Organizer Meeting: May 1, 2020

Any existing Hyperledger meetup organizer, or anyone interested in becoming a Hyperledger meetup organizer, is welcome to attend these calls.

Meeting Details

• Day: May 1 (the first Friday of each month)

• Time: 16:00 UTC / 9 AM pacific (feel free to suggest alternate times)

• Dial-in: https://zoom.us/j/4336690939

Recording

• Video of call

Attendees

• David Boswell

• John Carpenter

• Jon

• Bury

• Audrius

• Hao Wang

• Criss

• Guillermo Diaz

• Prajit Datta

• Gerhard Dinhof

• Mike Brunt

• Merchi

• Nagesh CR

• Jim Mason

• Gilles Gravier

• Daniela Merella

Agenda

• Introductions

• Review of resources available for running virtual meetups

  • Virtual meetup section in Meetup Organizer's Guide

  • Managing Zoom Meetings guide

  • List of Virtual Hyperledger Meetups

  • Meetup Organizer mailing list where you can ask other organizers to co-host or answer any questions you have

• Observations on switch to virtual meetups

  • There have been a lot of positives:

    • General attendance at virtual meetups seems to be higher than in person meetups since anyone anywhere can join and not just people in the city where the event is happening

    • Members of groups in smaller cities or in parts of the world were there aren't a lot of Hyperledger community members are benefiting since they hadn't been able to organize many in person meetups because there weren't many speakers nearby, but now there are a lot of meetups they can join

    • Regional cooperation is happening more – the Hyperledger India Chapter had started this trend last year with their two national e-meetups and now we're seeing other regions doing the same sort of coordination, such as the recent Latin America regional meetup

  • There are some challenges too:

    • I think the main challenge is that meetups can now conflict in a way they couldn't before.  If two in person meetups were happening in different cities that didn't matter since there were two different groups of people who could go to each, but now if there are two virtual meetups happening at the same time there is one audience who needs to choose which to go to.

    • However, not all meetups conflict – one meetup in Spanish and one in English held at the same time would be appealing to two different audiences.  And time zones matter too – a meetup in an APAC friendly time zone is appealing to a different audience than meetups in AMEA and North and South American time zones

  • Other observations from your experience running and/or attending virtual meetups?

• Discussion of how we want to work together on virtual Hyperledger meetups

  • Reviewing the results of the recent survey sent to meetup organizers

  • Can we work together to schedule meetups to cover the different topics that people want to see covered?

  • How many meetups do we want to organize each week?

  • Who is interested in taking on running meetups in different languages?

• Other topics?

  • How to best recruit relevant speakers that are not duplicating content from recent Virtual Meetups.

  • How much time and number of speakers is optimal for these Meetups?  How to best handle if the Meetup begins to run over the allotted time.