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Planning a Meetup

Planning is key to a successful event, so let's go through some of the things you'll want to think about.

Choose a venue for the Meetup

There are two main ways to conduct a Meetup - online or in-person.

Online Meetups

Use the following checklist to plan an online Meetup:

  • Select the online platform to host the Meetup.
  • Fix a date and time.
  • Reach out to potential presenters.
  • Create your social media promotion plans.
  • Choose a platform to have a conversation with the attendees, speakers, and organizers.

An online Meetup allows you to connect to a broader audience living in different time zones, along with the regular Meetup group members. You may want to promote the event on social media platforms in the time zones coinciding with the event timing to extend the reach of the group.

In-person Meetups

Use the following checklist for an in-person Meetup:

  • Find a venue to host the Meetup.
  • Fix a date and time for the Meetup.
  • Reach out to potential presenters.
  • Scout out potential Sponsorship for the Meetup.
  • Create your social media promotion plans.
  • Choose a platform to have a conversation with the attendees, speakers, and organizers.

Finding presenters

Selecting the topics forms the core of any Meetup group. Before looking for speakers, consider answering these questions:

  • What kind of audience are you expecting in the Meetup?
  • What is their experience with Ansible and with Automation in general?

Here are a few places you can use for speaker outreach:

  1. The Ansible Forum
  2. Social media or email
  3. Community events
  4. Github contributions

When reaching out to the speakers, try not to spam the same people to give talks at the Meetups. If you know the person or someone who can introduce them, that would be wonderful. And if not, a personal touch to the message is necessary for the person to know you, your intention, and your ideas, so they can make a reasoned decision about accepting or declining the invite. See the Email templates in the Resources section to help in this process.

Planning tools

In addition to the Meetup.com group, we can create a GitHub repository for your Meetup group on @ansible-community

You can use the repository to:

  1. Get talk ideas and proposals for upcoming Meetups from your Meetup group.
  2. Upload and share presentation slides and code samples from speakers.
  3. Create an issue per event to gather feedback from attendees.

Session ideas

The following ideas are popular for Ansible Meetups:

  1. What is Ansible?
  2. Ansible 101
  3. Writing your first playbook
  4. How to contribute to Ansible?
  5. From Playbook to rulebook (presentation for EDA)
  6. Ansible Ecosystem

Finding a venue

Any in-person event can not happen without a venue. There are some templates in the resources section which might be helpful in communicating with a potential venue for your Meetup.

Finding a sponsor

Meetups don't happen without places to have them, and everyone appreciates food at a Meetup. As a Meetup organizer, you need sponsors to support your community. There are some email and message templates in the Resources section to help you with communicating with potential sponsors.

Promotion

Promotions help us to create awareness about the event. This is an important tool for outreach and the way you can spread news about your event around the world. In the Ansible Community, we provide certain platforms where you can promote your Meetups.

Bullhorn

The Bullhorn is our newsletter for the Ansible contributor community. Read past issues of The Ansible Bullhorn.The Bullhorn gives you the reach to spread your message across the Ansible Community worldwide.

To promote your event in Bullhorn:

  1. Join the #social:ansible.com (the Ansible Social room on Matrix)
  2. Leave a message about your Meetup, tagging @newsbot. Posts should be in Markdown format.

Social media promotion

Social media plays an important role in raising awareness of your event. There are some social media post templates in the Resources Section to help you with your promotions. Ansible has a social media presence in the following platforms

While posting about the event, tag the above mentioned handles for extended reach. There are some social media templates in the Resources Section to help you with social media promotions. While doing the promotion, make sure to tag the willing attendees and of course the sponsor(s) of the event.