Meetup Organizer's Guide

This is a guide for those who are interested in running a Hyperledger meetup. We encourage you to start a meetup in your area if there is not one nearby. If you are interested in becoming a meetup organizer, please read this guide and then contact us.

This is also a living document, so feel free to edit the page to add tips or suggestions and please let us know if there is information you’re looking for that isn’t here.

Other Useful Resources

In addition to the information in this guide, you may also find these resources from meetup.com to be a helpful:

meetup.com's Organizer Guide
meetup.com's Help Center
meetup.com's quarterly webinar series for Hyperledger organizers
- October 8, 2019
  - Part One (video) and (slides): Covers tips on how to promote your group, contact your members and gives a status update on using WeWork spaces for meetups
  - Part Two (video) and (slides): Amol Kulkarni discusses how the community ran the National Indian meetup and how others can do the same and Adrian Avendano talks about how GST runs their meetups and demos a tool they are building to help organizers connect with speakers
- June 4, 2019 webinar (video) and (slides): Recaps tips from previous webinar and includes tips on how to transition leadership when an organizer steps down and engaging group members between events
- March 27, 2019 webinar (video) and (slides): Covers how to get people to show at events, how to find speakers, how to build a leadership team and meetup.com product updates.

Becoming a meetup organizer

If you like networking, organizing venues and finding interesting speakers, then you would make a good meetup organizer.

The process for being approved as an organizer is simple — after contacting us, we’ll find time to speak with you. During that call we’ll make sure that you’re serious about taking on the role and we’ll walk you through the support we offer (this guide also describes the support available).

We also encourage you to share responsibilities with others and not do it all yourself. From experience, we’ve found that having 2 or 3 co-organizers for a meetup is ideal and allows you to share tasks and to not get blocked if you become too busy with other things for a period of time.

Please do not create a meetup without the intention of leading the group. While we love to see interest in spreading Hyperledger around the world, the most successful meetup groups have consistent local leadership and representation.

Using meetup.com

We will set up a new meetup group on the meetup.com site for you and will link it to the other Hyperledger meetups hosted there. We will name your group after the city or region where you live, such as Hyperledger San Francisco or Hyperledger Morocco. The site has a range of tools you can use to help organize your events. If you’re not familiar with that site, please see meetup.com's article about using their organizer tools.

New meetup groups will get created using Hyperledger branding, although you can make changes to the design of your group pages. When posting images and captions for your meetup, please consider using images of the Hyperledger official logo, event speakers and attendees, and the local city and event space as well as including captions that are concise and considerate. Productive posts combine engaging photos with captions that are lively and powerful without resorting to sensationalism. If you have any questions please contact us.

Although we recommend that you use meetup.com, we do recognize that there may be reasons why using that site isn't the best fit for your local community. For example, meetup.com isn't accessible in China so that community uses http://www.huodongxing.com/. Please contact us if you want to discuss other event hosting platforms. Note that these guidelines for running meetups will still apply and that we may also create a group on meetup.com to point to where you are hosting your event in order to better promote your activities.

Collaborating with other organizers

There are over 100 Hyperledger meetup groups around the world and you can tap into the expertise and ideas of other organizers by collaborating with them on the following channels. We encourage you to sign up, introduce yourself and ask any questions you have.

Scheduling and promoting meetups

We recommend planning to organize a meetup every 2 to 3 months, although your should gauge the interest from your local community and adjust the timing as needed. Announcing your event at least 3 to 4 weeks in advance will give people time to plan to attend.

We also recommend being clear about what audience you are planning for when you schedule a meetup. For instance, is your event for developers, end users, those looking to get started with Hyperledger or some combination? Is the level of content going to be for a beginner, intermediate or advanced audience?

Once you’ve got your event scheduled, you’ll want to let people in your area know about it. The specific local channels to use will vary in different areas, but consider:

attending blockchain events near you
speaking to companies using Hyperledger
reaching out to students at nearby universities
sharing on your social networks using the #Hyperledger hashtag

We've also provided two image templates that you're welcome to use to create digital banners to promote your event. You can see examples of the templates below:

To use the templates:

Go to the Google Doc presentation version of the template and make a duplicate copy of the file
Add the information for your event in one or both of the slides
Go to File > Download As to get a version of the image in a format you can use on your meetup page, Twitter or wherever you'd like to share it.

We can also use the Hyperledger Twitter account and blog to help you promote your meetups. Sharing photos and write-ups of a successful event will get visibility for your group and will get people to sign up to be notified of future events. We can also share announcements of upcoming events and encourage people to attend. Please contact us about sharing photos, write-ups or announcements.

There is no requirement to share news about your events, although we will be able to provide you with better support if we understand what you are doing with your meetup group.

Finding content and speakers

We strive to create an environment where people who are interested in Hyperledger — developers, beginners and advanced users alike — can gather and talk about the technologies we’re creating and learn what is new in the space. Please do not use the meetup platform to promote unrelated webinars or events to your local community.

Topics you cover should be tied in some way to the Hyperledger ecosystem, such as introductions to the community and the projects, demos of applications, explanations about how to get a development environment set up, or presentations of use cases that a person or organization is working on. They key is choosing topics that are right for your audience. Talks about code contribution and demos are great for technical audiences, but if you feel like your community needs more education or would benefit from networking go for it!

To help you prepare content for your event, we have collected a number of presentations that you’re welcome to remix and reuse as needed. If there is content you would like that isn’t available, let us know and we can add it.

Note that there is no language requirement for a meetup. If you think that it will make more sense to make it in your native language, please do. There are presentations at the link above available in various languages. And if you’d like to translate any material into your preferred language, share that with us so we can share it with others.

Although you’re welcome to use these presentations to present on your own at your event, you may also want to bring in speakers. You can find speakers by meeting other community members in your area and finding out the interesting things they’re working on. You can also reach out beyond your local area and invite other people from the community to speak.

The Hyperledger Technical Ambassador program has community members who are knowledgeable about Hyperledger projects who also want to help people learn more about the technology. Connecting with Ambassadors is a great way to find a speaker who can attend an event either in person or by joining remotely. Other meetup organizers are also available to speak at your events – check out the Meetup Speakers tracking document for more information.

Providing a positive experience

Hyperledger is committed to providing a positive experience for community members both online on our community tools and offline at Hyperledger gatherings. Please make sure to read our Code of Conduct to learn more about the acceptable behaviors that all meetups should follow.

The meetup.com site also provides a way for you to receive feedback from attendees of the events you hold. We encourage you to look through this feedback to learn both about what people are liking about your meetups and where people are providing suggestions about how to improve the experience. Note that this feature on meetup.com is in beta stage and isn't available for all meetups groups at this time.

Selecting a venue

Different meetup groups will have different needs for venues — some groups will have big communities and will need a larger venue and some groups will be smaller and can use smaller spaces.

If you’re just getting started and have a small number of members, you can meet informally in a coffee shop or other public space. Once you start getting a larger number of people though you’ll need to find a more formal meeting space that will allow for you to project slides, use a microphone, etc.

If you are working at an organization or are at a school, you may have easy access to space. If you don’t have access, many organizers have been able to find hosts in their local community who are happy to provide space for events. And considering that most meetups happen after working hours, it is often not a conflict for an organization or school to provide space in the evenings or on weekends.

For more ideas about venue options, check out Meetup.com's Finding the right venue for you support article.

Getting sponsorships and funding

The Hyperledger project can provide funding of $12.50 per person up to $250 max for your first meetup. You can make requests for future funding, but it is not guaranteed. Please contact us if you are interested in this support.

We don’t have the funding available to support every event that each meetup group organizes though, so organizers are encouraged to seek sponsorship from their local community to cover any costs that come from organizing events. Please carefully review these guidelines before seeking sponsors for your event.

Sponsorship is limited to venue sponsorship (existing office space can be donated for an event or a third party space could be funded) and food and beverage sponsorship
Sponsorship dollars should not exceed the cost of either the venue or the food and beverages. Since the Hyperledger project is part of a non-profit with a mission to build and promote open source technologies, there should be zero profit involved in running meetups.
Events must remain vendor agnostic. Sponsors can be recognized by adding their name/logo on the Meetup event page and thanked at the beginning of the meetup, but it should be clear that all events are run by the Hyperledger community and not by any specific organization.
Sponsors may speak at a meetup just like any other person or organization is welcome to speak at a meetup. Any talk a sponsor gives needs to relate to what they are doing with Hyperledger though and product pitches in return for sponsorship dollars are strictly forbidden.
Sharing of any attendee data with sponsors is also strictly forbidden.

Running virtual meetups

Meetup organizers are encouraged to consider running virtual meetups online when that makes sense for your local community members. The tools provided by meetup.com for organizing in person meetups will also help you promote a virtual event, handle registration and communicate with attendees. For more about using meetup.com's tools to organize a virtual meetup, see their support article Hosting an online event on Meetup. And note that creating an online event on Meetup is a little different than creating an in person one – in particular, make sure when creating an event that you select the box for "Online Event" and add the video conference link.

Hyperledger has Zoom accounts that we can make available to organizers to use for running a virtual meetup. Before requesting access to a Zoom account, please read our Managing Zoom Meetings guide. To request access to a Zoom account, contact us with information about the day and time you are hosting the virtual meetup. We will then schedule the Zoom account and send you details on how to dial-in and record your events. Zoom offers two options – they have a meeting mode which provides an open call that allows for attendees to take part in discussions and a webinar mode that is more focused on one person presenting information out to a group.

And please let us know about virtual meetups you are planning so we can help you promote them. Since the virtual events aren't limited to who can physically travel to a specific location, we can help promote the meetup beyond your group members. For instance, we can send this to other meetup groups in a similar time zone or to other meetup groups who may be interested in the content (such as reaching out to all meetups in Spanish speaking countries if you are planning a virtual event with content in Spanish).

For tips for running effective meetups, we encourage organizers who have done this before to please share ideas and suggestions on the meetup organizer's mailing list and we'll add good ideas here. We'll also link to useful resources below:

Streaming and recording live events

Streaming and recording your events is not required, but it is something you may be interested in. If you are considering doing this, please note that some people don’t want to be on record when they attend these events and this may also have a chilling effect on what people are comfortable saying at an event. In addition, what you can legally record may vary across jurisdictions and you cannot record and stream copyrighted material, like music or other content, without a release.

You can find recordings of talks that other groups have done on the Meetups playlist on the Hyperledger YouTube channel. If you would like to add any meetup recordings from your events, please contact us

If recording events is something your group is open to, this section has some tips for how to do that. Mark Morris, the organizer for the Hyperledger Austin group, shares how he streams and records his events at Capital Factory were they hold their meetups:

Capital Factory has a camera mounted near the ceiling in the meeting space I use. The camera streams to their Facebook page. Facebook supports streaming to your page. If you choose this method, Facebook has instructions for setting up and streaming to your page.

Another method, I personally use to stream, uses one of my mobile phones (iPhone or Android) with the current Youtube app installed. The Youtube app is free and supports streaming. I often stream to my Youtube page. This is very easy and it allows me to save the videos, download them, edit them and share them. I can stream up to 12 hours. I can make the videos public or private and send or publish a link to invite viewers. Google limits streams to 15 minutes until you fill out the required form and submit to Google for approval for streaming more than 15 minutes. It is easy and quick.

When you stream audio is always a problem. So invest in a wireless mic. The wireless mic allows you to place your mobile phone camera in a location that captures the scene you want to stream and still deliver good sounding audio.

Using Google or Facebook allows you to stream your desktop too. So, you could use your laptop's camera to capture the presenter (you) and stream your laptop’s screen with a small inset video of the presenter.

Either method will work, but the first is more suited to live audiences and the second more toward online viewers.

Placing the camera in a good spot with good lighting is important so the stream delivers clear images and crisp sound.

It would seem easy to execute the above, but it is in fact difficult and often requires trial and error approaches to find the best setup.

Inventory:

Camera (mobile phone works)
Tripod with level
Smartphone holder that attaches to tripod
Wireless lapel mic with transceiver (put mic on shirt and attach transceiver to smartphone via phone’s plug)
Stream destination—Google Youtube or Facebook

Giving away stickers and swag

Active meetup groups (defined as a group that has held at least one meetup in the last 3 months) are eligible to receive free swag from our Hyperledger store to give away at their events. Organizers can make a new request for swag every 6 months and the amount of the coupon codes to use at the store will be based on the size of their group:

100 or fewer meetup members: $50 coupon code + free shipping
101 to 1000 meetup members: $75 coupon code + free shipping
1001+ meetup members: $100 coupon code + free shipping

To receive a coupon code, please contact us with a request.

Using official Hyperledger branding and assets

Please review our Brand Guidelines and Trademark Usage Guidelines for more information about our policies.

When talking about or promoting your event, please make use of the following branding:

Please use the approved Hyperledger logo (contact us and we'll send it to you)
Please use the following official description of the Hyperledger community

Hyperledger is an open source collaborative effort created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies. It is a global collaboration, hosted by The Linux Foundation, including leaders in finance, banking, Internet of Things, supply chains, manufacturing and Technology. To learn more, visit: https://www.hyperledger.org/.

Organizing other types of events

If you are interested in running other types of events in your area, you are certainly welcome to do so. For instance, perhaps you are interested in running a hackathon or a training bootcamp? Here are some resources that can help:

Hackathons: We do have a Hyperledger Hackathon Organizer's Guide available that you may find useful.
Trainings: We do have training resources available, including a Training Partner program, certifications and a community-led working group. Please note that if you promote your trainings to any meetup groups, please include this line in your description: “Please note that the course content is not designed or maintained by Hyperledger.”

If you're looking for help with any other type of event, please feel free to contact us and we'll be happy to help.