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
