Aeolus Community-Building Meetup #2

Yesterday we had our second Aeolus Community-Building Meeting. The idea was initially suggested by Nitesh, a community member who wanted to share some ideas for growing the community. We met a few weeks ago, with the notes published here.

This week we had a follow-up call, with much greater attendance.

We’ve been using Google Hangouts for these meetings with pretty good success. The videoconference aspect is pretty neat, and Mo had good luck with the screen-sharing aspect as well. This time we did an On Air Hangout, which allowed people to watch the stream live on Youtube, and for us to post a recording after the fact.

You can watch the recording here. (As a warning, my audio is really low, so if you crank the audio up for me, be prepared for everyone else to blow out your eardrums in comparison.)

Here’s a quick recap of what was discussed:

  • Mo Morsi gave a preview of his upcoming talks on Aeolus. He put the slides on the Aeolus Presentations wiki page.
  • We should have a release calendar on our site, and also make sure to make noise (on our blog, and on Twitter/Facebook/etc.) about our releases.
  • It would be valuable to look at integrating with CloudStack and documenting how to use it. Google Compute / Google Cloud Platform, too!
  • Our templates site is a really good idea that needs to be finished up and launched. The template repo Justin set up is a good interim solution.
  • It would be interesting to look at integrating with other sources of templates, like Bitnami or CloudFormation.
  • In general, we really need to support more providers, and finally arrive at a complete API.
  • Justin has been working on getting OpenShift Origin running on Aeolus. This would be an excellent blog post, and maybe a good marketing angle.
  • Sponsoring “drinkups” seems to work well for attracting interest, though it’s not clear if there’s actually a good return on it.
  • Someone suggested cotton candy at booths. I love that idea. Cotton candy kind of looks like a cloud, too!
  • Stickers and flyers are a must. We need to get a ton ordered.
  • We should do more with social media. We have a Facebook page and a Google Plus page, and we’re @aeolusproject on Twitter, and we have a blog. But we don’t make extensive use of them. What we really need are others to blog about us, retweet us, and share our stuff on Facebook.
  • We need to get people to take these tasks and commit to making them happen, and we should be in good shape for the next meeting!

Procedurally, we had some notes for how to make things go more smoothly next time:

  • I really, really need to buy a headset so that people can actually hear me.
  • When you have a large group of people who don’t all know each other, you should have people introduce themselves.
  • The 10-person limit is a problem. I think I might do a separate post on some things I have in mind for how to handle this next time.
  • We need an easier way to share the link ahead of time, both for the Hangout and for the live Youtube stream for people who don’t intend to participate.
  • We need to pay attention to IRC during the call, so those watching on Youtube can participate.

While comments are welcome on this post, please don’t do so at the expense of replying on aeolus-devel!

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