Hi good morning!

Welcome to Building Community. I'm Ross or as some people online refer to me as the Pony.

About me, I Started at Ping Identity in 2012, and was thrown into the deep end with this new tool my boss had bought called Casper, now known as Jamf Pro. I some how convinced my boss I needed training and went to get my CCA in Seattle, In 2014, seeing there were no mac meetups in Vancouver I started Vancouver JUG.

Our first jug , 20 people registered, I was excited, thought wow! This Is great. So with Ping Identity’s blessing I co hosted our first meetup.

What I learned in this was Registration does not always mean attendance.. I had a room setup for 20, and 1 person showed up. Discouraged I decided to try again.

For our next meetings, While a small attendance was great. It could be better. If I recall these didn’t have a formal topic but was rather a discussion and meet and greet. At this point I recognized that calling it a “Jamf User group wasn’t going to work, as some of the attendees didn’t even utilize jamf but were users of other managed platforms, mostly munki”.

Seeing the greater need I rebranded, as Vancouver Mac Admins. As Attendance grew, we now had a consistent group of macadmins attending. Content was still tricky. We had planned meetings and chosen topics to discuss.. The plan was to do a Meeting every two months.

Sometime in 2016 Mark Cohen approached me he was talking with Andrew Sergio about possibly starting a first chapter of Macbrained At this point I was a tad excited, Someone else wanted to help me with the meetups, although I should have asked for help earlier I didn’t. We then started planning our first meetup with our new brand. “we decided to become MacRained_YVR... Kidding. Macbrained_YVR”

So lets talk about how Macbrained_YVR got to where it is now.

STEP 1 PLANNING

Being the first chapter of Macbrained we knew we had to hold ourselves to a higher standard. It also meant we had a lot of leeway on what we wanted to accomplish and how we presented ourselves.

We started by hand picking a board of others to help with this new initiative. Asking them for a year commitment, which could include planning sessions, being available before and after meetings & possibly presenting topics.

From there, we had our first Board meeting where we laid down our guidelines of what we wanted to accomplish, meeting flow, and how we’d deal with problems.

All was well, around the same time the local community was asking when we’d be having another meetup. We were in a holding pattern till after Jnuc. where we were to be officially announced. Our first meeting, was hosted by Hootsuite and was a great success. We were lucky to be able to have it somewhere where the host apart of the board and okay with helping us figure it out.

STEP 2 MEETWith a brand relaunch we went from 7 attendees to 18. Our Topic was DEP @ Scale, with myself and Ron presenting.

STEP 3 FEEDBACKFeedback was a very important part of our meetups.. For our feedback we utilized survey monkey to send a survey out. Questions like: What could we change what didn’t work what did you like.

After our first meetup this piece of feedback stood out to me. It was was great, although people want to be there, we also have to be mindful that they may have other commitments. If we schedule a 2 hour meetup it better be a 2 hour meetup. It can go late, but the presentations should be done by the time clock runs down.

Not all feedback is negative, Overall we’ve had a positive response of how our meetup goes, as we grow I expect this chart to fill out more and more positive and negative feedback to show. The negative, just means we’ve got something to address. And can fix.

Meetups aren’t easy to host, they can be but they need some love and care to help them grow.. I polled the macadmins community on twitter, and slack before making this presentation to get a general sense of what they struggle with, with their own meetups.

Three Theme’s kept repeating.

Attendees – Getting them in the door.

Content and Speakers – Who’s going to talk,

and Venue - where can we have it

Get your name out there!Tell everyone about your meetup!Don’t be afraid to reach out on everything. People communicate in different methods. Do an announcement when registration opens on slack, then do anohterannouncement a few days before.

Send an announce to the MacE list, it’s a great place to let people who may not utilize slack about your event.

Stop by your local apple store talk to the business team, they may have people in mind they think would like to know about it. I'm also hearing they may be trying to become a bigger part of the local community.

Post on JamfNation - It doesn't have to be Jamf Specific to be posted.

Reach out to Jamf integrators you know or acn Partners. They have alot more contacts than you.

Create a local mailing list, invite people who you know are local, continue offering that up as a local list to localized Macadmins, as you meet them. Ensure this channel isn’t chatty. No one wants to join another mailing list that spams their inbox. MacBrained_YVR has a mailing list, and our board members actively reach out to locals asking if they’d like to join.

Personally, I feel is the hardest part of the meetup. Topics do not always have to be deep dives.

Topics could include something being worked on, something people want to learn or something they currently are experiencing issues with. This is also a great place to test your Conference talk in a smaller group.

It doesn’t always have to be related to mac. Although a general mac theme is preferred. Our last Macbrained was on ABC’S of S3.

Venue, most companies allow thier staff to host, or want to. Ask your attendees if they’re willing to host. Be aware that they may also see hosting as an opportunity to share what they do or talk about the companies product.We’ve allowed this as part of our opening as it encourages other people to share, and informs us of what other companies are doing.

Not all venue’s will have a budget to pitch in for food etc or libations. Some do and that’s great, but its not expected.

Be consistent with your meetups, schedule them in advance and plan on sticking to that schedule.

EG. Macbrained_yvr is quarterly. Cascadia Macadmins is the 3rd Thurs of every month.Have a meeting format and stick to it.Macbrained_yvr’s is the following.

Doors open Intros - this is where we ask everyone to go around the room and say who they are and what they do, and possibly where they work (We may forgo this as we get bigger)Thanks to our host – Allowing them to talk about what the company does.Announcements (this may include conference announcements, who's hiring, when our next meetup is, or other industry related items)Topic and presentationsQ/A

at the end of the meeting we send an email to all participants thanking them for joining which includes. This email contains

A Feedback Survey, when the next meeting isLink to sign up for the next meeting

Meetups are much easier with a team helping you. Doing them on your own is tough, although someone will need to be the leader of the pack.