Must-go-to user group events in the next months

Behind every user group are passionate individuals who want to give back to their community. They spend tons of their spare time and take financial risks to make those events happen. I met many of those organisers over the last decade and longer - and I am grateful for what they did and do. You can read about my thoughts how important YOU are in that in this blog post from around two years ago.

User group events give you an awesome opportunity to meet people that share the same interests, learn from experts in their field, make new friends, and have a lot of fun. There’s no better way to experience the vibe of and the commitment to a technology than doing that in-person with your peers. Be it in your local region, your country, your continent, or world wide.

User group events

This is a (not complete) list of upcoming events that I want to highlight with this post.

• August 10-11- Midwest Dreamin’ in Chicago, an event that started with 100 attendees a couple of years ago and is now set to attract nearly 1,000.
• August 12 - be an ally and stay after Midwest Dreamin’ for WITnesssuccess - the inaugural Women in Tech event for the worldwide Salesforce ecosystem
• September 14 - French Touch Dreamin’ in Paris will have it’s 2nd edition for the french community after a successful first event last year with 250 attendees.
• September 22-23 - Surfforce in Ireland (a user group with a twist, supporting the local region)

These are not the only events. There are Forcelandia (also in August), Tahoe Dreamin’, Texas Dreamin’, Down Under Dreamin’, India Dreamin’, and many more. Some are long established - others just started.

For example, here in Europe, there are besides French Touch Dreamin’ also London’s Calling and Dream Olé.

• London’s Calling started last year and they had their second event this year with more than 350 attendees.
• Just a couple of days ago the Spanish community held their first one-day event, Dream Olé, in Madrid with 130+ attendees.

It is an amazing time to see how organisers and members from the numerous developer meetups or user groups (these are different, check out the links) step up, take the risk and workload and make those bigger events happen. Thank you all!

There’s still some whitespace to fill on the map - but I know some people who are working on that… ;-)

Sidenote:

What’s interesting for me is how self-funded the events are. You find some of my colleagues as (keynote) speakers, but you find us rarely as a sponsor on any event. And if it’s only a medium or low level sponsoring. IMHO that’s great - this kind of events shouldn’t rely financially on a vendor.