Guidelines for organizing Magento User Groups

You want to organize MUG meetups? Cool! Thank you so much for putting in the time and effort to organize these local Magento meetups and bringing the community together on regular basis. You are awesome!

We already have a general Code of conduct for our community. This document is an addition to that specificly for organizers of the MUGs.

To align ourselves, have a consistent image and make sure your MUG gets the attention it deserves, we do have some tips & guidelines for you. If you have any questions/remarks about these, please let us know or submit a change!

How to start:

• Request access to one of the existing Meetup.com groups. Each region has one, and Dutchento pays all Meetup.com fees. You can quickly become one of the co-organizer of such a local group.
• Let the people at Dutchento know so they can help you promote it. We will also add you to our Slack discussion group for MUG organizers.

What do we expect from you as an organizer:

General organization

• Organize regular meetups. Once every 3 months is a good pace to start with.
• The meetups should be open to anyone that wants to join.
• Coordinate dates with surrounding MUG organizers.
• If you are organizing this as a commercial company, some promotion in exchange for your effort is ok. But the meetup should still be open to visitors and speakers from your competitors. This is encouraged in order to promote the local community cohesion and collaboration.
• Talk to potential speakers and refer them to the speakers form: https://goo.gl/forms/4uCHomUqP37z32iC3
• Local MUG organizers are the first point of contact for speakers and attendees.

Content/ Topics

• Dutchento is not in the lead of the ideas, topics or the program of a MUG. It is all done by you as MUG organizer. However, we are happy to help out where needed.
• Coordinate speakers and topics with surrounding MUG organizers.
• MUG topics can of course be shared between MUGs if agreed upon the creator and the speaker. If the speaker can't or won't travel to other MUGs, please coordinate with them if you can copy their presentation and under which conditions. Always be respectful to the original creator.

Announcing the event

• Add your event to the relevant meetup.com group. If you don't have the rights, please contact [email protected]
• In your text, be as clear as possible about your target audience to manage expectations. For example: You don't want merchants showing up unknowingly to very technical developer sessions.

During the event

• Say thanks to the location hosts and sponsors (when applicable).
• We would like you to setup a pull-up banner from Dutchento. Request one in time and we will deliver them to you :).
• try to get people to already submit ideas for new meetups (locations and topics).

After the event

• Use meetup.com to thank all the participants and ask them to contribute new topics/locations for new meetings
• We highly recommend creating a blog (text or video) summary of the event and send that to [email protected] for placement on our website. These articles can of course contain links to or images from the location hosts and/or sponsors of the event. We kindly ask you to not place this content on other channels before it's placed on the Dutchento website.

When following these guidelines, you can expect the following from Dutchento:

• Promotion of your MUGs through our website and social channels.
• Access to our network of the best speakers from other events.
• You can join and (if needed) vote during our yearly MUG strategy meeting.
• When organizing 4 MUGs or more per year, you get 4 free tickets to our yearly (Meet Magento event)[http://www.meet-magento.nl/] for you and you team!
• Sponsorship of meetups to pay for the costs of location and (some of the) drinks.