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.