openstack-community team mailing list archive

[Tristan Goode <tristan@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Christian,

Congratulations and welcome!

We started an Australian group in November (aosug.openstack.org.au), we have 115 members and we've had 2 successful meetups so far in 2 cities with 2 more planned for March. Here are some things we've done to get people along to your first meetups...

1. Get vendors along. By various methods we got people from Dell, Citrix, Rackspace, F5, Cisco and others coming along and giving talks about their company involvement. Go through the list at http://openstack.org/community/companies/ and contact who you can in your area.
2. Write to the Heads of Schools of the University IT faculties and invite them and their school along. We had a great attendance from many universities, lots of folks doing PhDs and some with them already, all were really excited by OpenStack and many are hands on.
3. A bar tab. If you can stretch for it, good, if not, this is where your vendors may be able to help. Free beer is always attractive. :-)
4. Look for local sysops/sysadmin/network ops email lists or online forums and promote your events there to get folks along.

Meetup.com has worked well for us, but it has a limitation that's annoying. It's disappointing that they make you tie the group to a city, as we have a sparse population in Australia and to keep the community from fragmenting into cities at this early stage we wanted just a single group to cover the country, and as we're doing meetups in multiple locations we have to keep changing the location. We asked them to allow for us to have a national group but they will not.

Cheers
Tristan


> -----Original Message-----
> From: openstack-community-bounces+tristan=aptira.com@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> [mailto:openstack-community-bounces+tristan=aptira.com@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
> Behalf Of Christian Berendt
> Sent: Saturday, 28 January 2012 10:18 AM
> To: openstack-community@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [Openstack-community] founded first german user group
> 
> Hallo together.
> 
> We founded the first german user group a few minutes ago.
> 
> We'll try meetup.com for organizing our meetups
> (http://www.meetup.com/openstack-germany) and will probably setup an additional
> mailling list for technical discussions in the next weeks.
> 
> Our first informal meeting will take place during the CeBIT (takes place in
> Hannover/Germany).
> 
> We plan hosting regular hackathons (in our HQ), providing german
> documentation/articles and regular informal meetings on several fairs in Germany.
> Anything else will show the future.
> 
> Bye, Christian.
> 
> --
> Christian Berendt
> Linux / Unix Consultant & Developer
> Mail: berendt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> 
> B1 Systems GmbH
> Osterfeldstraße 7 / 85088 Vohburg / http://www.b1-systems.de
> GF: Ralph Dehner / Unternehmenssitz: Vohburg / AG: Ingolstadt,HRB 3537
> 
> --
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