Our next meetup?

[Anand Kumria]

Hi,

A colleague of mine went along to doxlon (DevOps-Exchange-London) just
recently.

He was fairly disappointed as it didn't feel like people who were at the
coalface were there. It felt like a group of people who were trying to
figure out how to manage / integrate "DevOps" into their own organisations.

There was also a bit of vendors trying to demonstrate their wares.
Not particularly wrong with that, just not what he was after.

The last time we met as a group was June 2014 (
https://groups.google.com/d/topic/london-devops/MN5rBAoOjc8/discussion
), where there was presentation on Cloudfoundry and CoreOS (by yours truly).

Since then two other groups have arisen:

http://www.meetup.com/London-DevOps/ - 2015 members
http://www.meetup.com/DevOps-Exchange-London/ - 2782 members

However both of them have (different) recruiters involved.

Again nothing wrong with that if you like recruiters.

But I'd rather a more technically focused group.

I have some ideas for space, I just need 3 people who would like to talk.
I'm happy to organise all of this -- although help would definitely be
appreciated.

Rough plan would be:
- intro
- round the room (depending upon numbers)
- first talk: 5 / 10 minutes
- break for refreshments
- second talk: 15 minutes
- third talk: 5 minutes
- adjourn to either drinking / eating venue

Please reply and let me know if you'd be interested in either talking or
helping out.

Cheers,
Anand

--
“Don’t be sad because it’s over. Smile because it happened.” – Dr. Seuss

[Karanbir Singh]

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Hash: SHA1

On 07/08/15 12:09, Anand Kumria wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> A colleague of mine went along to doxlon (DevOps-Exchange-London)
> just recently.
>
> He was fairly disappointed as it didn't feel like people who were
> at the coalface were there. It felt like a group of people who were
> trying to figure out how to manage / integrate "DevOps" into their
> own organisations.
>
> There was also a bit of vendors trying to demonstrate their wares.
> Not particularly wrong with that, just not what he was after.
>
> The last time we met as a group was June 2014 (
> https://groups.google.com/d/topic/london-devops/MN5rBAoOjc8/discussion
>
>
), where there was presentation on Cloudfoundry and CoreOS (by yours tru
ly).
>
> Since then two other groups have arisen:
>
> http://www.meetup.com/London-DevOps/ - 2015 members
> http://www.meetup.com/DevOps-Exchange-London/ - 2782 members

so, we need a meetup.com page then :)

>
> However both of them have (different) recruiters involved.
>
> Again nothing wrong with that if you like recruiters.
>
> But I'd rather a more technically focused group.

+1

> I have some ideas for space, I just need 3 people who would like to
> talk. I'm happy to organise all of this -- although help would
> definitely be appreciated.
>
> Rough plan would be: - intro - round the room (depending upon
> numbers) - first talk: 5 / 10 minutes - break for refreshments -
> second talk: 15 minutes - third talk: 5 minutes - adjourn to either
> drinking / eating venue
>
> Please reply and let me know if you'd be interested in either
> talking or helping out.

depending on the dates you have in mind, happy to come along and talk.
however I'd recommend make them all be a flat 15 min each, and set
expectations for lightning talks.

- - KB

- --
Karanbir Singh
+44-207-0999389 | http://www.karan.org/ | twitter.com/kbsingh
ICQ: 2522219 | Yahoo IM: z00dax | Gtalk: z00dax
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[Marc Cluet]

Hi Anand,

As organiser of London DevOps (and not a recruiter) I would like to know why you're ditching both ourselves and DevOps Exchange as not being "technically focused", I don't think that's the reality.

Running a meetup group is not a free task, even with the time and effort we incur into expenses, the bill is mostly food and drinks that we offer in each of our meetups, that's why we carefully choose to partner with someone to try to cover that.

If we choose to go with a recruiting agency (as we did due to previous relationship we had) we suddenly become not technical.

If we choose to go with company X (can be Docker, RedHat, Canonical, Puppet Labs, Chef, etc) then we are just X centric

If we don't then we can't either get venues big enough or any kind of food and drinks at all.

We're trying very hard to focus both on the technical side, by finding quality speakers, and on the socialising side by offering an opportunity to people with interest in it or already part of it to take part in this.

The more meetups the community has the best example of how vibrant and healthy it is, but starting by ditching other people making the effort is not really positive.

Cheers,

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[Anand Kumria]

Hi Marc,

I knew I would hear from at least one of the groups I mentioned. :-)

I'll do everyone the courtesy of changing the subject so that those who
are interested in discussing a future meetup can ignore this thread.

As I said in my original message, "

He was fairly disappointed as it didn't feel like people who were at the
coalface were there. It felt like a group of people who were trying to
figure out how to manage / integrate "DevOps" into their own organisations.
"

If that isn't enough explanation, what else can I say? I've been along
to one of each, and also felt they weren't "meaty" enough. Admittedly in
my case that was earlier this year, so perhaps things have changed. From
my colleagues who have been to both recently, they've reported the same
feeling.

Indeed, some of the feedback I've received from my original email
basically says the same thing.

I know the difficulty that can be faced when organising meetup groups; I
also organise the London Django meetup. I will say that finding venues
and sponsors for food wasn't a particular problem in the past (in 2014).

It is unclear why the situation would have changed significantly in 12
months. Perhaps there is little interest in DevOps (although the amount
of emails I get from recruitment agencies indicates that that is unlikely).

I've got to say that your comment "starting by ditching other people
making the effort" is pretty offensive.

As I see at
(https://groups.google.com/d/topic/london-devops/bq2w28c7E8k/discussion), a
mere three months after the last talk -- you hadn't engaged this
community -- but taken over an existing one (on meetup).

Perhaps your effort to help the existing set of people was done behind
closed doors, but from my perspective what I see is:

- some talks in June 2014
- not much happening for a few months
- then Anna wondering who the recruitment company is that is running
the London DevOps meetup
- and then Mark and yourself chiming to say hello in Sep 2014

That all being said, I'm glad you ended on a positive "The more meetups
the community has the best example of how vibrant and healthy it is".

I'm not interested in starting a mega-meetup with 2000+ people in it.

Just a small, highly technically-focused group who are - essentially -
peers.

Hope to see you along.

Cheers,
Anand

[R.I.Pienaar]

> On 8 Aug 2015, at 20:09, Anand Kumria <aku...@acm.org> wrote:
>
> Hi Marc,
>
> I knew I would hear from at least one of the groups I mentioned. :-)
>
> I'll do everyone the courtesy of changing the subject so that those who
> are interested in discussing a future meetup can ignore this thread.
>
> As I said in my original message, "
>
> He was fairly disappointed as it didn't feel like people who were at the
> coalface were there. It felt like a group of people who were trying to
> figure out how to manage / integrate "DevOps" into their own organisations.
> "
>
>
> If that isn't enough explanation, what else can I say? I've been along
> to one of each, and also felt they weren't "meaty" enough. Admittedly in
> my case that was earlier this year, so perhaps things have changed. From
> my colleagues who have been to both recently, they've reported the same
> feeling.
>
> Indeed, some of the feedback I've received from my original email
> basically says the same thing.
>
> I know the difficulty that can be faced when organising meetup groups; I
> also organise the London Django meetup. I will say that finding venues
> and sponsors for food wasn't a particular problem in the past (in 2014).
>
> It is unclear why the situation would have changed significantly in 12
> months. Perhaps there is little interest in DevOps (although the amount
> of emails I get from recruitment agencies indicates that that is unlikely).
>
> I've got to say that your comment "starting by ditching other people
> making the effort" is pretty offensive.
>

Indeed when I started this group I did what I could and everyone pitched in. We never had problems with venues food etc. the community rallied and provided whenever I asked on Twitter

I got busy and the next one took over and the next and so forth and so on. In all cases it was quite informal. What sponsorships there were was based on people giving pizza/drink/venue and I made a point that sponsorship does not buy speaking slots etc.

Things fizzled out, other groups were formed around commercial interests and the current group came about by effectively ditching this group as it was. Branding was changed, meet up groups formed under new names, format was changed and commercial interests were catered to etc.

So I would agree that calling someone out for ditching an existing group is particularly unacceptable given the manner by which the current "London Devops" have departed from the format, principals and even the very group of people who ran it and the mailing lists etc setup to run this group etc

That said Marc and co though have done good and contributed events where others did not have time or inclination, rubbing these events are time consuming and wanting to put some structure in place can not be faulted.

I would however be in favour of a more community and less commercially aligned group being reformed.

[Marco Abis]

Hi there,

and here is a co-organiser of the other group :-) speaking for
myself of course, no idea what the others think. I don't think there
is anything inherently wrong is saying that a particular group doesn't
satisfy you, I agree with Marc that the more the merrier if the groups
are different enough but also that nothing prevents you from helping
improve one or the other groups (of both!).

I don't think you can decide how big or small your group is going to
be unless you make it invitation only and cap the number of members.
The bigger the group the harder it becomes to make everyone happy: you
will never cover every single aspect in every single monthly meetup
since it's a huge matrix: 5 broad topics (CALMS) for newbies and the
same 5 broad topics for more experienced people. And some people will
want longer talks while others shorter ones.

I have to say as a member rather than an organiser I'd be disappointed
if a "DevOps" meetup only covered technical aspects though, that would
not be a good representation of what DevOps is.

I guess the goal shouldn't be to make everyone happy, just try your
best (often failing) to put together good talks month in and month
out. And IMHO a good talk is good if both the content and the delivery
are good, more often than not one or the other aspect comes short, and
that's ok again.

On the sponsors front I do have a problem with recruiters and other
companies if the meetup ends up revolving around them, if they
subsequently spam all attendees (you'd be surprised how many companies
want to sponsor DOXLON and then go away when we say they cannot get
the email addresses of the participant to spam later).

Probably not adding much to the conversation :-)

Best

[Sam Sharpe]

On Friday, 7 August 2015 17:48:33 UTC+1, Anand Kumria wrote:

A colleague of mine went along to doxlon (DevOps-Exchange-London) just
recently.

He was fairly disappointed as it didn't feel like people who were at the
coalface were there. It felt like a group of people who were trying to
figure out how to manage / integrate "DevOps" into their own organisations.

I am not sure that the organisers control the attendance. The people who are

there are a function of who was interested and sometimes who signed up first.

 - round the room (depending upon numbers)
 - first talk: 5 / 10 minutes
 - break for refreshments
 - second talk: 15 minutes
 - third talk: 5 minutes
 - adjourn to either drinking / eating venue

I may be misunderstanding something and perhaps I don't understand your

colleague's definition of 'meaty', but to my mind any talk as short at the ones

you propose won't be meaty either.

The speakers at an event are mostly volunteers (the budget generally goes on

venue, food and drink). It sounds like the problem with previous events was that

the people who did volunteer to speak were the ones you didn't want to hear

from and the people who didn't volunteer to speak were the ones you did want 

to hear from.

In any of these series of events it's relatively easy to line up a few big names for

a few meet-ups, but eventually you exhaust your personal connections. From that

point you rely on volunteers or you spend a lot of time and effort chasing down speakers.

There's a finite pool of time in most people's calendar and that includes the

organisers, the potential volunteers and the potential speakers - which is actually

where external sponsors are valuable because it's in their business interests

to spend time attracting speakers and guests.

It seems to me that rather than further dividing the space into more competing

meetups, a more useful use of energy might be to assist with organising an existing

meetup or convincing the kind of people you do want to hear from to speak at one.

Cheers,

Sam

(not affiliated with any of these meetups)

[Robert Logan]

Odd really, seeing some infighting going on, actually it shines a light. Groups change over the years, the desire to give message and get message change as well. If the initial desire was 'clean' and its gotten 'dirty' then there are two approaches.

Burn it and start again.

Discuss and apply change. (I'll do this).

The group is fine, people come and go, have kids and never touch a computer again, or move to the Antarctic and have no internet. Or they think their time 'is done', and want others to take up the slack. At that point there is change and its not their fault.

One thing I have taken from this group is how potent its ideas became. As someone who whores themselves on 'conference speaker' type duty occasionally I can assure you there is colossal demand for skills/knowhow in the field. Never underestimate recruiters, like moths to a flame ... rather vultures to a few bucks. I keep a separate email for events etc - doh!

n.b. Always up to do a talk. I have drilled rather deeply into 'devops' now.

[lynxman]

Hi Anand,

On Saturday, 8 August 2015 21:09:25 UTC+2, Anand Kumria wrote:

Hi Marc,

I knew I would hear from at least one of the groups I mentioned. :-)

I'll do everyone the courtesy of changing the subject so that those who
are interested in discussing a future meetup can ignore this thread.

As I said in my original message, "

He was fairly disappointed as it didn't feel like people who were at the
coalface were there. It felt like a group of people who were trying to
figure out how to manage / integrate "DevOps" into their own organisations.
"


If that isn't enough explanation, what else can I say? I've been along
to one of each, and also felt they weren't "meaty" enough. Admittedly in
my case that was earlier this year, so perhaps things have changed. From
my colleagues who have been to both recently, they've reported the same
feeling.

It all depends on the target audience, both Marco and I try to run meetups targeted at both newcomers and people who have been doing DevOps for a long time, this involves that some of the talks as you say won't be meaty for an experienced person, we try to maintain a balance based on available speakers and target audience, we don't always succeed but definitely we try hard.

 

Indeed, some of the feedback I've received from my original email
basically says the same thing.

I know the difficulty that can be faced when organising meetup groups; I
also organise the London Django meetup. I will say that finding venues
and sponsors for food wasn't a particular problem in the past (in 2014).

It's not a problem when the group is around 30, we didn't have any problem for that, now even if we're not massive paying food for 100+ (as is our current attendance) is another level of difficult.

 

It is unclear why the situation would have changed significantly in 12
months. Perhaps there is little interest in DevOps (although the amount
of emails I get from recruitment agencies indicates that that is unlikely).

I've got to say that your comment "starting by ditching other people
making the effort" is pretty offensive.

It was not my intention being offensive, if that is how it resonates I do apologise, I think that the more constructive we all are the better we can spread the message, and even if it wasn't targeted to the meetup I organise I know how much Marco and the Dataloop guys are working to get things sorted for everyone.

 

As I see at
(https://groups.google.com/d/topic/london-devops/bq2w28c7E8k/discussion), a
mere three months after the last talk -- you hadn't engaged this
community -- but taken over an existing one (on meetup).

Perhaps your effort to help the existing set of people was done behind
closed doors, but from my perspective what I see is:

 - some talks in June 2014
 - not much happening for a few months
 - then Anna wondering who the recruitment company is that is running
the London DevOps meetup
 - and then Mark and yourself chiming to say hello in Sep 2014

I don't know what happened exactly in the past, both Matt Saunders (who is in this list) and myself climbed to the opportunity to try to make the meetup alive again in September 2014 when it was about to be deleted by meetup.com. Since then our targets have been consistent around the following:

1. No sponsors influence in any way the talks
2. No selling solutions, explain problems and how to learn from them
3. One entry level talk for new people coming to DevOps
4. One "this is a challenging problem I faced" talk
5. One high level talk for more experienced people
6. Socialising afterwards to get to know more people who are doing the same

Not only that but we also try to add on top of that hackathons (we have run 1 so far) to get more hands on experience.

 

That all being said, I'm glad you ended on a positive "The more meetups
the community has the best example of how vibrant and healthy it is".

I'm not interested in starting a mega-meetup with 2000+ people in it.

I'm personally not interested either in running the biggest meetup in the world, if people want to sign up I'm more than fine for it, we try to keep our venues small on purpose to avoid massification, we've got one big one at Facebook (300+) but that's more of a special ocasion rather than the norm. Nonetheless we have our attendance right now at 100+ which for me is the tipping point where if you go bigger you start not getting much from the meetup group, I would like to keep it that way personally.

 

Just a small, highly technically-focused group who are - essentially -
peers.

I'm more than fine with that, I'm just worried of what would be the requirement to be a "peer", this could create if not crafted carefully an exclusionary group.

 

Hope to see you along.

Will do! Hope you come to ours as well! :)

[lynxman]

Hi Marco,

Completely agreed with you, we have exactly the same issue, more people wanting to sponsor and sell their product rather than real offers for uninterested sponsoring, we have been very lucky finding sponsors that understand that.

Cheers,