It's been a while since I blogged about our monthly Open Source meetups in the Bay Area! We just had our fourth meetup last week - with 40 participants (out of 74 RSVPs)! As usual, we had a theme wrapped around the whole meetup, which was this time ... (surprise): Christmas! I was very excited about it and we decorated our facilities with christmassy things -see the pictures below :wink: But that was not all! Our first speaker, Aaron Williams, was talking about how to prototype with IoT and he came up with software-controlled christmas lights, running on an Arduino and with sensors and an UI for maintenance purposes!
In the meantime, our Open Source Bay Area community grew to 280 members with overall 162 participants within 4 meetups over the last 5 months. But, that was not the only change! Based on the feedback we received from our upcoming meetups, our participants really enjoy Q&A sessions to get their more detailed questions answered. Because, at the end participants join our meetup to gain new knowledge and our survey results underline that content is king! Based on that, we change the format. Our speeches are now only 15m long, followed by 30m Q&A. This allows us no have more time to mingle and connect to like minded people!
As for the last meetup, we had two speakers joining the speakers panel plus one spontaneous lightning talk by Ralf Pieper:
- Aaron Williams (SAP): Architecting IoT Apps for the Cloud
- Solomon Chang (Zen Producer): An Introduction to Cassandra for RDB Folks
- Ralf Pieper - Lightning Talk: Crypto-currency
Here are some pictures - just to let you know what you missed :wink:
I was really glad to see such an amazing engagement within our community. Ralf came up with the idea for a lightning talk just before the meetup. We were thinking about those spontaneous talks already a few times and we figured it could be very nice to give our community members the possibility to talk to the community and bring up some issues or thoughts they had!
We also introduced online surveys this time, so let me share some results with you:
- 100% said attending the meetup was worth their valuable time!
- Overall, the meetup was rated 5.7/7 stars - which is a great result
- 64% said that the content was key for their decision to participate
- Here's what people liked most: Talks & selection of speaker, Networking opportunities, Engagement & discussions, Gained knowledge, Organization
- And here's what our community is most interested in right now: Big Data and cloud security, IoT everything (e.g. Connected Cars) - but live demos!, NoSQL databases and Big Data infrastructures, Crypto-currency in the cloud, OSS business models & success factors, Configuration Management
We received very well feedback and people would like us to keep it going - which we will obviously do! So, if you are interested join our community and RSVP for the next meetup using the link at the bottom of this blog! Also, if you know any cool speakers that would fit perfectly in one our meetups, please let us know!
Thanks everyone for participation and also thanks to Inga Bereza and Garick Chan for co-organizing all of our meetups :smile:
If you are an Open Source enthusiast, please join our meet up group and RSVP for the next meet up on January 21st!
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