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Starting the Ukrainian Unity User Group

January 9, 2015 in Community | 2 min. read
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On Saturday December 6, the first meetup of the Ukrainian Unity User Group took place in Kyiv with 50 attendees in a very cozy, homely atmosphere. There was lots going on, including a teleconference, two talks, contests and prizes from sponsors and plenty of active networking.

Here’s how the user group got started:

For almost two years I’ve been waiting for someone to organize a Ukrainian community of Unity developers. When local studio Nravo recently started a group that held regular Unity meetings and BarCamps in the west-Ukrainian city of Lviv I felt inspired. I decided to stop waiting and start doing. And so the idea of UUUG was born.

You can’t have a meetup without speakers. Using my Facebook, Skype and LinkedIn network I quickly found two volunteers: Dmitry Andruschenko from iLogos and Ivan Dolgushin from AppTurn.

One more thing you need for a meetup - somewhere to hold it! I asked my friends from ITStep Academy for help and they agreed to host user group meetings in their office in Kiev.

When you have a place to hold your meetup and some speakers, you can start promoting it! We used Eventbrite to create a landing page and handle registrations and created a Facebook page to promote the group. Local companies were also eager to help out and promote the event.

After a few posts on Facebook, Alina Melnichuk and Yuri Karadzhov from Wargaming and Margarita Ostapchuk from Microsoft Ukraine volunteered to help with meetup preparation.

At this point, we learned about a GamesJamMicrosoft event in Moscow, which was scheduled for the same date and decided to hold a teleconference assisted by Microsoft’s Ukrainian and Russian offices.

The meetup started with the teleconference. Valentin Simonov from Unity Technologies answered questions about the future of Unity and Tatiana Smetanina from Microsoft shared information about competitions held by Unity and Microsoft.

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Then, after talks about lightmapping and game AIs, augmented reality photos with virtual characters, a question and answer session with Wargaming, a contest and giveaways it was time for the after party – phew!

We met so many kind and engaged people who were willing to take an active part in the group’s development, help organize meetings, hold interesting talks and share their knowledge. Big thanks to the Unity Community everywhere!

If there is no Unity User Group in your city – start one :-)

January 9, 2015 in Community | 2 min. read

Is this article helpful for you?

Thank you for your feedback!

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