Internation or cross-region communities collaboration

[duracellko]

Question

.NET communities work pretty well in local regions. How would you support communication and collaboration between communities? For example better collaboration of different meetup groups. Exchange of speakers, etc.

Background / More Information

This week there 3 cool presenters from Hungary presenting at .NET meetup in Singapore. It would be nice to see this more.

About Me

I am active in 2 .NET communities. I come from Slovakia, but moved to Singapore last year.

[jguadagno]

There are two reasons why this typically had not happened well in the past. The first is cost. May speakers pay for speaking at user groups/meetups out of their own pocket, except for evangelist. Number two is knowledge of other events that are happening.

There are two things that can be done. The first is funding. I strongly believe that to grow .NET and its ecosystem we have to continue to evangelize it and send people out to speak about it. At the same time we want to find and help the local speakers that are really good and help them broaden their reach, We also need to be smart in how we do this. The dot net foundation already tracks and support meetups, we should look into sending speakers to multiple events that are in proximity of each other when possible.

[daronyondem]

Once you combine the power of all meetups and user groups you have a better chance of getting sponsorships. With that, you can fund more travel and expenses. A single user group might not be able to lure in a corporation, but a combined group can do that. Once funding is in place the second issue is "who gets funded" and "for what?". That is a much harder question. Expertise is important, but what do you do if you have two experts on the same topic? We need to build a systematic approach to issue funds to speakers or user groups. For example, user groups with more activity might deserve more funds. Of course, we should make sure we don't get into a chicken and egg problem. User groups need funding to kick off their activities as well. We need to set the right metrics to measure user group and speaker performance to allocate future funding. Metrics should be interpreted relative to geography and topic of expertise and technology.

[SeanKilleen]

Thanks for the question, @duracellko! Tagging @dotnet-foundation/candidates so they're aware aware this question has been asked.

[jskeet]

Funding is part of the difficulty here, and if .NET Foundation funds are being considered, I'd want a much more detailed discussion to happen before any money were allocated. There will always be more worthy-sounding causes than funding to go around, so we'd need to work out criteria that could be assessed as objectively as possible. Establishing those criteria is not something I'd want to try to do quickly on a Sunday afternoon...

But I believe that perhaps more importantly, the .NET Foundation can be a good hub within the network for connecting meetups and user groups with each other. In the UK, I know that various user groups do talk to each other - but I wouldn't be surprised if they formed natural groups, and the groups may not have good communication with each other. I wouldn't want to assume that the .NET Foundation would be any sort of "top of tree" - but it could definitely help put people in touch with each other. The Foundation is already associated with 270 groups... I'd like to expand that, but ideally in a way that's entirely non-invasive. (I confess I don't know the current arrangements for being included in that list, but groups should be able to add themselves without changing how they advertise elsewhere at all. If that's already the case, that's great!)

Thinking specifically internationally, one approach I've personally taken a few times for speaking to user groups is to do so remotely - in the space of about two weeks, I gave talks to groups in Australia, Romania and the UK. Doing that in person would have been exhausting, time-consuming, and bad for the environment. We're in a technological world - let's use that as best we can. I do appreciate there are benefits in physical presence as well, but I think it would be good to tip the balance further in terms of remote presentations. The Foundation could help in a fairly passive way here by encouraging this as an option and providing suggestions (based on experience) of how to host user groups with remote presentations as well as possible.

[schneidenbach]

Bringing remote speakers to local user group-type events can be difficult for budgetary reasons - it's often cost-prohibitive to host speakers from out of town for small community groups like user groups. It's often better to have OOT speakers come and present while they're there for business/other events/just visiting, but that goes back to the issue of visibility - the potential speaker has to know about the meetup in time for the meetup AND know about it far enough in advance so that the speaker and event can be properly marketed.

One idea that is less popular but has worked for some communities is remote presentations - the speaker is remote but the local group still gets together to watch. That way you get the group together AND still get a great speaker!

I think the Foundation's biggest contribution here would/could be helping with the visibility component.

[SeanKilleen]

I think my answer here is a little bit in line with my answer to another of your questions.

• I think the Foundation has the opportunity to apply a marketplace of needs approach to this collaboration. The Foundation sponsors meetups and you can see where they are. Surfacing a way to find meetups in need of speakers could be a nice way to get some support there, especially for folks who happen to be in town.
• We could build a ".NET Passport" where folks who are traveling or new to an area can participate in a meetup or other activity and earn a stamp. This could encourage folks who are on business etc. to join up with the local .NET community there and allow us to meet and exchange a little more. Maybe meetups could sponsor impromptu talks or lean coffee sessions when speakers come through town outside of their normal cadence.
• We have an opportunity to greatly expand the idea of group collaboration around talks. Webinar sessions where a presenter speaks to one or more groups can be a great way for groups to get together in person and receive a talk (this could also help for groups that don't have a speaker for their normally scheduled times).
• Once the Foundation surfaces needs of projects or the community, multiple meetup groups could choose to collaborate, even remotely. Twitch, VS / Code live share, and other tooling has made it easier than ever to collaborate and learn together. If we provide some things that need doing, and help community members find each other, we may be able to help a lot of good things happen organically.

Other candidates are right in their concerns about budgetary considerations -- the Foundation will have a finite budget and travel is expensive. But I think we can get creative about meeting each other where we are and making the most of our collaborative tooling (and attitudes!). There are a lot of different ways to meet this challenge, and a lot of things we can consider to open up opportunities for collaboration across our community.

[schneidenbach]

We could build a ".NET Passport" where folks who are traveling or new to an area can participate in a meetup or other activity and earn a stamp. This could encourage folks who are on business etc. to join up with the local .NET community there and allow us to meet and exchange a little more. Maybe meetups could sponsor impromptu talks or lean coffee sessions when speakers come through town outside of their normal cadence.

I considered gamification as a potential means to help incentivize speakers to speak at remote user groups as well. How would you implement a system like this? (Not a technical question fwiw - how would a system like this integrate w/ the Foundation's overall goals w/o a lot of management overhead? Is there room for a system that rewards overall contributions to the .NET ecosystem instead of just traveling to user groups?)

Unrelated to my question above, but another consideration to make - would/could the Foundation help connect sponsors to local user groups?

(tagging @SeanKilleen)

[SaraJo]

.NET user groups, especially the ones that live outside large cities, are the first touchpoint for a huge swath of the community. I myself started out going to a user group in Edison NJ. Even though I lived 40 miles for NYC, the idea of going into the city to attend the larger group there was intimidating. Finding something close to home was easy and welcoming. Allowing groups to pool resources and share learnings is a great way to power up local communities.

There are two governance models that are generally observed in the case of distributed groups, the spider and the starfish.

The spider is a centralized organization that governs satellite orgs. I think of INETA as a good example of this. I believe the organization is now defunct, but it used to be an org that represented .NET speakers and worked with user groups to get qualified speakers at local events.

The starfish is a network of decentralized meetups where there is no governing body, but the shared interests promote the exchange of knowledge and resources. I think that this is a model that works for user groups in general as people that are local to a geographic region know best what their group needs. Often a central organization misses this, and ends up putting most resources towards the large groups in urban areas.

I hesitate to be prescriptive without more context, it's not my style to jump into a situation and decide I know what's best. The .NET foundation site has done the first step of putting together the user groups on the site. It seems like the next step would be to get together the leaders of the groups and hear directly from them what would be most helpful in getting them a platform to share resources and learnings. I've seen this take the form of listserves, monthly hangouts, yearly conferences and more. All of those are on the table, I would leave it up to the people closest to the issue (the user group leaders) to decide how we can best facilitate to their needs.

[robertmclaws]

While getting people to together in-person through usergroups is an amazing way to build camaraderie in the community, I personally wouldn't suggest any focus on trying to faciliitate the movement of people in the physical world. There are too many financial and regulatory issues to make it worthwhile, and a lot of ways to get people in trouble (what if people got stuck somewhere because of an improper visa we helped facilitate?) We're 1/5th of the way into the 21st century, and our membership could have just as much impact over Microsoft Teams as they can in person.

Having said that, the Directory I mentioned in my other post could be useful for finding speakers on specific topics and could assit in getting them scheduled, marketed, and broadcast. Getting these kinds of talks exposed to a MUCH wider audience seems to fall exactly inline with the purview of this organizaion.

[stevejgordon]

I run a monthly .NET meetup and there are certainly some challenges in doing so. Our group has no externals funds, besides a little support in the form of drinks and snacks. I'm always conscious that speakers are having to fund their own travel to our events and this does limit the range at which it is practical for people to travel. I've been using my own ad-hoc approach to trying to watch schedules of speakers who happen to be in the UK for other events and where possible coordinating a visit to our meetup. I'd really like to provide a system to formalise that. I'm aware there are various speaker/event sites and apps but they tend to more generalised. I have ideas around building a .NET communities hub of sorts where groups can share ideas, support one another and help foster new meetups too. As part of that I envision a way for speakers and groups to coordinate in order to try and share the funding of speaker travel between countries. For example, if the UK groups could align on dates, then perhaps together, funding a non-UK speaker is more practical, if that speaker can attend a couple of events during a single UK visit. Meetups could also be alerted to speakers who are travelling to a country/region and reach out to the speaker directly. For me, an important part of growing our community is to help support in-person meetups and events.

Additionally, there may be support that the .NET foundation could offer to help fund remote conferencing technologies which allow speakers to attend more events virtually. As an organiser I've been put off by some of the practicalities of getting everything working reliably over video conferencing. Working together I'm sure we could provide a consistent approach to supporting this better with a technology platform that makes it simple to setup remote meetups. It's something I'd like to explore and experiment with.

On the issue of funding, I'm a little more divided on how this can be achieved. Defining a fair system or allocating funds would not be trivial. Which groups get what funds? Who is accountable for ensuring those funds are used appropriately? I certainly think funding and financial support would be a great thing and I'd be very interested in discussions about how a fair system could be devised. Again, if we can be more efficient with funding which can support multiple meetups by sharing travel costs of a speaker to multiple events, that might prove more practical in the longer term.

[IrisClasson]

Excellent question @duracellko! I'm at home with a sick and grumpy 3 month-old so apologies for a short answer.

While I don't have a solution, I do have some suggestions based on my experience with cross-community sharing. Firstly, I do a lot of collaboration with schools and universities, in particular local training schools. I've found schools to a great way to get better reach geographically, and schools often already have a network and can help arrange exchanging speakers/teachers. An additional bonus is that the students themselves often travel to attend classes from nearby cities, arranging meetups at their school increases the likelihood of them attending and thus gives better reach. I've done three talks the last month, two of them with my baby strapped to my chest, and I'm helping a school arrange a hackathon together with other schools. What we can do is to reach out to schools, provide guidance similar to the one Azure Global Bootcamp provides to enable schools to host and arrange meetups together.
Second, as @jskeet mentioned, virtual talks can work really well! I've done this several times, and it all started with the Pluralsight study group I started years ago that would meet on biweekly basis. We collaborated with similar user groups in for example Russia, and despite the time difference we made it work and it was a lot of fun. Again, providing resources on how to do virtual meetups (tools, advice, mentoring etc) is something we can easily do.
Thirdly, let's not forget cross-community such as other platforms. I've collaborated on a number of occasions with the local iOS meetup group, it can be really interesting to hear talks on other platforms and the attendees seemed to enjoy that a lot. What we can do is to reach out to other communities, not just our own, and invite them in as well to share their ideas.

Hope this made sense, and not too many grammar errors. Going to clean this comment up once he is sleeping :)

[prkhandelwal]

I believe we have already taken the first step to enable more collaboration among .NET Communities by .NET Foundation Memberships. As few of the people have already addressed budgetary reasons limiting these kind of collaborations, I would like to mention some more solutions we can use.

• The Membership website could be developed to serve as a portal where the members could easily get to know fellow dotnet members. Members should also be able to share some of their works and can share how they are contributing to the community on regular basis.

• People can also raise requests to find speakers for their events and vice-versa.

• People should also be able to share their personal projects to bring in interested community members for collaborations.

• I also believe that we should find a way to enable some people like Community leaders, specially in schools and universities who might not be a part of the .NET community to somehow be able to reach us for speakers or resources if they are hosting a .NET related event. (I just got a call from a University junior of mine today asking to get some Speakers for their Azure Bootcamp).

• Also, now that we have Members from various parts of world under one roof, we should also come up with some way to support the members in connecting different communities the belong to in their respective localities.

[IEvangelist]

Hi @duracellko and thank you for so many great questions. You asked:

How would you support communication and collaboration between communities

I'm thrilled that this has an emphasis on community, for me this is what it's all about. I believe that in order to better cater to supporting communication and collaboration, there needs to be more transparency. One idea that has been immensely successful in Milwaukee Wisconsin is this idea of "meet the meetups". It was kind of like a meta-meetup, where all the local meetup organizers attended this one "meet the meetup" meetup, and it ended up having over 800 people. It was literally insane, the idea of gathering so many people together - but was special in that it highlighted the disparate communities and the space betwixt them. Some had lots of cross over and others not as much. The point is that opportunities are only ever realized with transparency, and constant communication.

I believe there is a lot of other opportunities for transparency throughout the .NET Foundation that I would like to champion. For example, it would be great if there was some sort of communication or rapport that the .NET Foundation could publish that highlights decisions and activities, etc. Make it truly open - perhaps even something like a community stand-up?

Other ideas come to mind as well, like tracking speaker details and sharing it with other meetups. And perhaps even new tooling around the communication and collaboration aspect of this. I would love to explore what's possible now with some of the existing infrastructure. I think it is great the that .NET Foundation website already has hooks into the meetup pro and supports user groups in this manner.