Linux.conf.au 2017 – Wednesday – Session 2

400,000 ephemeral containers: testing entire ecosystems with Docker – Daniel Axtens

  • A pretty interesting talk. It was largely a demo so I didn’t grab many notes

Community Building Beyond the Black Stump – Josh Simmons

  • How to build communities when you don’t live in a big city
  • Whats in a meetup?
  • Santa Rosa County, north of San Franscisco
    • Not easy to get to SF
    • SF meetups not always relevant
  • After meeting with one other person, created “North Bay web Professionals”, minimal existing groups
  • Multidisciplinary community worked better
    • Designers, Marketers, Web Devs, writers, etc
    • Hired each other
    • Seemed to work better, fewer toxic dynamics
    • Safe space for beginners
  • 23 People at first event (worked hard to tell people)
    • Told everyone that we knew even if not interested
    • Contacted the competitors
    • Contacting firms, schools
    • Co-working spaces (formal of de-facto like cafes)
    • Other meetup groups, even in unrelated areas.
  • Adapting to the needs of the community
    • You might have a vision
    • But you must adapt to who turns up and what they want/need
  • First meeting
    • Asked people to bring food
    • Fluffy start time so could greet people and mingle
    • Went round room and got people to introduce themselves
      • Intro ended up being a thing they always did
      • Helped people remember names
      • Got everyone to say a little
      • put people in a social mindset
    • Framework for events decided
    • Decided on next meeting date, some prep
    • Ended up going late
      • Format became. Social -> talk -> Social on each night.
  • Tools
    • Used facebook and meetup
    • 1/3 of people came just from meetup promoting automatically
    • Go where people already are
  • Renamed from “North Bay Web professions” to “North Bay Web and Interactive Media professionals”
  • “Ask a person, not a search engine”
  • Hosted over 169 events – Core was the monthly meeting
    • Tried to keep the topics a little broad
    • Often the talk was narrow but compensated with a broad Q&A afterwards
  • Thinking of people as “members” not “attendees” , have to work at getting them come back
  • Also hosted
    • Lunches, rotated all around the region so eventually near everywhere, Casual
    • Unconfernces
    • Topical meetups
    • Charity Hackathon, teamed up with students and non-profits to do website for non-profit. Student was an apprentice.
    • Hosted Ag+Tech mixers with local farmers groups
    • Helped local cities put out tech RFPs
  • Q: Success measures? A: Survey of member, things like Job referrals, what have learnt

 

 

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