[SGVLUG] Meeting Recap: Building a Community (2/11)

[Lan Dang]

tl;dr Wow.  Large turnout.  Insightful talk.  Wonderful discussion.  Thanks to many people for making it happen.  We will return to OpenX on Mar 10th for "A Cloud-based Architecture for Processing 3D Mars Terrain".  


That was...an amazing meeting.  Normally, getting audience participation is painful.  Not this time.  There was a very thoughtful discussion, and afterwards, people were milling around, talking to each other, until we nicely threw them out of the building.  Some of them adjourned to Conrad's.

We had about 62 people, many of whom were not LUG members.  See end of email for commentary.

Much thanks to Scoops, Carlos, Ed, James, John, Jess, Michael S. for helping out.


Michael S. was emcee and did a very good job of selling our group. We previewed our speakers for the next few months.  We quickly covered SCALE, which many of the audience had attended.  And we had a fantastic round of Linux in the News.


Liz told us the deeply personal story of why and how she started Learn to Code LA, with a wry humor that got a lot of laughs from the audience.  I identified a lot with what she was saying, because it's something I struggle with on a regular basis.  She also brought in some thoughtful analysis of how a community is built and had concerns about the scalability of her group.

Big thanks to Bobby and  OpenX for hosting this meeting.  We could not have accommodated this meeting anywhere else.  I had never appreciated how great OpenX was for lectures until I witnessed Liz giving her talk to a packed room without the amplification of a microphone. The room was quiet except for something that sounded like a compressor.  No one complained about not hearing her, so I think the acoustics were good.

We consolidated our raffle to the end of evening.  People got a raffle ticket for showing up.  They could donate money for raffle tickets.  And they got it for audience participation.  We raffled off a pair of Hackaday Omnibus (courtesy of Jasmine), an SGVLUG/SGVHAK mug, an O'Reilly book, and an Arduino case.



I believe the large and diverse turnout was due to both Liz and I promoting the talk across our social networks.  We also got a bump from our SCALE booth a couple of weeks ago.

At our peak, we had 72 RSVPs, with 13 people who RSVPed directly to me.  6 of those RSVPs were last minute, and 11 just showed up without RSVPs.  Some of them were from OpenX. At the end, we counted about 62 people total.

Lan