How to grow a local devops community without funding - Rafael Gomes, DevOpsDays Chicago 2020

Few sponsors, almost no money and a huge country. DevOpsDays in Brazil big cities are thriving, but what about smaller towns without tech communities? What are the challenges and achievements so far?

DevOpsDays in Brazil started 2010 in São Paulo, but they didn’t organize it again in any city. We started back in 2016 in Porto Alegre and realized that we could help other cities to assemble too.

We started to help other cities with documentation, sponsors, contacts, tips, and money. Brasília happened in 2016 too.

Here is the list of following years:

- 2017: Salvador, Brasilia and Porto Alegre
- 2018: Salvador, Feira de Santana, Belo Horizonte, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Fortaleza, Belém, Florianópolis, Maringá, Porto Alegre, Santa Maria.
- 2019: Natal, São Paulo, Porto Alegre, Aracaju, Recife, Fortaleza, Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, Feira de Santana, Florianópolis, Belo Horizonte, Belém, Campinas, Goiania, Brasilia.

The cities of the north had more difficulty to find sponsors and people to attend, but these events are helping the local community to grow. I will show some data related to this growth.

Transcript

1. How to grow a local devops
   community without funding
   How we handled it in Brazil
   Rafael Gomes (Gomex)
   Organizer and Core Organizer
   

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2. Agenda
   ● DOD São Paulo 2010
   ● DOD Porto Alegre 2016
   ● Challenges
   ● What we handle it
   ● Achievements
   ● Status
   ● Next steps
   

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3. DevOpsDays São Paulo 2010
   

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4. DevOpsDays Porto Alegre 2016
   ● 140 people
   ● 2 sponsors with money
   ● 2 sponsors without money
   

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5. DevOpsDays Salvador 2017
   ● 90 attendees
   ● 2 sponsors, but no money
   

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6. Challenges when we restarted
   ● Brazil is huge
   ● We didn't have a company/organization to handle the money
   ● Building mutual trust with companies
   ● No money to start
   ● Lack of good speakers
   ● No money to sponsor people from other cities (expensive)
   ● How to handle marketing without money and a proper team?
   ● No money to sponsor people from other countries (significantly
   more expensive)
   

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7. What we handled it
   ● Brazil is huge
   We can't solve this problem
   

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8. Challenge
   ● We didn't have a company/organization to handle the financial processes
   We still don't have it, but some devopsdays used an Brazil-based ticketing
   company to get the money from sponsors.
   DevOpsDays Brasília created a company to handle the money of event, but it
   didn't work. The event just happened twice (2016-2017) :(
   To create and shutdown a company on Brazil is really expensive.
   

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9. ● Building mutual trust with companies
   The DevOps movement just "happens" on some cities on Brazil and the
   companies didn't know how to handle it and how to hire good people too.
   DevOpsDays was the best place to talk about the DevOps as culture and hire
   good people to work on this inside companies.
   Challenge
   

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10. ● No money to start
    We created a telegram channel (This chat is really used on Brazil) to help each
    other.
    Cities with extra money helped new cities to start their events. Paying costs of
    travel underrepresented people (women, LGBTQIA+, etc) to speak and increase
    diversity on cities without money. Their companies didn't paid their travel costs :(
    Challenge
    

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11. ● A few good people talking about DevOps on cities around Brazil
    We created a list of good people available to talk about "DevOps" with option to
    their companies pay the costs of travel. Some of then we added the company as
    sponsor.
    Example: Mateus Prado talked in almost 10 DevOpsDays on Brazil until now.
    Challenge
    

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12. ● How to handle marketing without money and people?
    We did an agreement on telegram channel to help each other sharing our
    articles on social networks (Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook)
    We paid to Facebook one time to burst our "Chamada de Trabalhos". However,
    we received a lot of people asking for jobs :( Outside IT, we don't have enough
    jobs.
    Challenge
    

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13. ● No money to sponsor people from other countries (significantly more
    expensive)
    We still have this problem :( Tips are very welcomed!
    São Paulo already received people from another countries twice, but we need to
    make this happen on other cities too.
    Challenge
    

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14. ● We created a huge community
    ● People from cities outside the big centers are talking about DevOps now
    ● We are changing people's lives (Working with "devops" knowledge is better
    to find a good job)
    Achievements
    

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15. Current status
    ● 2018 : 11
    ○ Maringá (South)
    ○ São Paulo (Southeast)
    ○ Porto Alegre (South)
    ○ Santa Maria (South)
    ○ Belo Horizonte (Southeast)
    ○ Fortaleza (Northeast)
    ○ Salvador (Northeast)
    ○ Rio De Janeiro (Southeast)
    ○ Belém (North)
    ○ Florianópolis (South)
    ○ Feira De Santana (Northeast)
    ● 2019 : 14
    ○ Natal (Northeast)
    ○ São Paulo (Southeast)
    ○ Porto Alegre (South)
    ○ Florianópolis (South)
    ○ Aracaju (Northeast)
    ○ Goiânia (Central-West)
    ○ Feira De Santana (Northeast)
    ○ Belo Horizonte (Southeast)
    ○ Fortaleza (Northeast)
    ○ Salvador (Northeast)
    ○ Campinas (Southeast)
    ○ Belém (North)
    ○ Recife (Northeast)
    ○ Macapá (North)
    ● 2016 : 2
    ○ Porto Alegre (South)
    ○ Brasília (Capital)
    ● 2017 : 3
    ○ Porto Alegre (South)
    ○ Brasília (Capital)
    ○ Salvador (Northeast)
    

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16. ● Increase our presence on North and Northeast
    ● Increase DevOpsDays on other cities than capitals
    ● Founding local "meetups" to help local community
    ● Invite good speakers abroad to help us
    ● Increase our participation on other countries of Latin America (really
    expensive)
    Next steps
    

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17. We did it together
    

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18. Rafael Gomes:
    ● Blog: gomex.me
    ● Twitter/github: @gomex
    ● Linkedin: rbgomes
    ● Email: me@gomex.me
    Contact
    

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