How to Discover or Organize Lakehouse & Apache Iceberg Meetups

July 3, 2025

This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Alex Merced

Free Resources

Planning a meetup around Apache Iceberg or modern data lakehouse architectures? Whether you’re looking to host your first community event or expand your existing network, discovering and organizing meetups can be both rewarding and impactful. These gatherings offer an opportunity to connect with other data professionals, share best practices, and explore cutting-edge tools and architectures. In this blog, we’ll explore how to find and collaborate with existing data communities, discover upcoming Iceberg and lakehouse-related events, and provide tips on organizing your own meetup. We’ll also share links to online communities, tools, and platforms to help you build momentum around your event and grow your local or virtual data community.

Step 1: Join the Related Communities

Slack communities for different lakehouse communities are going to be one of the best places to find people to collaborate with. In certain communities there are dedicated channels for meetups that make easier to discover people looking to collaborate in your area

Step 2: Where to collaborate

A good pattern to use is to create a meetup channel if it doesn’t already exist for your area like #meetup-atlanta and then invite people to join the channel to collaborate on local meetups.

Data Events Slack Community

The Data Events Slack Community is a great place to find people to collaborate with. Here are the existing meetup channels in the Data Events Slack Community:

meetup-argentina
meetup-australia
meetup-brazil
meetup-california
meetup-canada
meetup-chile
meetup-china
meetup-colombia
meetup-colorado
meetup-egypt
meetup-florida
meetup-france
meetup-georgia
meetup-germany
meetup-illinois
meetup-india
meetup-ireland
meetup-israel
meetup-japan
meetup-massachusetts
meetup-mexico
meetup-netherlands
meetup-newyork
meetup-northcarolina
meetup-singapore
meetup-southafrica
meetup-southkorea
meetup-sweden
meetup-texas
meetup-uk
meetup-utah
meetup-washington

Iceberg Slack

Currently in the Apache Iceberg Slack Workspace the following Channels Exist:

meetup-atlanta
meetup-austin
meetup-bayarea
meetup-boston
meetup-chicago
meetup-denver
meetup-nola
meetup-orlando
meetup-seattle

note: There are no other channels for other cities as the ability to make channels was turned off in the Iceberg Slack, my suggestion is make the channel in the Data Lakehouse Hub slack.

Data Lakehouse Hub Slack

Here are the existing meetup channels in the Data Lakehouse Hub Slack:

meetup-atlanta
meetup-austin
meetup-barcelona
meetup-boston
meetup-chicago
meetup-denver
meetup-london
meetup-miami
meetup-munich
meetup-nyc
meetup-nola
meetup-orlando
meetup-san-francisco
meetup-santa-clara
meetup-seattle

Apache Polaris Slack

There is a #meetup-attendee and #meetup-organizer channel in the Apache Polaris Slack along with:

#meetup-nyc-austin-boston-atlanta
#meetup-sanfran-seattle-denver-chicago

Step 3: Find or Propose Events

By reading these channels you should be able to discover upcoming Iceberg and lakehouse-related events in your area. If you want to organize an event you can propose an event and see who would want to collaborate in organizing the event.

Step 4: Organize the Event

Naming Your Event

Simplest way to organize your event is under the name X Lakehouse Meetup where X is the city or region and you can run the meetup any way you like. For example, Atlanta Lakehouse Meetup. But if you want to use a name like Atlanta Apache Iceberg Meetup you can do that but need to follow recently approved guidelines for doing so to avoid trademark issues with the Apache Software Foundation.

Apache Iceberg should be championed in every meetup and technical session (after all, we’re here to support this technology and our community)
All talks should be vendor-neutral and not sales pitches (of course vendors can be mentioned, but that should never be the point of the talk)
Each meetup should have at least two talks with speakers representing different companies/organizations (we need to champion diversity of thought)
Planned meetups ought to be brought to the attention of the dev list (this is to promote transparency and raise awareness)

These rules include having an open call for speakers prior to the event and decided on the speakers among all event sponsors (and allow others to sponsor the event if they want to).

Organizing the Event

Essentially you have three main costs:

Venue
Drinks
Food

So soliciting people to co-sponsor the event either by sharing the costs of these things or having different sponsorts pay for different things is a good way to organize the event.

All contriuting sponsors should have their logos on the event promotion. You’ll want all these details squared away to allow at least 2 weeks of promotion before the event if not more.

Promoting the Event

You should first either create a meetup or lu.ma listing for the event. For Apache Iceberg meetups there are community run outlets to post your event.

Here are some other Luma Calendars and Meetup Groups you may want to follow for Lakehouse Events:

Meetup Groups

Luma Calendars

Message calendars@datalakehousehub.com to get your event added to these calendars, include link to Luma or Meetup event listing:

Social Media

Make sure everyone involved is posting about the event on linkedin, twitter and blue sky.

Emails

Sponsors should send emails about the event to their lists if they can, use Luma to email attendees to remind them about the event 7 days, 24 hours and 2 hours before the event with any logistics details they should know. Offering each sponsor a link in these emails to a related blog or asset is a good idea.

Conclusion

Bringing together the Lakehouse and Apache Iceberg community through meetups is one of the most effective ways to foster collaboration, share knowledge, and build meaningful relationships across organizations and regions. Whether you’re organizing your first meetup or joining an existing one, the open and welcoming nature of these communities makes it easy to get involved. By leveraging platforms like Slack, Luma, and Meetup, and by following best practices for organizing inclusive and impactful events, you can help grow the ecosystem and play a key role in advancing open data architectures. So jump into a meetup channel, connect with others, and start planning — your community is waiting.

This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Alex Merced