GroupBy.org is off to an awesome start:
- Dozens of speakers submitted abstracts and collaborated on ’em
- Hundreds of readers voted to pick their favorites
- The winning speakers put on a heck of a show
- Almost 700 of you showed up to watch live
- Our A/V team kicked butt and got the recordings up on YouTube the very next day
- And I have to say the site looks pretty spiffy these days
I’m really proud of what you and I built over there. Here’s what’s coming next:
- Friday, we’ve got another 6 live sessions
- Our A/V team will launch the podcast feed with the full recordings
- We’ll be launching mobile apps to make it easier to listen to these on the go
- Submissions are open now for the April events
- March 15-31 – voting will be open, and this time around, attendees will just pick their top 10 favorites (rather than rating individual sessions)
From here on out, I’ll blog GroupBy news over there, like today’s post about GroupBy Live Webcast Notes & Lessons Learned.
But here on my personal blog, I wanted to stop for a champagne moment. In that post, Scott Adams writes about how it never really feels time to pop the champagne because there’s so much he’s still working on, and I can totally identify with that. I’m juggling a whole bunch of things in the air, but I’m going to take a second to stop to celebrate what we did together.
In 2016, I had to hit pause on my community efforts when we bought out Jeremiah & Kendra, and I had to take on a bunch of company duties. This year, I’m back in a comfortable rhythm, and I’ve been able to carve out a certain amount of time per week to tackle community initiatives. I’m really loving it already.
However, my community stuff has to be sustainable. I’ve written about what sustainable community initiatives mean to me, and I’ve been careful to build GroupBy in a way that I can sustain it. I don’t do the A/V work, I’ve been doing the site work so that I can hand it off to volunteer organizers, and I don’t do private help – all support questions need to go through public channels like the GroupBy forums or Slack channel.
If we can do this together with just a few hours of our time per week, I can’t wait to see what it looks like by the end of 2017. Here’s to us, dear reader.
14 Comments. Leave new
Brent, congratulations for the great idea !!! When we’ve talked in a shuttle bus in Seattle last year i was scaried with your excitation talking about free conferences cause it’s comes with a lot of hard work .
With all the succes that is coming, maybe we can have the the physical Group By conference in a few years !!!
Alexandre – thanks sir! Yeah, it was definitely a lot of hard work leading up to the event, and I’m so glad to see that it worked out well.
A couple of local user group leaders have already reached out to me about using this platform for their own local events like SQLSaturdays. We’ll see how it goes – I want to make sure the online kinks are ironed out first, so maybe in 2018.
Awesome work sir….Thank you very much…I am learning a lot…
Thanks, glad you enjoyed it!
Congrats sir! Thanks for all you have been doing and thank you for all of your community efforts.
You’re welcome!
I love this idea and how you did all of this. It is highly valuable to the community. Thank you.
It really is a fantastic resource. I learned several things from the last session and being able to watch the sessions I missed due other responsibilities or just to review is incredibly helpful.
Gratitude to you and the presenters.
I like how the topics are voted on. Gives me a sense of involvement in the outcome and anticipation for results. Great community building tactic!
Thanks! That’s great to hear.
Hola, Gregorio! This is your old high school Spanish teacher Senora D! I was just in the Hokey Pokey talking to Carole and she gave me the scoop on you and your innovative enterprise. I always knew you’d do well! Congratulations!
Hola, Señora D! It’s great to hear from you. Your classes sparked a lifelong love of the culture, and I’ve been all over Mexico over the years. We’re heading back to Cabo this winter. Thanks for being a great teacher!
Hello Brent, now we don’t have PASS anymore, do you intend go ahead with GroupBY even a physical event ? By the way how can i access the old videos from previous groupby conferences ?
Thank you Sir.
All the videos are free in the GroupBy YouTube channel, forever. I’ve handed the event off to other folks to manage. Enjoy!