User Group Ninjas
From Community Leadership Summit Wiki
User Group Ninjas – 25 people
User groups are an important part of online communities, because they are the place people get to meet face to face. Forge the local relationships that you need to do long term kinds of projects.
What do you want to get out of this session?
- want to figure out how to get user groups started
- is it ok to 'co-opt' other user groups for your technology
- first GTUG was a joint meeting with a JUG
- talk with UG organizer and do a one-off session
- what should be the focus of the user group?
- too narrow, too broad
User groups when they start are a bunch of individuals
Meetup.com is a tremendously valuable tool for user group
Start-up Best Practices
- If you meet once a month, meet once a month no mater what; consistency
- Good collections on how to start an UG...on the Python website
- Have a website; mailing list – disussion list vs announcement list
- Beer, giveaways
- Time for people to greet, and mingle at the end
- Take care of the social aspect
- Great place to create leaders and speakers
- Make it easy for people to be speakers
- Lightening talk type of meeting – needs a certain size
- Talk size is 20-30 minutes
- You will need to do a lot at the beginning.
- Ask people directly to do one specific person to do one specific task. Don't generalize.
- Watch what people do, and ask them to do stuff they already do.
- Artifacts after the meeting are really helpful.
- Leaders need to take a soft touch.
Differences in different parts of the world
- university support
- teaching basic technologies vs advanced topics
- may not be only country specific, but locale specific – urban vs rural
Virtual user groups vs face-to-face
- online is considered much more like a forum, portal etc
- very different from ugs that have a physical presence
- stronger association to the physical group
- what about u-streaming meetings – some groups have 25-30 people on ustream at meeting
- changes the dynamic of the event when folks are watching over the internet
- show on screen the chat that goes along with the streaming so that the people in the room can see what the online folks are asking about
User Groups Sub-Groups
- Japanese OpenSolaris User Group Example
- Study groups – highend; go over a chapter each week
- Newbies
- International community (studying English too!)
- Do it in the same day
- Trying to handle language, cultural and skill issues
- Brazil example :Saturday tutorials vs weekday evening more technical sessions
Summer Apprentice Program
- get professional members of your UG to mentor students
- students have to do a report at the end of the summer
- have a meeting around the program where the students give lightning talks on their projects
How do I get younger members (students) into our group?
- visits to universitites
- Brazil example, university would pay for travel, and the speaker would do a ½ day event
- 250 events in one year
- OSUM clubs
- hard to get younger members and women
- monthly workshop that is free for Ruby that is oriented towards women, guys can come with a woman; hoping to get more women to the UG meeting
- not good at helping newbies
- add a way for someone to do something good (food for foodbank, donate money to orphange and then visit the place) (Abilities United)
- dual-purpose meeting
How do groups learn from groups?
- steal from each other liberally
- talk to the people that were there before you
- go to their meetings (difficult to scale)
- blend across group
- in a big international city, connections get built all over the world – people come and go; relationships extend to new places
- provide opportunities for face-to-face learning
- special subjects for user group leaders
- put together something for user group leaders in your area
What is success?
- need to respect that the leader is a volunteer, and what they define as success is important
- 100 people at the meeting is successful (close to the tribal number)
- how much does the ug community produce
- put a human face on problems and issues (open sourcing of Java)
How to balance corporate participation and user groups
- corporate goals, relationships etc
Talk to Andres at Meetup dot com about Meetup discount
