Databricks launches Meetup-in-a-box for Apache Spark Meetup Organizers

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.

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 [email protected] 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 [email protected] 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 [email protected] 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!