Community Meetups
Regular local meetings for people building on EmbeddedOS, organised by ambassadors and supported with materials from the Foundation.
This programme has not started
It is proposed and not yet running, so there is nothing to apply for today and no members to contact. It is published here because the Foundation would rather show the shape of what it intends to build than announce it as though it already exists.
If you would like to help start it — or you have run something similar and can say what went wrong — that is genuinely useful now, and more useful than it will be later.
Other community programmes
- Ambassador ProgramPlanned
- University ProgramPlanned
About this programme
Why this programme exists
Open-source communities are built in person, or they are not built at all. Mailing lists and chat servers sustain people who already belong; they rarely recruit anyone new. A meetup — a room, a projector, someone showing what they built — turns a project from a repository into a scene. The Community Meetups programme exists to make starting such a meeting easy: regular local gatherings for people building on EmbeddedOS, supported by the Foundation rather than run by it.
Local meetings also solve a problem no amount of documentation solves: context. Two engineers debugging the same board for different reasons will find each other faster in a room than in a forum thread. Meetups create the informal network through which practical knowledge actually travels.
What it will involve
The programme will be organised by ambassadors in each city or region — the Ambassador Program and the meetups programme are designed to grow together. The Foundation's role is support: shared materials such as talk templates and demo notes, listings on the website's community calendar, and practical help for organisers getting started.
Meetups will follow simple, published ground rules: free to attend, open to beginners, and talks drawn from what people are actually building. The Foundation will not dictate each city's format — a room with hardware demos in one city and a show-and-tell over video call in another are both fine. What matters is regularity. The programme will help organisers reach a sustainable rhythm rather than a single launch event that never repeats.
Who it is for
For anyone building on EmbeddedOS or curious about it: engineers, students, hobbyists, and the embedded-curious who have never touched an RTOS. Meetups will be explicitly beginner-friendly. Nobody should need a working project to walk through the door.
For organisers especially. People willing to book a room, set a date, and keep a group going are the scarcest resource in any community programme, and the Foundation will invest its support where organisers are.
Organisers do not need to be experts. The most useful meetup host is often not the best engineer in the room but the person who reliably books the venue and sends the reminder. Technical depth comes from the attendees; the organiser's job is continuity, and the programme's materials will be written with that in mind.
How to get involved
The Community Meetups programme is planned and has not started. There is no calendar and no list of cities today. If you want a meetup in your city — to attend or to organise — email contact@embeddedos.org with your location and which of the two you are. The Foundation will connect interested people in the same area as the programme takes shape.
Experienced organisers can help design the programme: which support materials matter, which ground rules work, and how the Foundation lists and promotes events. Watch the News page for the launch. In the meantime, the Discord server and GitHub Discussions are where the community gathers online.
Where no in-person group exists yet, the programme will support online-first meetups — regular video calls with the same ground rules — because a region with five interested people spread across three cities still deserves a meeting. Online groups that reach a critical mass will get help finding a physical venue when they want one.