i’d like to motivate the idea of organising local openHAB MeetUps around the world. We’ve organised two MeetUps in Düsseldorf, Germany and Stuttgart, Germany some months ago with great success!
We’ve learned from the past events that it’s REALLY great to get to know like-minded people, share knowledge and discuss great solutions (and workarounds ;-))
The effort to organise a meetup was quite small (max 4h):
organise a room (company meeting room, nice restaurant, warm up your old university connections, hackerspaces, etc.)
if there’s no catering available grab some drinks (don’t forget the non alcoholics) and ideally some food (we had great experience with a plate of Subs (Subways))
either share the costs or ask your company to sponsor this user group
(optionally) invite one or two speakers for the first meetup. The subsequent speakers can easily be recruited from the auditorium
discuss and have fun (bring some time, our first Düsseldorf meetup lasts until 1am)
actively invite other like-minded people and let them share experience (even with other systems like openHAB)
In order to let others learn from your experience:
share the links to your meetup
send some pictures
let us know about the outcome, discussion, opinions
Keep up, making openHAB THE open source smart home solution
Sasha, I would suggest signing up to www.geekzone.co.nz. Plenty of like minded people on there (including me) and I am constantly pushing openHAB to anyone that will listen! They also have reasonably regular meetups, particularly in Auckland.
Maybe - we’re looking at heading home in Feb/Mar and my sister wants to go away somewhere while we’re back, so we might head South… I’ll let you know if we’re down your way.
experience taught us, don’t ask for interest, better schedule a meeting and talk about it (use existing MeetUps and UGs). After that you will find yourself experiencing a wonderful evening with some great guys talking about Smarthome in general und openHAB in particular ;-).
Also have local universities in mind. Many students are very happy to learn about projects like openHAB because most of the time their own (of the universities) systems are quite old and went through many students hands before and hence cannot comprise of a consistent design and architecture.
Three years ago I started spontaneously an openHAB LinkedIn group with the message “Vote for openHAB” (to get a price for the most promising ioT development). To my surprise there are coming more and more members of this group. Now, with openHAB v2, I have decided to organize a local meet-up in Eindhoven. I don’t know yet when it will happen. Maybe in June or September. I’m looking for people who can help me, with advice, new products and new developments. This announcement is a first start… Regards Derk van der Wal
