I think in person meetups are a great idea. I have helped organize several meetups like this for Apache DataFusion and I would (biasedly) say they went very well and would highly encourage others to organize similar get togethers as well
The format typically we have used is as follows (the goal being to keep overhead low and the event inclusive) Venue: hosted at the offices of a local company (no feed) Food: Simple dinner (e.g. pizza), donated by a sponsor (a few hundred dollars at most, sometimes also by the venue host) Speakers: anyone who wants to speak Signup: first come / first served (no fees to attend) Agenda is typically something like 5:30-8:00PM 30m-1h welcome/food, 1.5 hour of talks (6 x 15 minute talks, adjusted based on number of speakers) 30m-1h wrapup Here are some upcoming examples to give you a feel[1][2]. Andrew p.s. I have yet to have too many speakers and thus have never had to turn anyone away. My backup plan has always been to simply reduce the time for the other speakers if we had too many. p.p.s. keeping the overhead low simplifies many things such as having to charge attendance or potentially turn anyone who wants to attend away (other than for venue capacity limits) [1]: https://luma.com/hxshbp0m [2]: https://luma.com/ctqtiqap On Tue, Feb 10, 2026 at 3:40 PM Antoine Pitrou <[email protected]> wrote: > > I'm in Paris and would certainly join a meetup in that area, but I won't > go to Seattle :-) > > Regards > > Antoine. > > > Le 10/02/2026 à 18:58, Micah Kornfield a écrit : > > I know a few other Apache projects host meetups for people to give talks > on > > how they are using the project/on going dev efforts in the community. > > > > I was wondering if anybody was interested in trying to do something > similar > > for Parquet. In particular, I think there are a fair number of > > contributors that might be in the Seattle area so it might be a good > place > > to try to have one. > > > > Cheers, > > Micah > > > > >
