One of the most important reasons for the growth of Apache Spark is the amazing grassroots community interest and support to share, teach, and learn with each other. At the heart of the Spark community movement are the Spark Meetup organizers who continue to dedicate their time, resources, and effort. This core group of individuals help evangelize and nurture Spark knowledge sharing, often helping members get projects off the ground. As of November 17th, 2015, the Spark meetup community has rapidly grown to more than 117 groups globally with 46,680 members.
Running a meetup can be an exhausting endeavor from finding the right venue, getting sponsors for those venues, securing speakers to present relevant and up to date information, not to mention promoting the event and receiving sponsorships to cover incidental costs associated with the meetup. While a Spark meetup is a local event, Spark Meetup organizers can all help each other out globally and leverage each other’s expertise and experiences.
If you are running (or looking to run) a Spark meetup, we would like to provide these resources – which we are calling a Meetup-in-a-box. The virtual components of this box include a Spark Meetup Organizers Google Group, Apache Spark Meetup manual, Spark Jeopardy game, Databricks Trial Accounts, and (coming soon) Spark Remote Presentation Session and Remote Q&A sessions. The physical components of this box include books, t-shirts, and prizes; more information on this will be available shortly. As we add more components to Meetup-in-a-box, you can keep up-to-date at Meetup-in-a-box for Spark Meetup Organizers.
Spark Meetup Organizers Google Group
As Spark Meetup Organizers and part of the Spark community, we encourage you – the Spark Meetup Organizer and/or coordinator – to join Spark Meetup Organizers Google Group as a central way for us to communicate and help each other.
Apache Spark Meetup Manual
The Apache Spark Meetup Manual is a living document to provide guidance and a helping hand to help run Spark Meetups. The manual was the brainchild of Mehrdad Pazooki who leads the Toronto Apache Spark Meetup group. We invite all of you to review and add comments so we can continue to share how to run meetups more effectively. To view the Apache Spark Meetup Manual, please click on the link or the image below, to edit or comment the document, please join the Spark Meetup Organizers Google Group and email sparkhub@databricks.com
Spark Jeopardy Game
Created by Donna Fernandez of the Washington DC Area Apache Spark Interactive, this is a fun game based on the game Jeopardy built on top of Apache Spark questions. As a Spark meetup organizer, you can run the game for your own event and we can potentially provide some prizes for the event! Please email sparkhub@databricks.com for edit access to this game. To play this game yourself, please click on Spark Jeopardy Game or the image below.
Some quick notes when playing this game:
- If the game asks for a password, leave it blank and you will be able to get access to the game without any problems.
- For instructions on how to play this game, please click on the Quick Tour button at the bottom of the Spark Jeopardy board.
- To provide feedback or new questions for this game, please email sparkhub@databricks.com.
Databricks Trial Accounts
If you are running a Spark workshop or want to showcase something with Apache Spark, Databricks can provide you an account up to three weeks prior to your meetup event. This way, instead of worrying about spinning up the infrastructure for your event, you can quickly spin up a cluster and showcase your data engineering and data sciences work through Databricks notebooks in your language of choice. Please email sparkhub@databricks.com to get access to Databricks Trial Accounts for your meetup event.
Coming Soon: Spark Remote Session and/or Q&A
If you would like a deep dive Apache Spark remote session and/or a Question & Answer session, email sparkhub@databricks.com for more information. We will provide more information for this as soon as we complete our test sessions to ensure that we have resolved any issues.
Discussion
As we continue to update and expand these Meetup-in-a-box resources, we will continue to update the Meetup-in-a-box for Spark Meetup Organizers page as well. To all Spark Meetup Organizers – please join the Spark Meetup Organizers Google Group and email sparkhub@databricks.com to get access to these resources, to get more information, or to provide feedback about SparkHub. This way, we can work together to help the Apache Spark community be the best community experience!
