 So good afternoon or good morning depending on what time zone you're in So this is gonna be our panel about Cloud Foundry community and in particular. It's about the Cloud Foundry meet-up community Which is a very strong part of our community. There are a hundred and seventy six meet-ups last time I like to think there's more now around the world. I thought about send starting one in an article Just so we could say there was one in every continent. I have a friend that goes down there once a year But it's a very diverse community. It's run by a lot of different people from lots of different organizations We're gonna share best practices as you'll see the best practices vary So you should and your own meet-up or your own community. You should take the best ideas here and try them out at home So first show hands before we get started. How many people here have been to a meet-up any kind of meet-up? Awesome about two-thirds maybe three-quarters How many people have been to a Cloud Foundry meet-up where the topic was about Cloud Foundry? Wow, just a handful and how many people actually organize a meet-up? So you are a meet-up organizer? Awesome So all of you whether you've not attended one whether you've attended one whether you've organized one of your own Please feel free to jump in with your own ideas So if you have questions or if you have insights or you know We answered the question with how the best way to do something is and you have yet another way Feel free to jump in and share that So without we have three meet-up organizers who've done an awesome job in our communities And so we have them here to share what's worked for them What they recommend doing what they like about it why they do it and so I'm gonna have them introduce themselves to start And I think Kim you are first Hi, I'm Kim Baderman. I am the director of technical advocacy at IBM And I started the meet-up group in Seattle in 2014 and the meet-up group in Atlanta, Georgia in 2014 as well And I've been organized a meet-up since 2010 Thank you I'm Paula Kennedy. I am the director for business operations for pivotal Amir's I'm based in the London office of pivotal I used to run a company called cloud credo, which I founded in 2012 with Colin Humphries and And when we were kind of within cloud credo, we started our own meet-up group Which was the London platform as a service user group? Which we founded in 2012 as well and we still win it today Yeah, my name is Lucas Leven. I'm with Swisscom. I'm the product owner of our application cloud that's our platform as a service offering and We found that the Cloud Foundry meet-up user group for the Dach region In 2014 right after the Cloud Foundry summit in San Francisco, and I'm mainly organizing meet-ups within Switzerland Thank you all for joining us I didn't introduce myself. I'm stormy Peters. I used to run developer relations for the foundation now. I'm volunteering in this role I'm still working primarily on cloud foundry ambassadors. I haven't organized a meet-up. I go to my local meet-up I haven't organized a meet-up But I used to offer to send t-shirts or swag or anything any meet-up organizer wanted So I can't send you that swag, but I can find someone who can if you need it for your local meet-up So that I thought we'd just start with some questions And just kind of the easy one to start like what works really well in your community What what do you think your community your meet-up does particularly well on that? If you were going to give one piece of advice to someone starting a meet-up or someone trying to revamp their meet-up what would that be and Read anyone. Okay, I guess I'll start So my meet-up is slightly different from some of the other meet-ups you described So as is the platform as a service kind of user group So we're not just focused on cloud foundry, although admittedly we're slightly biased and we have a lot of cloud foundry based talks I think the thing that I have found that works well for us is We are we try to be consistent with when we have our meet-up And we try to schedule it regularly. So people in our community Kind of expect that we'll have a meet-up towards the end of the month normally on a Thursday And we try to have one a month and it's typically in the same location. So we run it in the pivotal office And I think having that consistency it's sort of on the calendar And I've had a few a few cases where I Had to book it on a different day because the speaker couldn't come and then someone would say to me Why did you change it to Monday because it's always on a Thursday and they sort of have it in their mind That that's when it is and I think by having it regularly and in the back of people's minds That way we get more people coming because they they sort of know when they expect it to happen You know what works particularly well within our meet-up group is the content It's really really about the content if you if we have a meet-up out mic a meet-up about microservices or Docker then we have a way more people in where it's just a Random Cloud Foundry topic. So we really see that people Check out the schedule and check what speakers there and what the topic is that there is RSVP So we really take care of the content there. And what are what are the Cloud Foundry topics that are really interesting? So are they interested in Docker as a competitor are there are they interested in hearing how customers use Cloud Foundry or Exactly, it's like how can I use Docker on Cloud Foundry? What are my restrictions? Or also, how do I need to design my application that it works on the Cloud Foundry and what is also very important point is? To get the lessons learned from other customers or other users from Cloud Foundry It's like what was your experience with with where did you struggle? What can we do to avoid struggling? So that they really can profit from it Yeah early on when we were just getting off the ground it was helpful for us to to cross post with other meetup organizers and so I encourage if you're Organizing something or you're thinking of it to get to know all the other meetup group organizers and applicable technologies So example for us was Dev Ops and Docker and a couple other different topics that played really well with Cloud Foundry And so that's how we got our attendee base kind of going And so then people are starting starting anything I always go out and look for advice And I'm sure when you started out if you asked you that tons of advice and the world changes and different communities are different And different things work. I was curious. What's the best advice you got that didn't work Like I know you said like Docker's not a hot topic in Seattle as much anymore Like what's what's the piece of advice you got when you started that sounded great and it just didn't work for you So when we Founded cloud credo and a piece of advice that I was given was if you run a meetup It's a great place to recruit new people. It's a like a you know a recruitment kind of hotbed of developers We never in the history of cloud credo hired one person through our meetup group And it was one of those things where like I really enjoy doing the meetup And it's a lot of fun, but we've never actually recruited a single person on the basis of having done that meetup group But we also see on on our side on hiring I can't agree there We have actually hired and met some people which are now working with us on our meetup So that was quite a good one what was not working out for us was or what I think is not working out this The meetup is called Cloud Foundry was a group for the Dach region So it's for the whole region of Germany Austria and Switzerland and that region is too big for a meetup group So I really recommend to do a meetup group local somewhere I mean Switzerland is local enough to just have one for the whole country But otherwise just for the city like you have with London focus there Someone told me to have in Seattle. There's two different areas So there's Seattle, which is a lot of the startups and all the bigger companies are in downtown Seattle But there's also an east side, which is where Microsoft and some of the Google offices are in different offices in general and so they said Do every other month do east side in Seattle and just alternate but that people we were we were losing attendees people That were in Seattle wouldn't come to the east side, but the east side would come to Seattle So we just ended up keeping it in Seattle proper after a while just creating twice as much work Oh, exactly the traffic and everything so Yeah, please I'll repeat the question if you could say it as loud as you could and then I'll repeat for the recording So the most annoying thing from an attendee perspective is a meetup with no content So please have good content Any any other advice he doesn't have any opinions at all Right, so at any time if anyone has a question or piece of input Yep, so the question is can it be too often and is once a month too often like do you lose attendees that way? That's a good question It's a lot of work. Let me be clear. It's a lot of hard work to run it once a month The hardest thing is actually trying to find the speakers and Just make sure that the content to your point is Actually relevant that people in the community care about it that you're not just creating a slot and then having to fill it What I try to do I do two things what I do is I run one every month Like I say I don't do one in August because in Europe everyone's on holiday in August And I don't do one in December because it's Christmas and people are busy doing Christmas parties So therefore I do ten I aim to do ten a year. I do one my November meetup We typically do lightning talks, so we just have some fun So we have maybe five or six speakers doing short talks and that's always quite a good fun event and then for the other ones It is difficult I mean, you know like I said the challenge of trying to find speakers and you might get one One event where you have you know a hundred people will show up because that particular content that you've got Or that particular speaker that you manage to book, you know It's really popular and everyone wants to come and then the next month Maybe you get 15 people come but I I look at it as even though I find it hard work to do It's also whether it's it's kind of that that principle of kind of the open space like whoever comes that was the right number of people So if you have an event and only five people come well, those were the right five people, you know They come they talk they network they build that community It doesn't really bother me that much whether I get a hundred or five if I if I've run it and they've come That was kind of meant to be so Along with that question Why why do you? You know Kim, why did you start the communities like what makes you passionate about it? And why do you think it's necessary to or why do you think meetups are important part of the Cloud Foundry outreach strategy? When I started years ago, I was in sales And so I was never one of those traditional people that had to have a sales engineer attached to me all the time I always wanted to understand the technology And so when I started helping out with spring and then I started the Hadoop user group in Atlanta I wanted to understand the underlying technology and so that was an easy way for me because I don't I can read release notes But it was easier for me to learn by hearing and doing and seeing And having questions in a meetup environment. So if that's why I first started I started doing it for Cloud Foundry You know, I feel like it's it's such a positive community and why I stay in it Even though that's not my core focus at IBM. It's because I love it so So we've kept you So Lucas what what what makes you do it? Yeah, for me It's really get to know new people and also get to new get to know new inputs I don't think then when we see new concepts or discuss about new concepts Is this really the view that it can be what do others people what do other people think about it and really? Get that valuable input and have that discussion Also the upper and the weird discussions that are very great on that meetups and that really makes me passionate about doing it I mean, I think with the meetup group that I do Like I say because we are a platform as a service user group Some of the most interesting kind of meetups we have are where we invite Basically kind of competition for pivotal to come in and present, you know, what they're doing and what's interesting for those other companies And it's a it gives us an insight into kind of what else is going on But you know cloud foundry is a community and it to me It doesn't really matter whether it's you know pivotal cloud foundry whether it's IBM blue mix doesn't really matter kind of the vendor It's just interesting to hear other cloud foundry stories how people are using it, you know What's going on in the world of cloud foundry and also like the other technologies like kubernetes and mesos and doco It's it's just interesting to find out what's going on in our community What people are interested in have them come in and talk about it And so a question that wasn't on my list of questions. I apologize to you already When you started these communities, how long did it take before you kind of felt like you had a rhythm and you had a nice group of Attendees that's coming so what would your advice to someone who is starting one like how long should they realize that it's gonna take before they Really have a rhythm. I think it takes a little while. I mean we started my first year of doing low-pug I think We ran them probably only once to the question of how frequent is too often. We only ran a meet-up probably Once every six months and because it wasn't frequent and people didn't really know about it We started off with only, you know 15 to 20 people and now we have I think nearly 900 members and I use a group And I think you just have to for me The best advice would be just keep doing it as long as you're enjoying it as long as a few people come as long As it's interesting to you, you know, it will just build up. It's just about keeping going I think Yeah, I think also for the beginning it's very important that you Co-organize with other meet-ups like Docker or Microsoft microservice meet-up groups in your town and Then the start I think that was was pretty easy on our side to get Some attendees because you also get promoted from meetup.com for the first meet-ups and Others will get emails about there is a new group and they will automatically sign a spiss on sign-up But it's more important that what Paula the man Paula mentioned that you keep it going and Really organized on a regular basis these meet-ups and search for the speakers search for the venues and keep that spirit Going that is within that meet-up group Probably took us three or four months in Seattle to get repeatable attendees And a lot of it is I'm super passionate about getting to know the people that come to the meet-ups and invite them back and remind You know, not necessarily remind them but say if they're on Twitter and hey, I can't wait to see you next week I hope you're gonna make it but really when we started having some pretty big high-profile Speakers was when you know people really started coming and said oh, this is awesome You know and we're gonna have someone that's more technical next week and not one of the original founders of Cloud Foundry But you know join us and said that really got a lot of up to helping for us I think it's also important to be kind of sensitive to the community One of the things I try and do when I'm scheduling a meet-up is just check the local meet-up calendar Not try and compete with other meet-up groups not trying like schedule something on the same night as some other big event And and if you want to start up a meet-up in your own, you know city or town where you live Maybe just see if there are already kind of a platform as a service user group or if there's a Cloud Foundry group There's no point in kind of trying to compete if there's one already in existence Maybe just contact the organizers see if you can contribute see if you can help not kind of try and form your new thing if there's already one You know you could support in your area. That's definitely a cardinal role of meet-ups. You know, please don't split the community Yeah, and really do not hesitate to contact the organizers. They're happy to to co organize something with you together So the question is what's the advice on level of content should you have? Frequent beginner level Cloud Foundry 101 classes or should you do deep dives in the different Cloud Foundry aspects? What works well we vary those so For Atlanta, we're still getting that off the ground even though we've been doing it for 2014 since 2014 So we do a lot of the frequent Cloud Foundry 101 things because Atlanta was a little further behind Seattle Seattle's You know a lot of tech companies, so I think it depends on your environment for sure But I do enjoy the deeper dive and we have had folks come in and do like many workshops And we ask you to bring your laptops and we're gonna do these things We're gonna actually show you how to work it so that that gets a lot of people coming back. I Think I think we do kind of similar to Kim. We try and mix it up. So sometimes we have the like say we have different Piles providers coming in and then you end up with a bit more kind of a vendor pitch And they'll talk to you about what their platform as a service will do Which can be interesting or less interesting depending We've done different things as well. So like say we do a lightning talks event once every year And that's always a lot of fun. So you get people talk and they'll talk about any subject It doesn't have to be you know technology related even it could be on anything And they're always quite well attended and then we've also run like a hackathon Which we've done on a Saturday and people come in and they'll hack on a certain piece of Cloud Foundry So we've done like a Diego hackathon which wasn't well attended but Was a lot of fun for those people that were there. So we try we also try and mix it up So the Denver you want to follow up on that So the question is what your policy or attitude towards vendor I have a lot of opinions on this We are a community first Happen to work for a company that actually has an opinionated take on Cloud Foundry. However, if you want to have that discussion after And someone wants to ask you about pivotal Cloud Foundry or a blue mix. That's fine But if you're coming in to do a straight-up vendor pitch, that's not what the meet-ups about Yeah, I've seen the same. We also had some real vendor pitches and after that I started to review the talks and review the slides up front just to go a little shortly about I mean One slide about what what they do no worries on at the beers. There's enough time to pitch it for sure, but Yeah, it's not a place for a full sales talk So on the on the content side the Denver user group usually does two presentations every night And so the first one will be a talk like I I gave like a cloud Foundry foundation update I know like all states come in and digital globes come in talk about how they use not vendor pitches But like actually how they implemented Cloud Foundry and they're quite honest about what's working and not working So that goes over really well And then their second talk is always a very technical talk by someone from the Cloud Foundry contributor team Talking about what they did so they kind of balance it every meeting we tend to kind of Invite people and if they do have end-of-pitch it's sort of at their own risk because We quite typically have Colin Humphries Who's our co-organizer and he will heckle and he will ask awkward questions So then does want to come in and do their kind of Competitive to Cloud Foundry pitch that's absolutely fine, but it's sort of at their own risk. Let's put it that way So so we've talked a lot about content what's been So everyone who organizes a meetup is always looking for speakers and contents and I'll put up mailing list We have a cf speakers at Cloud Foundry mailing list that you can actually post and say I had this meetup And if you're interested in speaking, but I'm curious what was your best most engaged best talk like So everyone can mob them afterwards and send them email and ask them to come talk at their meetup Josh McKinty He talked about his journey from open stack and how he and into Cloud Foundry and how it all tied together And just because it's Josh, you know a lot of people have wanted to meet him That was a huge talk. The other thing if you're talking about a technical talk, it was all around containers And it was just talking about the entire ecosystem And we got from a to z and how it plays into Cloud Foundry use cases for each one and that was pretty well attended Yeah, we'd like half a year ago. We had Colin Humphrey In Zurich and he talked on retrospective from Cloud Foundry. It was it was pretty good. I really recommend him I think I'll go apologize to Josh and Colin later I think probably our most well-attended meetup has actually been when we've done the lightning talks Because when you've got kind of six different speakers from six different companies and they all invite Their friends and their colleagues and they all come in and because there's typically what we've tried to do when we've done That event is have something for everyone It then seems to attract a wider audience and then you get lots lots more people come and you know I think that's that's always been our most well-attended event Any questions from the audience? So what's the format of the lightning talks? How many speakers and how long? so we try to do between five and six speakers and Depending on the number of people with our sort of our total session time would be let's say an hour But what we would normally do is try and have let's say three and then a quick break So if I can get more drinks and more food and then another three talks each lightning talk would be five minutes We typically get them. They maybe have a one-minute spare when it's off the stage So, but we're not strict when we do it. We're not strict on You know, you can only have each slide every 15 seconds We don't have any kind of format like that you can have as many slides as you want But you get five minutes and that's it How do you promote diversity of speaker and attendees? Posting with other groups In Seattle, there's women in tech groups. There's that I'm involved in there's also different Start-up groups that I'm involved in that tend to have more diversity and so that's that's work well in the past for us Yeah, I often go directly to two people and ask them and encourage them to speak at the meetup Give them the platform and have them to talk about what they're doing So we I've done something similar to Lucas. So we've particularly the lightning talks We try to encourage people that have not spoken before Because if you if you're not used to public speaking that five-minute slot is slightly less scary than a 20-minute slot or a 30-minute slot And so we actually had a really good case. I think it was two years ago when we ran it We approached somebody who was in pivotal to come and do a lightning talk and she was very nervous She had not spoken before and then since then she's gone on to speak at lots of different conferences all around the world And she's fantastic and she came back recently and did a half an hour talk at our meetup group There was amazing her confidence had built so much and just from doing that one five-minute lightning talk She's gone on and spoken kind of all around the world That's awesome Any advice from the audience on any of these topics? Anything else hey any questions? I always have lots of questions. I can go back to my questions My other thought on the on the on the paid talks though is that nobody wants to give a talk that nobody wants to listen to Sorry, I think being really blunt with people and saying you know great that you sponsor this thing people will notice that But if you stand up and give a product pitch, they won't remember you well So we asked how you found speakers What are the signs that your community is doing well like how do you know like so you started up this meetup It took three months to a year to get it really going How did you know then that it was going well like is it the number of attendees? Is it the conversations you have? I think for me it's when you see Kind of similar faces and you see the regulars that come I mean, it's always great to see new people come But we've had a couple of cases where people have come to our meetup They've gotten to know each other and the natural facts have then gone on to kind of form Companies together. So we've had a couple of kind of startup companies that have basically been built out of They've gotten to know each other because they've come to the to our meetup They've got a shared love for Cloud Foundry They have ideas about what they want to do with it And so they're going to go off and start the business from it And I think to see that kind of growth out of just our Meetup group to me is a really great measure of success like it looks like it's doing well Because people are kind of getting together outside of our meetup group and starting companies Yeah, that's your thing The number of attendees yet, that's always an indicator for sure But there's Paula said the regularly the regularity and if you see The same people returning to your meetup. I have the conversations and then Yeah, you can also build up some trust. You see their loyalty. This really is for me a good sign for a healthy community What makes me happy is when attendees become speakers You know and that that's always a sign of super engaged You know community that's happening and then when everyone we have to leave the space and they're closing it down Everyone wants to grab beer after you know, that's how you know it. You know, we've got a good little ecosystem going Yes, that then always when the beer starts not people just taking one beer and the left We're often there for hours and just talking and having discussions. Yep Conversation So what's your meetup which meetup do you run And so he said for the back there I might not hear that the most important part of your meetup is the is the social Social aspect of it. And so the content is to get the conversation going Thanks So do you run any analytics on your attendees No, I mean, I typically I Like to kind of in the run-up to it I like to like look at the numbers. I get quite excited if I see there's lots of people signing up I kind of ask people to sign in just so I know how many people are in the building in case we have to evacuate but I don't use it as a kind of a I don't ask me people to email addresses. I don't try and market to them. I don't try and hit them up for kind of information It's about just having that community of people can come and chat and you know, like you said have the sort of social content I don't tend to personally I don't tend to do any Analysis on who's coming or from which companies or you know, that type of thing not really Anybody else any analytics? Not yet. I Got through the list Right as you're about to have the meet-up the list kind of populates and it shows how many times They've RSVP on the website when their first time They've they said they were coming and then you can kind of go through and kind of see what the trends are But as far as I'm a huge proponent of if someone from an organization inside of the company were to say I want your meet-up list because we're sponsoring this and oh by the way We're gonna use this as a as a tool to try to sell to these people that I would shut it down I'm just like burn it to the ground But that's not what people are there for right They're not there to be sold to it You know your audience basically and then these people are are passionate about the technology or one or want to know more And so that's you know, that's the intent. So you got to keep that You know keep that like that and and we'll just take a couple more questions to wrap up But what's one thing that either someone told you what didn't work Or that you didn't realize would work that you accidentally ended up doing like what what surprised you that worked Someone said to me that you should as Kim mentioned earlier that you should move Location regularly so that you know if you've got people I mean London probably doesn't have quite such a split as maybe Seattle But you know someone said you should go for different locations so that it doesn't look like you're always based in one company's office Or you know that you're heavily influenced by one company, etc. etc That was the worst advice I think ever because it felt like if we changed location people then weren't quite sure where we were and they had to keep checking on the site and then people would kind of go to the wrong place and I was like that's actually crazy, so we now Consistently run it in the pivotal office And people know where it is They don't get lost and they show up and it's just much more straightforward We should go back to the people that gave you both the same bad advice Anything else that surprised you that was a success that they didn't expect or that someone told you wouldn't work For us, we changed as we are mainly Zurich focus that we have our meetups in Zurich and then once in a while we yeah, we were told yeah, do something in burn That's about one hour train It's the same bad advice Looks like but then they're actually I I didn't Thought that it will happen, but we had 30 attendees out of out of nothing and it was Really spontaneous Defined there, so it really surprised us You were successful in the second it was it was successful there. Yeah, so now we As of now check where what the availability of the venue is and based on that we then or where the speakers are from or How it works for us But but also then we do not change we have like our free locations and change maybe between these free locations But do not have always a different location. I Do think it's worth pointing out that you can get all the advice you should get all the advice you can I mean you should find out what's been successful There's a lot of commonalities, but every community is very different like you can even look if you did have access to the Meetup analytics you could see that the number of people that RSVP and Attend the meetup like the percentage of RSVP's that attend varies greatly by country There's just different cultures on whether or not you really come if you say you were coming I think the US is one of the worst so So if there are differences between locations and between communities So take take all the advice and then look the in one case it was bad advice in one case It was really good advice. Yeah Have you ever considered asking for a fee so we split the costs Pivotal in Seattle and Atlanta and Atlanta to you we split the cost so they host it And then they provide beer we provide the food But I'm also sourcing speakers and so As far as the fee goes we don't really charge our attendees We would rather pay that ourselves because we don't want you to have to pay to get to something However, it would there's a psychological thing. That's the study that if you pay a nominal fee More people show up. So maybe we should do that in the United States because it is flaky. It's about half you know I'd say it's probably about half in the UK as well I mean, it's normally if I see let's say 50 people have signed up I expect yeah 25 to 30 depending on the weather if it's a beautiful day in London. Nobody will show up Like I know that. Yes, the stormy stormy came and spoke at our low poke And I think it was like the first warm sunny day in London. We've had it was like our first hint of summer No one came like it was just so beautiful a day. It was like, I think we had maybe 10 people It was kind of quiet beer. Don't take it personally Or so I want to wrap up with one final question So I would ask you normally like would you do it again? But I think it'd be more interesting to the audience like what's the one piece of advice He'd give to them keeping in mind that a handful were meet-up organizers and a lot of people are meet-up attendees What's your one? When it comes to meet-ups like what's the one thing they should do and they go to meet-ups or why should they go to a meet-up for? What should they bring to the table that would help the meet-up organizer? What one piece of advice to the audience and it with any style that you would like that's kind of your closing Wow, no pressure I mean for me personally the reason I do it is because I Like being part of the community. I like meeting new people. I like talking to people You know and I enjoy it. It's really hard work I would say that if you're thinking of starting a meet-up group don't underestimate how much effort it is It will take up your time You will have some sleepless nights where a speaker will drop out at the last minute and you suddenly have a gap And you've got a hundred people signed up and how do you get that new speaker to come in at the last minute? Like those things happen, but you know, I enjoy it Honestly, I really enjoy it. That's why I do it And I think if anyone's thinking of starting a meet-up group Think about it. And then if you're passionate enough and it's something you really think you'll get some benefit out of I would recommend Go ahead and do it Yeah, from for me personally, it's really if you go to a meet-up do not really do not hesitate to Share your thoughts. I mean nothing is wrong. Just open up the discussion share your thoughts That's that's really the real value that I see If you're an attendee and you're getting to know the project or you're starting to play around with it Offer to be a speaker because there are no dumb questions. We're all in this learning together And if you want to give the one-on-one level talk and maybe you attended the first one four months ago But you've been really deep in it submit it, you know, that that's super helpful for all of us like After doing it for so many years. It's what stormy. I wouldn't be negative up here But I'm burnout trying to find speakers So also if you have people that you know that would like to come speak in the States Let me know and and let stormy know I mean they're keeping lists. So Thank you Paula Lucas and Kim and our whole audience and they they are here all week And they're all cloud Foundry ambassadors and you can interrupt them You can come up to them have a drink with them have a coffee have a water ask them your questions Tell them your opinions We're here to help make this community awesome as all of you are and so please start the conversations. Thank you very much. Thanks