Last night we had our first Dublin Socialytics Meetup. We held it at the Irish Computer Society (ICS) offices in Ballsbridge and I have to give a big call-out to the ICS folks as they were the perfect hosts. Our meetup attracted a great bunch of folks across a diverse, but complementary, set of backgrounds.
There were some great suggestions for how to organize future events.
- There was general consensus that the best format was a to organize a meeting room and have a combination of information sharing, with open discussion, and then some social networking.
- Everyone liked the idea of some meetups focused on open debate around a specific question, or set of questions, that we publish in advance. This sounds a lot like the format of Twitter Chats except we would be doing it face-to-face instead of across the twittersphere, and that could work really well.
- It was agreed that we would share a list of topics inside our meetup community and allow members to offer to present on them, or find people that could be guest speakers. The types of topics people thought would be interesting ranged from technical to data science to business use cases. Getting this mix of speakers will require some reach out on all our parts, so get looking ;-)
- Twice a month seems to be the optimal frequency for folks.
In looking at the makeup of our group, we were fairly light on the consumers of socialytics (business folks who have very specific problems in this area that they are looking to solve). The goal will be to bring more of these types of people into the meetup, or alternatively get them along as guests at some of the events. Socialytics use cases seemed to be something that was high on everyone’s wishlist. We are also a bit light on hardcore data scientists who have hands-on experience of implementing bigdata solutions, so we need to root out these folks and minimally bring them in as guests to some of our sessions.
So the big call-out is for business folks, who are interested in consuming social media, enterprise social network or collaboration data for analytics, and data scientists, who want to show us that crunching bigdata can be sexy ;-) We promise stimulating events.
Marie's Ramblings & Ruminations 
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