Upcoming changes for Jenkins Area Meetups transition to CDF
Tracy Miranda
Jenkins Area Meetups (JAMs) are local meetups intended to bring Jenkins users and contributors together for socializing and learning. To date CloudBees has sponsored the JAM Meetup pro account and overseen growth of the program. In particular Alyssa Tong and Max Arbuckle have worked with the Jenkins community to achieve some incredible growth/numbers:
· 106 groups
· 33,866 total members worldwide
· 453 total events hosted
In March 2019, Jenkins began the transition to its new home as part of the CD.Foundation alongside other projects Jenkins X, Tekton and Spinnaker. The goal of the CD Foundation is to help facilitate an open governance model and continued growth of its projects. With that in mind, CloudBees will be transferring ownership of the Jenkins Meetup Pro account to the CDF.
As part of this transition and as we all look to the next stage of growth, there will be a number of changes in the processes. Details will be sent directly to JAM organizers and here is a summary of the changes.
· The Jenkins meetup pro account will be rebranded as CDF and the scope will be expanded to general CI/CD meetups as well as specific meetups for other projects e.g. Tekton or Spinnaker meetups.
· JAM organizers are free to choose whether to keep their Jenkins JAM branding or switch to CI/CD (CDF) branding. If they choose the latter CDF will provide all the necessary assets for rebranding.
· We will take the opportunity to do some housekeeping on the few inactive accounts (meaning 0 events have been hosted since they joined) as well as reach out to inactive JAM organizers to help revive JAMs which have become dormant.
· The process for creating a new JAM will be managed by CDF and will have some changes, including requirement for groups to run one or more meetups before they may join the pro account.
We have a rough timeline, where we will aim to reach out to JAM organizers by the end of the week and give them until the end of the month to acknowledge and let us know their preferences.
Going forward this will give us more bandwidth to keep growing the meetups and help meetup organizers:
· Get access to more, high quality content
· More easily find speakers for their meetups
· Get better access to swag as needed
Long term I believe this is a good thing as we continue to grow and evolve the Jenkins community. From a CloudBees perspective we are honoured to have been able to support the community growth to this stage and look forward to supporting the next vendor-neutral stage of growth. And Alyssa and Max will continue to be involved and support these efforts!