at this last year. We announced IBM an open source project that we donated to the Cloud Foundry community called the Admin UI. So basically I did a one hour talk introducing the local community that wasn't at the summit to that technology, tried to get some of the feedback and some contributors, some comments on it to basically get them aware of the project and involved in it and involved in the greater Cloud Foundry community. So it was just a Wednesday evening presentation at Pivotal Labs in New York City. They've got a great little kitchen area. Just a little bit of networking, meeting some people beforehand, going into the presentation and then following it with questions and post-meeting conversation drinks, things like that. Okay, so if you're new to meetups, probably they're particularly with Cloud Foundry. It's a great way outside of these once yearly summits to actually go learn about Cloud Foundry, kind of build on what you've learned here. It's a pretty complex project. It's sophisticated, highly distributed. You'll want to basically see a demo, talk to some local experts and as you continue to go to meetups, you'll learn more about technology. You'll have some questions for local subject matter experts that you can put out there and you'll basically build up a network of people that you can rely on and build up your own skills. And in fact, as with all of us, now that we organize Cloud Foundry meetups, we've been able to establish local expertise areas in Cloud Foundry, which has in turn helped a lot of the companies that are in the foundation find new talent in the area around the country and around the world. So how do you actually find one of these meetups? Meetup.com has become the go-to place. The first thing you do if you haven't already after this talk, go up to meetup.com, sign in and just basically fill out a profile, set up some of your keywords. Cloud Foundry is one of the keywords that are up there. There's also related topics like platforms of service, IaaS, OpenStack, things like that, that may be relevant to what you're interested in, that's specific to Cloud Foundry or more broadly about cloud computing. They also have a very good search interface. You can find, if you happen to be traveling, you can also find something in an area that you're going to. And as you set up your meeting profile and you join groups, not necessarily attend meetups, but join these groups on meetup.com, you'll find a network of people that are interested in related topics. So it's very helpful for learning about new technologies, things that are emerging, and learning about related groups here. For example, here's someone here that I didn't realize there was an Apache Mezos user group in New York. I joined the user group by finding out that this guy was RSVPing for my events. Okay, so if you don't actually find anything in your area, it depends. If you're not in a major metropolitan area, you may not find an existing Cloud Foundry group. And you may want to start a new one, but we would advise really that you look for something that's related to Cloud Foundry and actually be very specific that you don't find an existing Cloud Foundry group. One of the problems we do see in anti-pattern with meetups is people get excited about technology. They rush home, they set up a user group, but they don't realize there's an existing one in their town that's got existing people in it looking for speakers, looking for venues. They kind of go their own way and then do one meetup and then they abandon the group. So you want to make sure you're building on whatever community is there, and you may have to expand that out. So maybe not Cloud Foundry, but maybe Paz or a Cloud Computing user group. Look for OpenStack groups. Those are actually one of the closest open source projects to Cloud Foundry. So if you can find one of those, you can finally usually find an overlap in communities. And in fact, the OpenStack user group HowTo is a great resource for helping you find some of those tips. You'll see that bit.ly link later as well, but os-ug-tips. Okay, so if there's no Cloud Foundry group in your area, go ahead and try to find a sponsor or a venue to host it, whether it's your own company, whether it's a local university. And then get started with a topic and a speaker. Make sure that you're not scheduling something at the same time as, for example, Cloud Foundry Summit, where people may not be in the area. And ensure that you're not conflicting with holidays, things like that. We find that August, November, December, terrible times to hold meetups for the most part, just because the holidays and the close of business that's usually happening. And a Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday evening are perfect. Fourth Tuesday of the month has been my go-to scheduling for the most part. Okay, so as you become an organizer of these meetups, there's four patterns that we've basically been seeing that have been the best practices. So any great meetup and any great organization that you can sustain over time, each meetup has great content, really relevant to your local audience. You've got great speakers, either one or a panel or a lightning talk format. They've got a great venue that's very welcoming, not that hard to find. You know, it's sometimes like Pivotal Labs, which is one of my favorite venues here in San Francisco. And in New York is they've got an open kitchen, you can go grab a drink, grab a bite, and then the open area with the brand new media equipment is right there for the talk. And then great attendance. So all of that is kind of useless if you don't have people that are regularly attending, learning, and building the community. So I'll go into each of these four topics in a little more detail, and then at the end of the talk, Animesh will actually show how he put these into action. Okay, so as you're setting up your user group, one of the very first great topics to start with is everybody wants to see, everyone wants to know what Cloud Foundry is. So if you start with a talk on the architecture and a demo, that tends to be a very good beach head for starting up a brand new group. If you want to do it yourself, coming back after this conference with what you've learned, that's a great way to start. As your local group evolves, people always want to know right after they learn about the technology is, okay, so how do I use it? What's the best way to apply it in my company? So customer use stories and use cases are a great follow on topic, and we're always looking for those. And finally, another great topic to start with is the integration with OpenStack, so you can't run Cloud Foundry in a vacuum. You need an underlying infrastructure to run it on, and of course, there's always interest in Docker as an alternative platform as a service. So there's plenty of integrations, as you may have seen at this conference already with Docker that you can use as a starting point. Those tend to be actually our most popular meetups, the OpenStack New York and New York City Cloud Foundry one, drawing over 100 people each time. Okay, and to kind of drive to those topics, actually one of the best places to find a speaker for your either next meetup or your first meetup. If you heard a great talk here sometime from a great speaker, these are ones that we've had at our meetups, Cornelia Davis from Pivotal, Renee Welch is from SAP, and Sam Ranji, of course, who's been the MC for the event. Go talk to them, ask them if they're going to be in your area, and see if they're willing to reprise the talk or talk on something specific to your group. And again, you're at Cloud Foundry Summit, there's a lot of companies that have bet their future on Cloud Foundry. So they have an interest in building great user groups and organizations in their area. Go talk to them, see if you can find, if they have an office in your town, see if they can host their sponsor meetup in New York and in San Francisco, for example, Pivotal and IBM have been great hosts for us. We've also had some folks from the local university community that are interested in learning. We hosted at Pace University, Dave did a workshop for them on how to push your first Cloud Foundry application that was very well received. And of course, Altauros has been a great partner in spreading a lot of user groups throughout the United States and into Eastern Europe as well. Okay, so again, you really want to find the most attendees, see if you can get a lot of people into your meetup group. You'll notice with meetup, there's very low barrier to joining groups, so you may get a lot of RSVPs for an event, but it may turn out to get a low turnout. Generally, don't get discouraged by that, it's usually about 30%, 40%. If you get like 80 RSVPs to get like 30 people actually show up, there's a lot of factors that go into that. There's weather, there's timing. Don't be discouraged by it, but try to embrace that part of meetup and be as open, get a lot of people involved in your group. So if they can't come to this event, they may come to a future event and they want to know what's going on. You'll want to be able to promote the event through Twitter and announce it in a cadence up to your event. Again, the open source user group tips page, excellent for helping you, for example, schedule tweets a week out, two weeks out, things like that, and giving you a good format for engaging people, a great first place to start. And of course, at the presentation, before the presentation, two minutes before the presentation, people are always going to ask for the slides, the recording, and possibly streaming. So think about preparing those things in advance, but also if you have the collateral that comes out of each meetup, people love to see the pictures, they love to have the slides, and it makes them more likely to come to future events to be part of that. And that helps not only your local group, but expand throughout. And that's one of the things, actually, that Animesh has been very successful at, that's helped him build the community as well as he has along with Dave in the Silicon Valley area. Okay, so just to wrap up on organizing a group, don't underestimate the effort. Like I said, like a lot of people, they get excited after going to a conference like this, and they really want to get going. But it does take quite a bit of effort to sustain a group. You want to make sure that you engage people in your community. You find co-people from different companies or within your own organization that are willing to be part of that community to help you run it. You're not going to be able to host each event. It's a lot of work to organize speakers, lineup venues, capture, video, take pictures, tweet, whatever during an event. You want to make sure that you, once you've established that beachhead, you've got a bunch of other folks in the community that are going to be able to help you out. So you want to be the catalyst. You don't want to be basically the keystone of the whole thing that if you go away, it goes away. That's really not good for the community as an open source, as with meetups. And there's a great place to pick up some more tips on organizing meetups here from Mike Schinkel. I don't follow these to the tee. There's some things in there I think are a little controversial. Some people are, they get upset about people RSVPing and not showing up. It's hard to plan about food or drinks. He recommends, for example, a nominal feed RSVP of like five dollars. I don't like that idea. It just kind of is against the spirit of open source, even though people are more likely to commit to actually showing up if they've got some skin in the game. But otherwise, there's a great bunch of tips on there. That and the open stack meetup group tips are fantastic. Okay, so I'm going to hand it over to Animesh. He's going to take those four great patterns practices and show you how he used them to basically build his own career, build up the community in the Silicon Valley area. Thanks, Daniel. Are we okay? So yeah, I think Daniel gave great tips around how to run meetups, where to find guidance, when to schedule, what to look out for. One thing which I do want to elaborate on first is why. Because I think why is important, right? Why you should be running meetups? What is in it for you and you and you? And part of that is, you know, at the end of the day, we all have our day jobs and we can only spare so much time and effort into something which is truly altruistic in nature. So around two years ago, when I was giving some technical presentations, by the way, I work for IBM, so I was giving some technical presentations and I realized I really like doing it. I really like, you know, taking technical knowledge and spreading it and making folks aware of it. But then your day-to-day pressures of delivering technical projects, being on meetings, writing status reports, doesn't give you time. That was the time I wished, you know, there were many versions of me, many clones of me, which can actually do that on my behalf. And I let you know, meetups actually enabled me to do that and let's see how. So at the beginning of last year, when I was asked to run a meetup around Cloud Foundry and Bluemix in Silicon Valley, to begin with, I was a bit apprehensive. First thing is, I mean, it was a relatively new venture for me and specifically also Silicon Valley is a unique place. You know, there are thousands of small startups who are there. There are companies which began very humbly and went on to become ultra successful. But it's a very competitive place and to stand out, you need to be on your feet, always learning and always motivated. So I began searching for my motivation. The fact that I was working on and I am working on IBM Bluemix, which is an open source platform, which is based on Cloud Foundry and is targeted towards developers, convinced me that this is something I needed to talk about at an organic level. I needed to reach out to the grassroots developers and have folks and communicate the message around Bluemix, around Cloud Foundry. So that was definitely one motivation. The second thing which motivated me was a great organizational culture in place within our organization, our VP, Angel Dias, who is heading our group. He also gave a keynote yesterday around Bluemix and Cloud Foundry. He's a great champion of meetups. He has a worldwide team which is running meetups across the world around Cloud Foundry, OpenStack, Docker, and he really supports and in fact incentivizes and rewards that initiative. As you can see, IBM was, we are running Cloud Foundry meetups in Silicon Valley, in East Coast, in Austin, Boston area, you name it. We are all across the world. Even in OpenStack meetup groups, we are partnering in a lot of them in Austin, Philadelphia, Connecticut. We did some meetups with OpenStack meetup group here and we are participating in Docker user groups as well. So that was a good motivation as well and I knew that this is something I definitely wanted to do going forward. The other thing which you see with respect to Bluemix, as I mentioned, since it's a platform which is targeted towards developers, there was a great realization within the organization that we needed to grow it at the organic, at the grassroots level. So if you see, there are around 14,000 or 15,000 people who are actually participating in Bluemix meetup groups across 81 cities and around 30 plus countries. So that's a huge initiative and all that within a period of one year. So, okay. I knew I wanted to do it but you rarely get what you want as is, right? And you need to get a bit innovative to get there. So the first thing I wanted to do in Silicon Valley was find if there is a Cloud Foundry meetup group. There was one, Dave Nielsen, who actually started that. It had around 200 odd members at that time. I did reach out to Dave, so that's an interesting story. And Dave being busy as he is, he probably didn't see the email, he didn't reply. And around a month later I got a mail from meetup.com that the meetup group is being shut down because nobody is kind of stepping up to be an organizer. I saw the great opportunity, got myself signed up, became the organizer. Dave came to know of it and he was obviously not happy. Why did you do that? I said that's a message I got from meetup.com and since I was starting, I didn't know what happened in the background. Apparently, meetup.com was sending him reminders that there was some dues because he knew to pay a monthly fee which keeps on marrying at around $12, $15, which he forgot, right? I mean, he was not seeing those emails. I kind of explained, okay, we got on the same page and thereafter started my journey. So that was one thing which I did and the second thing was definitely I started a Bluemix meetup group from scratch in the area. So okay, now I have a meetup group to schedule my meetups. The second thing is I needed to hit a home run in the first pitch, right? So that means I needed to schedule the first couple of meetups and I wanted them to be big, get a lot of members in so as to develop that early reputation in the community. Now, how many of you would go to watch a movie just because a Tom Cruise or a Brad Pitt is in it? Right? A lot of us, right? So going by that analogy, I realized that sometimes there are superstars in the community and no matter what the content is, if you just get them in your meetup groups, you are actually ensuring a big, big attendance. So that's why I started with Ferran Rodinas, actually got him to do a meetup around Docker and Cloud Foundry and Tiago. And in this case, the content was also good. Ferran is very popular in the community and it ensured huge audience. That followed up with the Cloud Foundry and OpenStack meetup, which again was a big success. And with these couple of meetups, I think the path was set. I got a good reputation in the community in terms of being able to schedule and doing successful meetups going forward. And thereafter, just a couple of weeks ago, Sam Ramji was in one of our meetups as well talking about the CF Summit. And this superstar doesn't always need to be a person, right? You can form collaborative partnerships with other meetup groups which are hugely popular. For example, the OpenStack meetup group in Silicon Valley that has around 6,000 members. So if you think of it that way, apart from the 1200 members which we have got in our meetup group, we are reaching out to 6,000 other people and telling, hey, we are scheduling this. And if you're topping into sex, that's a great opportunity to get a huge number of people also educated about your meetup group. So definitely do that. We did the same thing with the Big Data Developers Meetup Group because one of the things Bluemix has is a big ecosystem of services which span the whole big data arena. So whenever we scheduled a meetup which actually went into that side, we formed partnership with the Big Data Developers Meetup Group. Again it has around 4,000 to 5,000 members. And definitely coming back to my movie analogy, right? There are times when you actually go to a movie not because of the superstar but because of the content, right? So if you have a very strong content, a lot of time folks actually flock just for that, right? So Docker has seen huge momentum, right? So anything around CloudFondry and Docker and Diego, that was a huge hit. OpenStack, it's the most successful open source project after Linux, right? So that's something whenever we scheduled a topic around CloudFondry and OpenStack intersection that actually got us like huge, huge appreciation. So these are some of the sample contents, right? You can talk about Bosch, how does Bosch work with CloudFondry and OpenStack. And it always doesn't have to be what does CloudFondry integrate with, right? Whether it's OpenStack or Docker. The fact which we forget is CloudFondry is an app platform. So you can actually go forward with a lot of very cool apps. You can create apps around the ecosystem of services. For example, a couple of meters which we did was around Internet of Things. So building apps on Bluemix and tying it up with our Internet of Things service. Again, great response. There was a similar one which we did around Watson services and Bluemix which are available. So you can actually take that whole route where you're actually building apps on top of CloudFondry, tying it with the ecosystem of services and educating people about that rather than always going into the internals and talking about how does it integrate with other technologies, right? So you have the speaker, you have the content, but one thing which we forget, right? I mean, if we don't know, and again, I'm going back to my movie analogy, if we don't know a movie is coming next week, we won't turn up, right? So we often forget, but it's very, very, very important that we spread awareness about it. So one of the things which we actually, which I personally do is ask my co-presenters or presenters who are coming to the meet-up to prepare the slides a week in advance. And what I start doing is once the slides are in, I start taking screenshots of certain slides which are very attractive, which kind of give an idea about the content, and then start tweeting about them, posting them on LinkedIn, creating a blog around them. So, and then even ask my other meet-up organizers to actually send a mail with that slide, you know, screenshot into that. So the whole goal is get the audience excited, create teasers, and use social media very, very smartly in this case to make sure the folks are aware that there is a meet-up happening around this topic so that they turn up. Okay. So, and finally, you know, what are the rewards, right? I mean, we are sparing this much effort and time, and most of us do apart from our day jobs. I mean, there are a few who actually run meet-ups, and that's something which they do for a living, but if you see most of the meet-up groups, folks are doing outside their day job. So one of the great things which I have found, you know, is that the live feedback which you get from audience, be it a technology you are proposing, be it a product, be it a solution you are talking about, and an app demo, you get very early feedback in terms of whether it's going right, is there something wrong in it, should we take it in a certain direction. So if you want to get early perception, and if you want to feel what's the audience's position about certain things in the market, start taking it in meet-ups first, you know, you'll start getting those feedbacks. And as you can see, I got feedback from all across the world, from London, from China, and part of the reason was that we were making efforts to actually live stream our meet-ups all across. So a lot of people were actually joining remotely. And then, another reward is, you know, in turn you are building your own personal eminence and brand. That has happened within the last six months, three of our slideshares, they actually ended up being the most talked about content, technical content on Twitter. So I got these emails from Twitter that this is the most talked about technical content on Twitter, and they were actually posted on Slideshare homepage. So come to think of it, you're also building your own personal eminence and brand as you go through it, and you are being featured on the Slideshare homepage, Twitter is actually spreading and advertising your own content. So, and the reason it was happened, as we post these content on Slideshare, we got humongous response. As you can see, we have gotten around 60,000 views, or content from the meet-ups has been tweeted around more than 7,000 times with the potential of reach of 1.5 million. Now, if you think of it, right, a meet-up is a very casual activity where you go and present something in front of a 100 member audience, and that's what you plan for. But if you think of the reach, if you do it in the right way, and when I say the right way is give enough time on your content so that it doesn't need a speaker to be standing behind it. The content should be self-explanatory on its own. And if it is, it has a shelf life which is much, much, much beyond your meet-up. So definitely make sure you're building your content in a way and then spreading that through the social media because the reach you can get is much beyond where a single event can get you. And finally, as I said, about the organizational culture, if it's in place, if you have a good organizational culture, you will be recognized and rewarded for that. And I did get recognition and rewards within IBM because of these efforts. So make sure your team is behind it and they're recognizing all the hard work you're putting into it, and that will act as a motivation to you as well. And I think the last part is, as all along while you're doing it, you're doing it, you're making some great friends as you're going through it. You're meeting some great people, making some great friends, making great connections while having beer and pizza and food, right? So it's a no-brainer. So definitely you should get involved into this. Create meet-up groups in your areas. Get involved in them. If you don't want to run, definitely join them and build your skills as well as you go along. With that, I'll just pass on to Manuel to wrap. And why you should get involved. We also want to show you where you can find the local meet-up. Go to meetup.com. And finally, we wanted to really talk about how you can organize and how you can sustain a community. And really, this is all about a community and giving back. So again, here are the links to our presentations and our Twitter handles. And one last thing, IBM is hiring, so if anyone's interested, come talk to us. Right? I don't think we have any time for questions, but we'll be around and we'll answer all your questions.