What topic do you want to speak about?

Meetups are a great way to get user groups members together and learning from each others’ technical stories. We’ve got a few broad guidelines for Elastic User Group talks: your talk should be technical, or focus on the hows and whys of your setup. A good guideline here is you want the audience to be able to take what they’ve learned and apply it right away –– so try to stay focused on the free and open-source Elastic Stack.

We do not allow any-type of a sales or product pitch, because a user group is not an appropriate forum for these activities. If you are looking to build more awareness about your company hiring or a product, refer to our community organizer guide for more information on how to appropriately mention these things during your talk.

There are a few different approaches you can take with when deciding on the topic of your talk. We’ve listed some of the common talk-types below, and you can always talk to the local organizer to find out if the group is looking for a specific talk or get feedback on your topic.

1. Use Case. Are you using Elastic for logging analytics, monitoring, search, or another use case? Attendees are looking to learn how others have set up their Elastic Stack, or learn a new way to use it.
   1. You might want to include:
      1. What things looked like “before”
      2. Architecture of your setup
      3. Implementation, and decisions made along the way
      4. Results + successes
      5. Any difficulties you experienced and how you resolved them
      6. A demo!
      7. Ideas for the future
2. Best Practices & Lessons Learned. Attendees want to learn from your successes...and your mistakes. Share the lessons you learned while getting started with the Elastic Stack, while implementing a new feature, or scaling your setup.
3. Feature Focus. Give a focused talk on a particular feature that changed your life — or at least made an impact on your implementation. :)
4. Getting Started. Walk through how you got started with a project, and any tips and tricks you have. This is a great presentation for all experience levels — whether you are talking about your first Elastic Stack project, or whether you’re doing something new and advanced.
5. Open Source. Have you contributed to a part of the Elastic Stack before? Are you building an open source plugin for the Elastic Stack you want to share? Inform others about how to get more involved with the projects as contributors.
6. Something else on your mind? We’re happy to set up a quick call to help refine your idea, go over options (or share what we’ve seen work well) and do some brainstorming. Email us at [email protected] if you want any help!