Last month, I was at 2ndQuadrant booth at P2D2, an annual conference organized in Prague by local user group called CSPUG (Czech and Slovak PostgreSQL User Group). The conference was certainly a huge success and more than 200 people showed up! Meeting a lot of PostgreSQL enthusiasts in town, I wondered why there are no regular meetups in Prague. At the conference after-party, I started to question folks and learned that given a chance some of them would give talks and many more would be happy to attend. The initial reactions verified my observation and I felt motivated enough to start organizing meetups myself!
Even though I’ve been living in Prague for some time now, it has been a little difficult to manage the myself all by myself. My colleague Tomas Vondra stepped forward to help and gave access to our already existing meetup page (surprise!) founded by him.
I immediately started to work on the meetup page and designed a cover photo using the existing CSPUG logo. Now, it has a brand new identity and looks good to the eye. The kickstart for the page already paid off, we have more than 100 members and the number is growing almost every day! You can visit and join our group here: Prague PostgreSQL Meetup
Having set up the meetup page, we needed a place for announcements so we created a Twitter account. You may follow us @PrahaPostgreSQL and help us to grow by following/retweeting!
After reviving the meetup page and created a social channel, the tougher part was organizing the meetups. Luckily, we found some volunteers (thank you so much!) to help us both from Prague and abroad! We will be organizing a meetup last Monday of each month, and we plan to have one talk in English and another in Czech to attract both locals and non-Czech speakers at the same time. Please feel free to write to me if you have any suggestions/feedback.
Upcoming Meetups
We have already secured our meetups for next two months and are inviting speakers for our session in June. You can have a look at our upcoming meetups here: http://www.meetup.com/Prague-PostgreSQL-Meetup/events/
We are very excited for our first meetup due on Monday, on 26th of March. If you are in Prague, you are welcome to join us! My colleague, Sasha Aliashkevich will give a talk as well. For more details, please visit: http://www.meetup.com/Prague-PostgreSQL-Meetup/events/tbrslpyxfbjc/
Call for Speakers
We are constantly on look out for new speakers, if you are living in Prague or planning to visit this beautiful city anytime soon, you can register here.
Special thanks to our friends from neighboring cities who agreed to come to Prague for our meetups. Without the amazing support from our PostgreSQL community friends, we could not have achieved this much in such a short amount of time! Thanks!