Today, the Cloud Lunch and Learn team is celebrating the first month of existence. It has been an amazing experience, working together with the community, to deliver online sessions related to the Cloud. This post is to memorize this mark, as a sign of hope, to be the first of many months promoting collaboration in the communities, connect and enable community members to work together, especially the ones that did not work together before.

Also, I want to share with you some information about this initiative, in case you did not hear about it.

Context

So, during the last year, working together with different tech communities, I noticed that there is still some problems in terms of connection and communication between the different communities. So, I decided to take the opportunity to try something that would promote the connection and communication between the different communities, so they are aware of each community is working on, and also we could work together to build better and bigger initiatives to the community.

In many countries, and especially in the IT area, there is a concept of Lunch and Learn, where IT teams, in the context of their organizations, get together and watch tech sessions while they have their lunch. So, considering the busy days and calendars we have nowadays, it is a good opportunity to learn more about technologies.

So, I decided to use take this opportunity to apply this concept, and create this initiative that would allow anyone to deliver sessions, and everyone to attend and learn with those sessions, for free.

So, at the beginning of May, Cloud Lunch and Learn sessions arose. So far, we got great numbers

• 5 amazing online sessions, with different topics related to the Cloud
• 6 speakers
• 100+ people attending
• Almost 200 views on Youtube, for all the sessions recordings

I know it may not be big numbers for some of you, but as I use to say, we want to start small, steady, and consistent, so we avoid risks of compromising the quality of this initiative, and fail to deliver great content to the community. Step by step, I believe we will reach where we want to be.

For now, I appreciate all people involved, the team is growing and I can say all of us have been doing an amazing job.

Roadmap

Since we are still in a premature phase of this initiative, there are still some important things to be addressed, so we can move forward with this initiative.

Logo

The first two critical tasks to address is to get a better and nicer logo. Honestly, given the short amount of time, and given my skills with design, it was the logo I was able to come up with. We have currently an amazing designer working on the logo, and soon I believe we will have a great new logo to share with all of you.

Website

Currently, the CLL website is just a simple Github page. Given the time constraints, I wanted to bring something simple and effective, to list the sessions scheduled, so users could check the sessions available and attend them. A new website is coming soon, the team is planning the work for the site. We are planning to buy a nice template, so we do not need to spend much time on the design, and we can focus on building the logic on the website to provide the required features. Soon we will be able to show you how it looks like.

Workflow

One of the main areas we want to improve is the process to manage the sessions and speakers in this initiative. Currently is a process with many manual repetitive and time-consuming tasks. So, we are planning to leverage Cloud services and capabilities, to build automated workflows that will save us lots of time, while managing the sessions that we are delivering.

Collaborators

In terms of collaborations, we want to especially appreciate two important collaborators of Cloud Lunch and Learn.

Cloud Family

We have the Cloud Family collaborating in this initiative, and promoting all the sessions, so we can increase the number of attendees and speakers delivering the sessions. If you did not join Cloud Family, I would suggest you to do it, so you can join an amazing team of Cloud professionals and experts and access to a central repository with useful resources related to the Cloud.

For more information, please visit the link cloudfamily.info.

NET Mafia Meetup Group

Another important collaborator is the NET Mafia Meetup Group, that helps us to promote the sessions with their group members, so we can connect more people in this initiative. This a local meetup group, located in Dublin, that used to deliver in-person tech sessions, but due to the current circumstances we are living, the group decided to start to deliver virtual sessions and deliver content globally. If you want to know more about this amazing group, please visit the link meetup.com/Net-Mafia-C-Mobsters-and-other-Microsoft-family.

Resources

I want to share with you a few useful resources related to this initiative, so you can access some of the content delivered so far.

• Cloud Lunch and Learn Youtube Channel
  • youtube.com/channel/UCHZeZzSlTtmfgPozIq8J2Kw
• Cloud Lunch and Learn Website
  • www.cloudlunchlearn.com
• Cloud Lunch and Learn Call For Speakers Page
  • sessionize.com/cloud-lunch-and-learn/

As final message, I welcome everyone who wants to be involved in this initiative, and wants to join this great team, please reach me out, and we can talk more about it. There are so many ways you can contribute to this initiative, including helping to build the new ecosystem for the initiative on Azure, delivering tech sessions, moderating sessions of other speakers, promoting the initiative and sessions, and more. Each minute you contribute counts, so even if you do not have so much time, no problem, save a few minutes per day or week, and come help us.
I have been talking with some people about delivering sessions for the CLL and most of the times they are afraid of judgments or not being ready to deliver a session. So, if that is your case, do not be afraid, nobody will judge you, and even if you fail, you will have a team to help and support you, and it is better to fail fast, so you learn and improve your skills and quickly you will be a master on delivering online sessions. Take this opportunity as a chance to connect with other communities, even if you live in another country or continent, you can easily connect with all of us, and share your knowledge and experience.

Thank you all for supporting this initiative, and thank you for spending a few minutes of your time to read this message, and have a great day!

By the community, for the community. United by the Cloud! 💪 😊