As these events happened, we were building up to the 20th anniversary of the Apache Software Foundation. The contributions of the Beam community were a part of Maximilian Michels blog post on the success of the ASF's open source development model:Success at Apache: What You Need to Know by Maximilian Michels https://t.co/XjtVYgPAHX #Apache #Open #Innovation #Community #people #processes #JustWorks @stadtlegende pic.twitter.com/xSibnyWAMe— Apache - The ASF (@TheASF) 26 maart 2019
As the founder of the first Beam meetup in London back in 2017, seeing the community flourish on a larger and worldwide scale is something that makes me happy. And we have come quite a long way since 2017, both in terms of geographical spread:
As well as in numbers:
All of this culminates in two Beam Summits this year—one we already had a few weeks ago in Berlin, and the other which will take place in a few weeks in Las Vegas, where we worked together with Apache and the ApacheCon team.
In that spirit, let's have a more detailed overview of the things that have happened, what the next few months look like, and how we can foster even more community growth.
Meetups
We've had a flurry of activity, with several meetups in the planning process and more popping up globally over time. As diversity of contributors is a core ASF value, this geographic spread is exciting for the community. Here's a picture from the latest Apache Beam meetup organized at Lyft in San Francisco:
We have more Bay Area meetups coming soon, and the community is looking into kicking off a meetup in Toronto and New York! In Europe, London had its first meetup of 2019 at the start of April, as did Stockholm at the start of May:
Meetup groups are becoming active in Berlin and New York also, so stay tuned for events there and more meetups internationally! If you are interested in starting your own meetup, feel free to reach out! Good places to start include our Slack channel, the dev and user mailing lists, or the Apache Beam Twitter. Even if you can’t travel to these meetups, you can stay informed on the happenings of the community. The talks and sessions from previous conferences and meetups are archived on the Apache Beam YouTube channel. If you want your session added to the channel, don’t hesitate to get in touch!Stockholm had its second @ApacheBeam meetup at the start of this week, with @kanterov from @SpotifyEng and @while from @eqt.— Matthias Baetens 🌆 (@matthiasbaetens) 12 mei 2019
Slides can be found here: https://t.co/85LZMw7pDA
and the recording here: https://t.co/CutirIgu9V
Check out @BeamSummit as well - speakers announced now! pic.twitter.com/4veoeQeLgg
Summits
The first summit of the year was held in Berlin this past June. You can read about the inaugural edition of the Beam Summit Europe here. At these summits, you have the opportunity to meet with other Apache Beam creators and users, get expert advice, learn from the speaker sessions, and participate in workshops. We are proud to say that the Summit doubled in size this year with attendees from 24 countries across 4 continents.You can find resources from this year’s Summit here:
- 📹 the recordings can be found on our YouTube channel.
- 📊 presentations of the Summit are made available via the website and in this folder.
- We strongly encourage you to get involved again this year! You can still sign up for the upcoming summit in North America.
- 🎫 If you want to secure your ticket to attend the Beam Summit North America 2019, check our the ApacheCon website.
- 🔈 In case you want to get involved in speaking at events, do not hesitate to contact us via email or Twitter.
Why community engagement matters
Why we need a strong Apache Beam community:- We’re gaining lots of code contributions and need committers to review them
- We want people to feel a sense of ownership to the project. By fostering this level of engagement, the work becomes even more exciting.
- A healthy community has a further reach and leads to more growth. More hours can be contributed to the project as we can spread the work and ownership.
- We’d like to give folks a place to meet and share ideas.
- We know that offline interactions often changes the nature of the online ones in a positive manner.
- Building an active and diverse community is part of the Apache Way. These summits provide an opportunity for us to engage people from different locations, companies, and backgrounds.
