Last January, we have 24 amazing CiviDay meet ups in cities around the world. I looked back just now and was reminded of all the great things that came out of those meetups (including CiviCamp DC!). It was great to see existing meet ups energised and new ones started. This coming January 29th 2014, we want to repeat the success of last year, and push it up a notch.
We all know there is no better way than face-to-face meetings for properly connecting with people. IMHO, our meet ups have two main goals:
- existing users can get together, build their networks and skills, share experiences, provide support and help to each other
- people who are considering starting out with CiviCRM can talk to real people who've been using CiviCRM, hear real life success stories, find out what support is available locally, and get energised about the possibilities.
This year, we'd like to focus attention on the second of these - welcoming new people. We'd like to make CiviDay an outreach event to show propsective users how CIviCRM can help them. Since a lot of people are thinking about new projects in January, this is quite good timing.
Head along to your local meet up, and if you don't have a meet up in your city, why not organise one?
How will we do this?
To start us off, here are a couple of simple ways in which we can do this:
- presentations from end users showing how CiviCRM helps them acheive their missions would help show people how
- presentations from implementers outlining the resources out there that can help people getting started with CiviCRM
- partnerships with other organisations (non profit / tech media, for example) to get the world out about CiviDay in general and local CiviDay meet ups
It'd be great to hear ideas from people on other things we can do on the day to make CiviDay a success - both things we can do on the day, and ways in which we can promote it to people that would not come otherwise. And if you have a day to spare between now and the 29th January, then creating some CiviDay resources would be an awesome thing to do.
What now?
As of 25 November, we have 14 meet ups organised. Here are a few things you can do right now:
- sign up to your local meetup (or start one if there is not one nearby)
- let the world know that you are going to cividay and how good it is going to be (#cividay)
- tell us about things we can do as part of CiviDay in the comments below
- promote CiviDay to people to your local and global networks
Comments
How about an online CiviCamp for this day? Some of us are in rural areas where creating a new meet up would not produce bodies.
nasact:
do you want to coordinate and do a few online events that day. I do agree we should have 2-4 online events that day around the clock for folks who are not close to a meetup and/or cannot make it to one.
last year, we had an online meetup europe morning and pacific morning which covers some part of the workday for most people
lobo
I would be willing to head up an online session for North American (english speaking and maybe some spanglish) people like a 10AM PT - 1PM ET start time lasting no more than 2 hours. Happy to create an agenda for this but I would like to subdivide the session into two 1-hour sessions. First hour is an intro to CiviCRM, say "Civi and U" where we go at a high level of the modules, extensions, CMS integration (I will speak about Drupal but would love someone from WP and Joomla to talk about those) along with using the demo site to show some examples of Civi's capability. The second 1-hour session I would cover actual use cases that attendees have. I find that people are usually very interested in CiviCRM but don't understand either how to get started (consulting, hosting, etc.) or they don't understand how to solve their use case with the out of the box setup, or at least that is what I have encountered being a CiviCRM Ambassador and the people that have reached out to me. We could use Google Hangouts to conduct this and I prefer it because many members are available via Hangouts during other times as well and sometimes IRC chat is a bit much to follow when 3-4 conversations are going and all the bug stuff is flying in.
Hey NASACT/Adrian,
Great that you are able to do an online session. Your agenda sounds great. Do you have any people in mind for Joomla and Wordpress? Let me know and I can help find some if not.
Hangouts sounds like a great format - if you do it 'on air' then we can add it to civicrm.org/webinars as well and have it recorded for people that come later. In the past, we've used hangouts plus twitter for people to send in their questions which worked quite nicely since you can have the live hangout and the twitter feed on the same page.
We'll make sure that we promote this as part of cividay - if you can edit the wiki to start and add details there, that would be a good start. Once finalised we can add to https://civicrm.org/cividay.
PS if anyone wants to do a similar event in a European/Afican/Asian/Australasian timezone, please go for it and we can help you to do so.
good to see this coming up again but i think last year we flagged that having it the equivalent of the northern hemisphere's July 29 was not great timing since it is peak summer down here (we hope).
perhaps in future years this could be pushed back a month?
Do you mean February, Pete? What date would be good for you to 2015? We wanted to keep it early on since we don't want it too close to CiviCon SF, etc.
See mark Tompsett's idea for co-working day on the 29th - I think that's a great idea if people can make it happen - https://civicrm.org/blogs/mark-tompsett/lets-make-cividay-2014-civicrm-co-working-day-too
I love the idea of co-working day but I also would like to see a bit of time dedicated to those interested in coming over to Civi. For me, living in no man's land (middle US and not by any major city, i.e. Chicago, Kansas City, etc.) having an online meetup is critical. Let's think this through but I'm on board for this co-working day online instead of in-person. I wish every day could be an online co-working day :)
Hey there,
Last year, the main activities were evening meet ups and these will be focused on introducing new people to CiviCRM
Maybe its just semantics, but to me the essence of a co-working is that people in the same room at the same time, so not sure what an online co-working day is - or to put it another way, every day is an online co-working day for CiviCRM :)