Recently I blogged about the formation of the first AWS Users Group in Rochester, NY. This is a report about that historic meeting on September 20th, as well as a bit about several other AWS user groups.
Just before the meeting we ordered pizza for a crowd, not knowing whether or not one would materialize. No worries about that point! Thanks to the hard work of Mitch Garnaat and David Kavanagh, the turnout was outstanding. Attendees included representatives from academia, major corporations, hobbyist developers, and everything in between. A show of hands really surprised me--just over half the crowd had experience with Amazon Web Serivces. That meant the other half turned up on faith, because someone told them that "you've got to see this". Wow!
Reuven Cohen came over from Toronto to check things out in preparation for an event back home (see below). Sounds like the two groups may set up a "sister city" relationship.
At the end of the meeting we had one way to measure how successful the evening was: $RemainingPizza = 0... RawSug's next meeting will be next meeting is on October 18th at the Pittsford Library.
Rochester AWS Users Group (before the room filled)
AWSome
Innovation happens on all fronts--with AWSome being an excellent name for a user group. :) The second-ever AWS user group met one day later in Meetup format in Palo Alto, California. They met on a Friday night. That's true Valley Passion, because most people spend Friday nights unwinding.
According to a follow-up email from Sebastian Stadil, one of the organizers...
"We gave an overview of each of Amazon's web services, their use, advantages and drawbacks, and then discussed openly what we expected to get out of the meetup: meet people, and encourage the use of AWS among the startup community."
The demographics were young entrepreneurs, 20-35 years of age, having been or being involved in a startup. Most came to get informed, some to learn best practices, a few to get advice from more knowledgeable users. For all subsequent meetups we will have one or two speakers present use cases, or how they use AWS and for what purpose. This should be very interesting!
Toronto
In mid November Toronto will hold their first meeting on November 15th at 7pm, and current plans are to hold it at the Indoor Playground. Actual venue may change if the list of interested people continues to grow at its current rate. Already there are more people signed up for this group than any other that I'm aware of! The brains behind this event include Reuven Cohen of Enomaly and Kevin Thomason of AideRSS (among others).
By the way, I plan to attend this meeting--fresh off the plane from Europe.
Let us know if you'd like to form an AWS User Group in your area!
-- Mike
Information on the upcoming Toronto meeting can be found at: http://barcamp.org/AmazonCamp
We're pretty happy with the number of sign-ups so far.
Posted by: Dave Rapin | October 07, 2007 at 10:24 AM
I would like to attand a User Group meeting in Houston TX. If there is not one, perhaps I could start one, if I knew anything about the format. I just now discovered the site, and do not know anything else about the Amazon answer to eBay.
Posted by: Jim Darwin | October 31, 2007 at 04:01 PM
I would be interested to attend any AWS User Group event in the UK or I would be happy to start one if there is enough interest.
Posted by: Ioannis Kotsiopoulos | November 06, 2007 at 12:46 AM