A while back, I was reflecting on my 2024 community meetup journey. If 2024 was about recovering from a challenging year with the support of our communities, then 2025 has been fundamentally about connection. This past year has cemented my belief that the most impactful communities are those that break down silos, share resources, and actively collaborate. And this post is a reflection on why I chose to connect the dots between different groups, technologies, and cities, and what I learned along the way.
The core thesis here is simple: we are stronger together. My focus for 2025 is on joint ventures, bringing together the best of Cloud Native Barcelona, Grafana & Friends, Software Crafters, DevOps BCN, Kafka, and other communities, to offer the community something richer and more valuable than we could offer alone.
Before diving into the details, I would like to extend a massive, heartfelt thank you to every single person who made this year’s community work happen. Thank you to my brilliant co-organizers for their countless times jumping in to help; to the sponsoring hosts who opened their doors and provided logistical support; to every dedicated speaker for sharing their expertise; and to every single attendee who showed up and brought the energy. You are the community, and your efforts make it worthwhile.
I also want to commit to an honest assessment here. This journey had incredible highs, but also presented persistent challenges, particularly in terms of diversity and inclusion. Community building is a rewarding yet ongoing process, and I hope to share lessons from both the highs and the challenges.
From Seeds to a Network: The Collaborative Formula for Community Growth
Every journey begins with a starting point, a seed. For me, the initial ground for cultivating community stemmed from two foundational experiences. I first learned the ropes of bringing people together around shared technical interests with the Elastic User Groups in Barcelona and Madrid back in 2018, alongside Janko Strassburg, my long-time partner in crime. What followed was the restarting of Software Crafters Barcelona meetups in 2022, with Manuel Rivero‘s invaluable support and advice. The Crafters community, with its dedication to hands-on learning with regular coding dojos, truly instilled in me the value of consistency and showing up for the community.
These experiences laid the groundwork, and 2024 truly marked the beginning of a new chapter: joint meetups. Driven by a desire to break down the invisible walls between communities, this shift felt very organic.
The first joint venture was between Software Crafters Barcelona and Techfems, when we partnered to bring both communities together under one space in May 2024.
Another pivotal moment came at the end of 2024 with another joint meetup: Cloud Native Barcelona 🤝 Cloud Native Lisboa. I owe a huge thank you to Fábio Sampaio for suggesting that collaboration and making it happen. It showed us the potential of connecting communities even beyond our city.
These successful ventures quickly inspired more local cross-community events. We soon forged another partnership between the Kafka and Grafana communities (Apache Kafka meetup with Grafana in Madrid), which has continued into 2025. My sincere gratitude to Olivia Taylor and Ana Vrsalovic, whose connection was instrumental in getting these collaborations off the ground and will continue beyond 2026 as we expand to include other communities.
These initial joint steps were just the beginning. This year, 2025, has seen these collaborations grow exponentially, transforming those initial seeds into an interconnected network that spans multiple communities, cities, and technologies. Working together has multiplied our impact.
The 2025 Collaborative Calendar: Connecting the Dots in Action
Reviewing this year’s meetups, a pattern emerges: we are seeing an increase in joint meetups.
All those collaborations have been, and I am sure will continue to be, very rewarding.
Beyond the impressive numbers, the real reward of this collaborative approach is the synergy it creates. Simply put, joint ventures lower the organizational burden: finding hosts and speakers. By co-organizing, we share the workload, access diverse networks, and gain exposure to users and technologies we might not see in our core groups alone.
As Luca Berton noted after one of our cross-community events, “These cross-community meetups (Grafana, Kafka, Snowflake) are exactly where innovation happens“. In fact, by joining three different communities, we actually achieved an all-women speaker lineup, a rare and rewarding occurrence.
While our collaborative formula boosts audience size and exposure, it doesn’t automatically solve for deep-seated systemic issues. The reality of community work, as I’ve experienced repeatedly this year, is the persistent struggle to consistently find diverse voices from underrepresented groups for our speaker lineups. We must also seriously examine why we don’t see a proportional representation of diverse attendees.
While creating an inclusive conference with diverse voices is something we are getting better at, and we can influence as attendees, speakers, and sponsors, as meetup organizers, we face a tough, immediate decision: cancel an event until we achieve a diverse lineup, or proceed with a homogeneous one. Meetups are planned in weeks, not months, leaving us a narrow margin to pivot.
It’s not enough to be welcoming and inclusive. We must actively investigate the systemic barriers that prevent certain groups from attending or participating in meetups.
This continuous effort is a central part of my commitment as a community builder in the local community.
My resolution for 2026 is to move beyond good intentions and establish a data-driven approach.
I will begin gathering concrete data on the diversity of speakers and attendees. Once we have this baseline, we can explore and measure additional, targeted initiatives beyond our joint meetups to create truly inclusive spaces.
The journey of joint meetups in 2025 demonstrated that we are stronger together in technical collaboration. However, this combined strength should be intentionally leveraged to drive a more profound change. True allyship for systemic justice is not merely welcoming individuals. It is the commitment to dismantle the systemic barriers that prevent proportional representation in our communities and, by extension, the wider industry.
Our collaborative formula, connecting community groups across cities and technologies, is just one such initiative.
By committing to a data-driven approach in 2026, we are transitioning from recognizing the challenge to actively measuring and targeting the underlying structures of inequality, ensuring our local organizing efforts are a core engine for systemic change in tech.
