Cesar Escalante

logo Projector, microphone, webex, recording, intercom… the mental checklist runs quick just in time for the 6:00pm presentation of another monthly session of the San Francisco Dynamo User Group (SFDUG), a community of computational design enthusiast from the Bay Area that meets the third evening of every month to discuss topics about Dynamo and computational design.

August 2016 marks the turn of a milestone for SFDUG: the group celebrates its first anniversary at Perkins + Will, with a superb speaker and record number of participants, making it the most attended session of our group short history.   And since history without records become futile, I take the chance today to celebrate our first year anniversary by sharing a bit of the history of the group, discuss how our committee of volunteers works, describe how the group came to be the thriving learning community it is today, and hopefully inspire other user groups who have just started their own local meetings.

Each of the SFDUG monthly meetings intends to expose local visual programming enthusiasts with the work of well-rounded Dynamo specialists and computational design industry leaders. The meetings are attended by a wide range of user types coming from different segments of the AEC community, predominantly architectural & engineering design professionals from the Bay Area.

The SFDUG committee, an organization of a floating list of 4-6 volunteers, has been able to secure our speakers on a variety of Dynamo topics: case studies, plug-ins, popular nodes, interoperability, fabrication, student work, etc. Each meeting typically starts with a learning module, instructor led tutorial, followed by a featured presentation. The learning module is the ‘opening act’ for the featured presentation, and it can be an instructor led tutorial anyone can follow along. Each meeting also features a ‘node of the month’, typically presented by one of the committee members.

agenda

Typical SFDUG Meeting Agenda

The Beginnings

The very first SFDUG meeting was the result of an afterthought conversation last summer following Colin McCrone’s presentation of Dynamo at HOK; it was clear from that intro that computational design tools, posing to support extraordinary design, were now available within our typical production platform (REVIT), and readily available at our fingertips. But it also became clear that we needed better continuing learning resources, not available at that time.  We looked into creating something that didn’t exist, something that came almost spontaneous at a grassroot level: an autonomous learning space for and by the design community, local and virtual, in-person and web-based, open and accessible to anyone, for free.

Our first Dynamo User Group meeting in August 2015 secured +70 RSVPs from an email invitation from Colin McCrone, former Dynamo Evangelist, and myself, to our professional network, a simple announcement via LinkedIn and Twitter, hosted at HOK San Francisco, conveniently accessible downtown. With the amazing response of the first meeting it became evident we needed a better-structured organization to best serve the sparked interest in Dynamo. FirstMtg

First SFDUG Meeting – August 2015 at HOK San Francisco, courtesy Stephanie Egger

The SFDUG committee

The first meeting last year started with a call of volunteers to join the SFDUG Committee; within the pool of raised hands I was pleased to find representatives from academia, design firms, and software developers, and soon after that first meeting we held our first committee meeting online.  Each committee meeting flourishes with ideas and discussions.  From the beginning we drafted a simple goal: to provide high quality Dynamo learning content by top industry leaders available to the widest audience possible.  Achieving this goal would require developing an efficient team strategy with identified tasks and distributed responsibilities.

Committee Tasks and responsibilities

Putting together this monthly event with a team of volunteers would require us to identify each of the activities involved in the process, the input and outputs scheduled over time (just like any Dynamo workflow). In a nutshell, each meeting logistics follows the same sequence of activities: Any volunteer member is open to reach out to a potential speaker and responsible to securing the information required for an invitation: the topic name, a description, a speaker bio, and a marketing image.  Once this information is secured, we added information about registration in-person and virtually; the draft announcement of the event is deemed complete and ready for marketing:  the announcement is posted in our group blog site, a blast notification sent to our subscribers list, and the event is advertised using our social media outlets.  The day prior the event we notify our food sponsor with the total number of registrations and send the attendee list to building security for access clearance. On the event day, volunteers arrive early to arrange the room, set the food, set mic and audio tests, and start the meeting promptly at 6:00pm.  Upon completion, we help clean the room and a couple of days later the meeting recording is uploaded to our YouTube channel, and advertised in the blog.   The sequence of events is again repeated in preparation for the next meeting.

We had to break the sequence of activities into discreet tasks distributed among all the committee members.  So we created a board of tasks and responsibilities with measured timelines and used it to keep a balanced distribution of tasks while keeping the volunteering time to a maximum of 3hrs per month. We also needed to maximize decision-making, make transparent & centralized communications, and optimize marketing resources.  This came up as a challenge from the beginning. How could we make these team efforts efficient for an organization with no budget and a roster of volunteers with really busy schedules?

We looked at the cloud: we tested thru trial and error a wide array of cloud based technologies available to us at little or no cost that could helped us work as a team on each of the tasks and responsibilities. To avoid maintenance operations and enable to share the work between the committee and future volunteers, we voted from the beginning against multiple email credentials and choose to enable an single-access-to-all cloud services with a single credential and password. We also needed to secure sponsorship of food and spirits.  We reach out to Qatanna Palioca at Ideate Inc., a local Autodesk reseller and solutions providers, who graciously supported SFDUG activities from the very beginning with food and beverages throughout the year.   In addition, Brok Howard periodically has dRofus sponsor the meeting with wine and spirits.  

Cloud Services used by SFDUG  

Google:  sfdug.coordinator@gmail.com is our single point of contact for the group and the main channel to reach potential speakers. All committee members can use the account and respond to inquiries.  We also use the group Google Drive space to host links to .dyn and working files made available by the speakers and posted in our blog.

Trello:  We used Trello to map all the activities required to put together a meeting and help us distribute responsibilities to all the volunteers. Trello identifies a project as a board with task list. Each task is represented as a card assigned to users and connect to a progress bar.  Our entire operations are mapped in a group Trello board, and new volunteers have a board-in process overview of this map. Trello

 SFDUG Trello Board with Tasks and Responsibilities

  Blogger:  We used the Blogger service to the create of our group blog web page, sfdug.blogspot.com.  We liked that the page resizes neatly in a variety of devices. It also provides optional gadgets to subscribe people to a distribution list for announcements.  Anyone subscribed to our blog will automatically receive a campaign announcement.

 Slack:  This is a cloud-based team collaboration tool that centralize and records the committee conversations organized by channels.   It allowed our group to keep alive the conversation 24/7, and as a searchable datable it let new members to read thru the historical records of certain topics.  The monthly announcements are placeholder template files hosted in Slack, editable and reviewable by anyone.  Once the announcement is completed and marked as ‘final’, it is moved into our blog site for marketing. Slack

 SFDUG Slack Project Sample Page

 Evernote:  The committee meets once a month, the Tuesday following the monthly presentation, and minutes recorded using Evernote, an easy to use cloud-based word processing used by the note keeping volunteer during our monthly committee calls. We also installed a Zap applications that integrates Evernote notebooks with a Slack channel, which means anyone can read the minutes at anytime in case of an absence.  

Eventbrite:  Provides event registration services to our event and generates an attendee list. We required registration to anyone attending in person because we need a precise headcount for the food sponsor, and we need to produce a list of attendees for security access at the venue.

 Webex: This is our platform to broadcast and record our meetings. We also use the service to host our committee meetings.  The service is graciously sponsored by HOK San Francisco; it enables training sessions up to 100 attendees online.  Anyone is approved to attend a session.  Virtual attendees typically interact with the speaker using the builtin Chat window.

 Mailchimp: This is an email service provider that enables us to send bulk email announcements to our subscribers. Once a month, we update our subscribers list from our blog and plug them into MailChimp for our official email announcement.

 YouTube: Each meeting is uploaded from Camtasia directly into our YouTube channel.  Subscribers to the channel get automatic upload notifications.  The video link is then embedded into a blog posting in our website.

 Twitter & Facebook:  These are our main marketing outlets.Twitter is huge, not only among computational designers but with software developers and Dynamo gurus.  If you don’t have a twitter account you are missing on fantastic conversations about what is being tested on the Dynamo front.  SFDUG has a single twitter handle @BIM_SFDUG, and our marketing strategy is simple:  Once the event is posted on our blog, it is announced via the group Twitter handle, and retweeted by each volunteer personal account.  We encourage members to relay the tweet using other social media outlets such as LinkedIn.   The group also has a Facebook account, which has been set up to serve as an instant relay of our Mailchimp campaign and the twitter announcements.  It is also our repository of images and pictures of our monthly events.

Our first year of work

Here is a compilation of our work, the SFDUG 2015-2016 presentations:

What is coming next?

The committee is working hard to present the group with compelling interesting Dynamo related learning topics for the next year.  At the time of this publication, our schedule is filled until February 2017.  Many ideas are on the works: we have been tendering the idea of building new collaboration ties with AEC Hackaton, Autodesk, and McNeel, looking better ways to improve and expand our learning modules, such as hosting bootcamp Dynamo training sessions, improve our logo, and schedule Hackaton-style Dynamo competitions. We are discussing improvements to our website, considering additional budget sources, and teaming up with other Dynamo User Group organizations. But more than anything, what may come up the next year depends on you: we need you!  Subscribe to our group, join the conversation in our blog, follow us on twitter and facebook, send us your feedback, become a volunteer.  These are your meetings, your topics, your group, so stay involved and be part of this great knowledge resource for your community and the rest of the world.  Be part of the sharing community, and connect with other’s who share your same passion. To quote the Dalai Lama: “Sharing Knowledge is the only way to achieve immortality”.  

Acknowledgement to our volunteers

I want to thank the committee members of SFDUG for the fantastic work throughout this year, both current and inactive members; it is through the collective contribution of your ideas that SFDUG has thrived.  Let’s keep Dynamiting for many more years.  Cheers!

Committee