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Sponsorship is limited to venue sponsorship (existing office space can be donated for an event or a third party space could be funded) and food and beverage sponsorship
Sponsorship dollars should not exceed the cost of either the venue or the food and beverages. Since the Hyperledger project is part of a non-profit with a mission to build and promote open source technologies, there should be zero profit involved in running meetups.
Events must remain vendor agnostic. Sponsors can be recognized by adding their name/logo on the Meetup event page and thanked at the beginning of the meetup, but it should be clear that all events are run by the Hyperledger community and not by any specific organization.
Sponsors may speak at a meetup just like any other person or organization is welcome to speak at a meetup. Any talk a sponsor gives needs to relate to what they are doing with Hyperledger though and product pitches in return for sponsorship dollars are strictly forbidden.
Sharing of any attendee data with sponsors is also strictly forbidden.
Running virtual meetups
Meetup organizers are encouraged to consider running virtual meetups online when that makes sense for your local community members. The tools provided by meetup.com for organizing in person meetups will also help you promote a virtual event, handle registration and communicate with attendees. For more about using meetup.com's tools to organize a virtual meetup, see their support article Hosting an online event on Meetup.
Hyperledger has Zoom accounts that we can make available to organizers to use for running a virtual meetup. Please contact us to request account information – we'll need information from you about when you are hosting the virtual meetup and we can then schedule the Zoom account for you and send you details on how to dial-in and record your events. Zoom offers two options – they have a meeting mode which provides an open call that allows for attendees to take part in discussions and a webinar mode that is more focused on one person presenting information out to a group.
And please let us know about virtual meetups you are planning so we can help you promote them. Since the virtual events aren't limited to who can physically travel to a specific location, we can help promote the beyond your meetup group's attendees. For instance, we can send this to other meetup groups in a similar time zone or to other meetup groups who may be interested in the content (such as reaching out to all meetups in Spanish speaking countries if you are planning a virtual event with content in Spanish).
For tips for running effective meetups, we encourage organizers who have done this before to please share ideas and suggestions on the meetup organizer's mailing list and we'll add good ideas here. We'll also link to useful resources. For example, the article A Comprehensive List of Tips, Tools, and Examples for Event Organizers During the Coronavirus Outbreak has a section with several tips for running virtual events.
Streaming and recording live events
Streaming and recording your events is not required, but it is something you may be interested in. If you are considering doing this, please note that some people don’t want to be on record when they attend these events and this may also have a chilling effect on what people are comfortable saying at an event. In addition, what you can legally record may vary across jurisdictions and you cannot record and stream copyrighted material, like music or other content, without a release.
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