First organizational meeting on April 14

Apache Spark, Scala, Cassandra top the list of the top-paying technologies in the Developer Survey 2016. (http://post.oreilly.com/form/oreilly/viewhtml/9z1zd0a559djlv9sc3cua92t5apsbeh811cpjeb1d10)

Join the first organisational meeting of the Christchurch Apache Spark Meetup Group either face-to-face in Erskine 031 or remotely via the webcast from PC, Mac, Linux, iOS or Android at https://canterbury.zoom.us/j/787338741 .

This meeting will be mainly for introductions and planning. We can brainstorm for the format(s) we want to follow for our subsequent meetups, the objectives of various members, levels of Spark knowledge, etc. Enlarge the leadership team, find other venues for future meetups, etc.

Those with visions and concrete problems they would like to solve are welcome to make brief informal presentations.

If there are representatives from a couple different companies then the following can be better planned:

1. Getting more volunteers into the Leadership Team.

2. How to allow the community to learn from one another and sustain the meet-ups. Hooks into global Bright-Talks, Meetups at other venues besides University of Canterbury (UC, Ilam) in the city, etc.

3. Databricks Community Edition and efforts to reach middle Schools and High-Schools in the City and Canterbury in general (for hobbyists who like to spread the ‘cult of coding’ and ‘data analytics’ using free community edition shards – this is meant to be coupled with the code clubs initiated by Computer Science and Software Engineering at UC, Ilam).