MODX Meetups rock!
As mentioned in the Introducing modmore blog post, MODX meetups are a big part of the overall strategy here at modmore.
Meetups enable the MODX Community to meet each other face to face, and I'm a big fan of that. All the time I see people leaving meetups energized, full of great ideas and community spirit.
Having hosted a couple of meetups myself, I know there's a few things that can be challenging when organising one. Money to pay for drinks, snacks and sometimes room rent, and coming up with topics for presentation. Personally, I think that's a great opportunity for modmore to help MODX Ambassadors with sponsoring, while the ambassadors get to play with some awesome extras and get to demo them at their local meetup. They win by being able to provide their attendees with beer and pizza (or your favorite equivalent - bitterballen!) and showing off something cool, while modmore wins because more people hear about what we do and eventually get some extra sales.
Before the public launch, modmore has been involved with 4 meetups.
Leeuwarden, The Netherlands on April 3rd
Okay, so this is kind of cheating as I'm the one that organised this meetup, but this was the first time I ever (publicly) went into detail about what modmore was. I talked about a couple community related things, and then showed off an early preview of Redactor for MODX. Attended by 10 MODXers it was a great meetup with, aside from my brabbling, a presentation on using MODX as a multi channel CMS by Sterc and a very interesting case study from Bert Oost and Hugo Peek. Lots of discussion, drinks (mostly beer) and snacks later we left the premises right before they shut the door, so definitely a great evening.
Portland, Oregon, USA on April 10th
Unfortunately it was a little short notice and too expensive to fly over to Portland for a night myself... but luckily the host of this meetup, JP DeVries, had been working for modmore (building the Redactor RTE). In exchange for some sponsoring to pay for drinks and pizza, JP would talk a bit about modmore. So it happened, and the videos are available right now if you want to check out the topics he discussed. This was the first time Redactor was shown outside of my hometown, and when the videos came online lots of people were quick to jump in for the sneak peak.
Cologne (Koln), Germany on April 18th
My German was a bit rusty, but having spoken a number of German devs at MODXpo Europe 2012, I really wanted to check out their meetup and talk with more of them. They didn't need any further sponsoring as Trusted Shops took care of that and the location, but they were kind enough to give me some time to introduce modmore and show off some cool stuff. With 35 attendees, most of them new to MODX, it was quite refreshing to see Oliver Haase explaining why we all love MODX so much. It was great to chat about MODXpo Europe 2013 with Oliver and Christian too!
London, United Kingdom on April 25th
I've been really looking forward to checking out London for a while - having been at Heathrow a few times before, I never actually made it into the city itself before this meetup, so I took the chance to do a bit of sightseeing! The meetup, organised by Andrew Smith, was visited by about 20 and I really enjoyed the atmosphere and the great discussions. It was great to see how people responded to the ideas behind modmore and I think people really enjoyed the live Redactor demo as well.
Where to next?
No idea! I'll likely throw together a Dutch meetup again soon as it has been too long, but if you are excited about modmore and involved in a local MODX user group or meetup that could do with a bit of sponsorship, please do let me know by sending an email to [email protected]. I'd love to hear about what you are planning and how modmore could help you with that.