We held our first OpenStack User Group Meetup in Poland yesterday with
up to 50 people joining us at peak times, both physically as well as
online via Google Hangout and IRC Chat. It was a pleasure and honour
for us to talk with some of the best known and most sophisticated
OpenStackers in the world, and we are very thankful for their
attendance. If you didn�t have a chance to join us live, please find
below our recorded Google Hangout sessions.

Tim Bell, CERN
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcuW9mpFb3Y&feature=plcp

Boris Renski, Mirantis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F8aDqqFHwY&feature=plcp

Eric Windisch, Cloudscaling
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VabZmeb1RP4&feature=plcp

Atul Jha, OpenStack India
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqNH-9XOi9k&feature=plcp

Lessons Learned

Let me share with you what key learnings we drew from our first meetup:

OpenStack: don�t believe the hype. Expect most IT people to know
little to zero about OpenStack. It might be the largest open source
cloud software project globally with hundreds of companies backing the
initiative with hundreds of coders and thousands of members, yet there
are still zillions of system admins and developers out there who have
no clue what OpenStack is about. Educate them all, one geek at a time.

Tune into the global OpenStack community. When you�re small, you have
to think big. We have less than a handful of OpenStack deployments in
Poland, hence there are very few experienced OpenStackers able to
share their knowledge. As a small community, we have to think out of
your (local) box and attract the brightest OpenStackers in the world
to educate our community and we also need to find ways to give back to
the broader OpenStack community. OpenStack is an open source community
driven effort, it�s all about a mutual, respectful relationship with
other OpenStackers, it�s about giving and taking, so let�s do it
right.

Google Hangout & IRC Chat rock. It�s exciting to talk with
OpenStackers from the United States, Switzerland, Kenya and India at
the same time. We obviously lack resources to fly in speakers from all
over the world. But thanks to Google Hangout & IRC Chat we were able
to attract the smartest OpenStackers from virtually any place on this
planet. At the same time, we contribute back with our online sessions
to the OpenStack community far beyond our country borders: We welcomed
attendees from 9 different countries in Europe, Africa and even Asia
Pacific - most of which face similar challenges to ours. But when
small, local OpenStack communities join forces, there is an
opportunity to create a huge multinational community spreading across
multiple regions. It�s the power of many in action.

Pick your audience wisely: Only the brave. It�s only possible to start
a revolution with brave people, and OpenStack is a revolution. We
learned that you need to attract the brave ones in the first place:
People who don�t shy away from asking questions in front of an
audience, even in spite of a severe language barrier. People, who are
willing to make a difference, who show up at the meetup with burning
questions and who want to apply their newly acquired skills the next
day at work. We need to listen carefully to them and tailor our
meetups around their needs. The vast majority of the IT crowd will
follow later, but you can only start a movement with a small bunch of
wildly determined, super-pragmatic, brave people.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fW8amMCVAJQ

Address real life problems. Some of our attendees are contemplating to
build private clouds or to deploy their applications on alternative
public cloud platforms, but they don�t necessarily have OpenStack on
top of their mind. We realized that we primarily have to address their
questions such as: tactical choice of hypervisors or capacity planning
for cloud storage, automated deployment and management, application
development and deployment. Our learning: Relate to people�s everyday
experience reality, and then expand the conversation to OpenStack -
rather than the other way round.

Keep it short and focused. We challenged our attendees with four
speaker sessions in a row from 5.00 pm to 9.00 pm. Our key learning:
We need to keep our meetups shorter and focus on one specific topic at
a time. Also, people are keen on diving deeply into technical
conversations on topics they are interested in (we feel that an
OpenStack User Group meetup is not necessarily the right place for
level presentations on OpenStack).

Do it again, again and again. We will host our meetups and the
accompanying Google Hangout & IRC Chat sessions on a monthly basis.
Feel free to register for our upcoming meetup on July 11th 2013, 6.00
pm - 8.30 pm CEST (GMT + 2hrs), and watch out for further meetups in
August, September, October, November � see you there!

http://www.meetup.com/OpenStack-User-Group-Poland/

All the best,

Rafael

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