Outreach: Speakers

Finding Speakers

Some simple guidelines for finding speakers for your meetups.

Always ask your meetup members first!

The best meetups are always, always, always meetups that are driven by strong local content. If you have Ansible experts in your meetup, you should be asking them to share their experiences. The topic "How we use $TECHNOLOGY at $COMPANY" always leads to valuable and educational discussion.

Lightning talks

Lightning talks are a good way of getting your meetup members talking. Even if you already have a speaker, asking for 5-minute lightning talks is a way to give your members a safe, structured way to share a little bit about how they're using Ansible.

Topics

If you don't have any members who are ready to give a particular talk, the next best option is to have a member dig into a topic to learn more, and then to share that knowledge with other meetup members. Many Ansible topics can be picked up in a relatively short period of time just by reading documentation and experimenting. Some of the best meetup talks happen when one newbie walks through a topic and explains his or her experiences to other newbies.

Here's a recommended list of topics that can be useful for this purpose:

• An Introduction to Ansible
• An Introduction to Ansible Galaxy
• Ansible and Docker
• Ansible and LXC
• Ansible and Vagrant
• Ansible and Jenkins
• ...add your topic idea here!

Remote Speakers

There are a lot of experienced Ansible speakers all over the world -- and with teleconference/telepresence software improving all the time, remote speakers can be a good option. The following remote speakers are experts in their topics, and may be able to do a remote session with your meetup group. Feel free to reach out directly to any of the following speakers to schedule a session!

• Brian Coca (bcoca at ansible dot com) -- How Does Ansible Work? A Developer's Guide

  • Brian Coca, core developer at Ansible, will explain the internal workings of Ansible from the developer's perspective, with illustrative examples and a detailed Q+A session. For anyone who has ever had the urge to hack on Ansible itself, this is the talk for you.

• James Cammarata (jcammarata at ansible dot com) -- What's New in Ansible 2.0?

  • James Cammarata, director of core development at Ansible, will discuss new features upcoming in Ansible 2.0, as well as potential future plans for Ansible development.

• Toshio Kuratomi (tkuratomi at ansible dot com) -- A Guide to Writing Ansible Modules

  • Toshio Kuratomi, core engineer at Ansible, will walk through the structure of Ansible module, and provide valuable tips on how (and why) to write your own modules.

• Dave Johnson (dave at ansible dot com) -- An Introduction to Ansible Tower

  • (FIXME: abstract forthcoming)

• Walter Bentley (walter.bentley at rackspace dot com) -- Ansible and OpenStack

  • How Rackspace Is Deploying OpenStack With Ansible