Hello members of the (-Elastic)Search UserGroup Berlin,
Many of you have been asking about the future of the Elasticsearch UG Berlin. A few months ago we announced the temporary shutdown of the meetup while we negotiated how to continue the meetup due to some disagreements. We continued discussing this over the last few months and finally agreed to relaunch the meetup with a bit changed scope. We very much enjoyed running the group in the old form and it has been one of the most active groups in that space, with 32 events over the time it lasted. Only Elasticsearch France is more active.
Today we are announcing the re-launch of the group under a different name: Search Berlin and with a broadened scope: search. We will open the group to other topics from the same space. We believe this will lead to a more informative environment for all attendees and provides independence to the community effort. Elasticsearch and the products around it will of course stay an important topic. This comes along with a few minor governance changes (which improve the group, in our view).
First of all, what is changing?
Almost nothing, initially: there will be more diverse talks, and probably more talks. We are sure you will find other interesting stuff for your daily work. The name will be 7 characters shorter. The Elasticsearch introduction workshop will be dropped, because it doesn't fit the topic anymore. We are sure that the new topic will also mean that we can make more offers.
The topic range will expand. We consider anything within the space of search and analytics as our targets, both technology talks as well as talks about products built with those technologies. If you have experience with multiple, consider submitting a comparison talk. Elasticsearch, Logstash, Solr, Embulk and talks about Lucene itself are interesting topics. Also non-Lucene related search technologies are within scope.
The schedule will stay the same. We will be meeting every month except December, with additional sattelite events all year round. Depending on our venue search, we may switch the day of the month.
The next meeting will be on the 17th of september.
On the governance side, we welcome our long-term member Jilles from Inbot to the organization team. I cannot hold his contributions to the group high enough. If anyone else wants to assist us in running meetups and hackfests, please get in touch, the organization team is open to everyone.
Finally, the advertisement policy of the group has been amended to reflect the new structure.
Remember that the usergroup has always been a free offer, based on voluntary work. If you'd like to sponsor the group or provide a space to meet, please get in touch.
The twitter account is now @searchberlin.
See you soon, Florian and the Search UG Berlin team