Hey everyone,
First of all, I want to say thank you so much to everyone who participated in the User Community Leadership Planning session in Vancouver. We covered a lot of ground and had some great discussions around User Group Leader/UC/Ambassador/Foundation collaboration and general improvement of the program.
Below are the summarized notes from the session, along with some commentary on how we plan to move these ideas forward. To see all of the comments and discussions from the Forum session, check out the etherpad.
Meetup vs. Groups Portal - The biggest topic discussed was a Meetup Pro account vs. the current groups portal. MeetupPro allows the Foundation to own the main account and add sub accounts for each local Meetup. This will help when user group leaders step down or groups become inactive so that we can recruit more community participation. An issue with using a Meetup Pro account is that not all groups can use Meetup.com, but the groups portal is not quite as user friendly for pulling data and monitoring the status of different groups. We will continue to collect feedback on this, so please feel free to reach out with any comments or concerns. Birthday parties and the funding were also discussed. Historically, we have celebrated the OpenStack birthday in July, and have offered funding and graphics to groups that wish to participate. In regards to that, we ask that you please take this short survey about the annual funding. A new idea that we have discussed based on the feedback we have received is providing an additional $500 USD for a total of $1000 USD to groups who have had 5 or more meetups in the past 12 months. Groups who are not as active or who are newer will still receive the $500 USD (or less if that amount is too much). We also officially launched the Swag Store. With the store, we will be able to provide codes to user groups / ambassadors to order swag and have it delivered. When distributing funding including the birthday, the funding can also be shared in terms of a code for the store so you can get branded swag and have it delivered straight to you. Speakers for meetups - We discussed the Speakers Bureau as well, and plan to improve it in the future so it can be better utilized in finding speakers to attend your meetups. If you have particular feedback, please contact me directly.