LPI EMEA partners met virtually

Linux Professional Institute (LPI) hosts meetings to which Partners are invited on a regular basis throughout the year, but not specifically regional. On one side it needed to be digital; on the other, we wanted to highlight the sense of local community targeting the Partners of a specific region. So the EMEA Partner Meeting was the first of its kind in the region.

After many months of planning, on June 22 we were finally live for the LPI EMEA Partner Meeting. 

The meeting was a success, and it allowed us to experience, virtually, what is a huge part of LPI’s identity: the sense of community.
 

The Plan

I worked closely with Kaitlin Edwards, our Community Events Manager. When you are in the middle of a pandemic, there is a need to reinvent and find new solutions to a lot of things.

Yes: we are a digital-oriented organization. There are plenty of digital tools out there, but will you be up to giving your Meeting that “human touch” feeling that is mandatory if you want to share the sense of community I mentioned earlier?

You need the right tool, and you need to find the right way of using it. For this plan, the tool was Hopin, a virtual event platform.
 

The “Ingredients”

We do believe that with the panel of talks we brought to the Meeting hit the target. LPI has many new features and projects coming up in the next few months and the Meeting’s attendees had the opportunity to get a snapshot of them. At the same time, we wanted to share insights and thoughts about what took place in 2020, and how the past year influenced the IT world.

The variety of talks, set up by Kaitlin, gave us all a chance to look at past, present and future LPI. 

Rafael Peregrino da Silva, our Director of Partnerships and Sponsorships, highlighted how the last year had been one of profound reorganization of the Partner relation framework: a reorganization that, with the launch of the Partner Portal, makes the Partner’s day-by-day activity easier and smoother.

At the same time, programs like the Membership, Community, and Employability gives us even more tools to fulfil our mission: empowering the use of Open Source by supporting the people who work with it.

Fabian Thorns, the Director of Product Development, hit us with a ton of… juicy news. The LPIC-3 Exams are facing a massive overhaul. A new format for the Linux Essentials certification is ahead, while LPIC-2 will be updated as well.

Kenny Armstrong is the LPI Training Advisor, and we had him team up with our Simo “#LPIMemberJourney” Bertulli for a back and forth interview about – of course! – the Membership Program: its present and its future, made of integrations with the Learning and the broader community areas, as well as the development  of interactions with the Partners environment.

Dr. Markus Wirtz, the Manager of the Education Programs, shared his vision of what is, in my opinion (ok, I am a bit biased, here), one of the most effective LPI’s projects: the Learning Portal. It was an interesting behind-the-scenes look on a project that constantly deals with merging openness and much-needed consistency.

When it came to thinking about a guest speaker, we immediately thought of Dorothy Gordon. And according to the feedback we had after the event, we were right. Dorothy is, among the many other outstanding roles, Chair of the Intergovernmental Council for UNESCO’s Information for All Programme and a member of LPI’s Board of Directors. Her “Power and Control in Digital Spaces” told us how vital a healthy Open Source culture is, and how it’s going to be essential to address the instances that the geopolitics of digital spaces have to deal with when it comes to education, climate change and the constant risk of monopolisms.
 

Some fun, the concurrent sessions

There is no convention without fun. If the convention is digital, the fun has to be digital as well. But we got it covered! Our own Reiner Brandt, from the Linux Professional Institute Central Europe team,brilliantly managed a Kahoot Quiz session. It was great fun, and congratulations on the well deserved gigantic penguin to the winner!

There is no convention without more specific talks: we had them too, with Reiner’s session on “Linux in the Classroom”; Sonia Ben Othman delivered “The 4C for better graduate employability”; and Markus with ” StartIT – an upcoming program for ICT newbies”.
 

The EMEA Meeting in bullet points

When you put a lot of energy into organizing a meeting, you hope for that energy to come back in the form of a positive outcome: you have to pass that energy to the attendees for it to come back again!

And the 2021 LPI EMEA Partner Meeting has been a success indeed. We started nurturing the EMEA community in the weeks before, setting up a welcoming environment: all part of the plan! I was personally involved in setting up a Mattermost channel providing an easy benefit to our Partners to welcome them on a dedicated channel, where the conversation started before the actual Meeting and where it is still going on. I want to think that this approach played a nice role in the exceptional turnout that we had.

But let’s take a look at the Meeting’s figures.

• 8 between talks and sessions;
• 5 and half hours of content;
• 71 attendees at the Meeting, from 27 Countries;
• 277 chat comments made;
• More than 13,000 altogether minutes were spent attending the talks.
   

What’s next

We started with the sense of community, and we want to finish with the sense of community again: we decided to create a participation badge for our attendees, and decided to keep the Mattermost EMEA Partners channel open, a feature that all the Partners can use for having a more informal and interactive way to communicate with us and between themselves.

Personally, I am very happy and proud of having been part of this. I started with a joke: at least I had an occasion to wear a shirt again! Jokes aside, it’s a pleasure to be part of this community with such a great mission. A community I will be happy to tell the stories of.If you are a Partner, if you want to contribute and participate, give me a holler. You can do that on Mattermost too…