Ahhh, it’s that time of year! When snow graces large parts of the Northern Hemisphere, when people resolve that by golly THIS is the year they WILL get their stuff together, and of course, when all companies everywhere look over their end-of-year metrics. 
Here is the result of some data spelunking from our Open Source Data Infrastructure community.
Who comes to our meetups?
Source: Word Cloud Generator
Many different types of folks! But most of you are:
- Software Engineers/Developers
- Data Engineers
- Data Scientists
- Students
In 2023, our meetup community grew from 285 to nearly 5,000 members, a growth rate of +1,747.3%! 
Where are they from?
As of today, we host 22 meetup groups in 15 countries around the world.
If you’re located near any of those cities and want to speak about open source data stuff, we’d love to hear from you! Here’s our speaker form.
Why do they come?
Source: Word Cloud Generator
Pulling on some themes displayed here, folks primarily come to these meetups for:
- networking—to meet other professionals in the OSDI space, especially those they have something in common with!
- knowledge & learning —they want to stay abreast of new and upcoming “hot topics” within their industry.
- data—well, duh.
But whether they’re storing it, streaming it, scaling it, analyzing it, or generating AI with it, data is an evergreen topic that folks can’t get enough of!
What do they most want to learn about?
“Open Source Data Infrastructure” is a deliberately big tent to allow for a wide variety of interests and speakers. But here are the topics that seem to resonate the most:
- BIG data: Data Lakes, Delta Lakes, Lake Houses… if it has something to do with massive amounts of data and large bodies of water, our meetup attendees love to learn about it!
- Performance and Scalability: How to make my database blazingly fast? How to go from 100 to 100K to 1B rows?
- Event Streaming: Apache Kafka and its accompanying paradigm shift to real-time data processing is always a hot topic.
- Analytics and Observability: Surfacing and making sense of large quantities of data.
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC) / Data Platforms: Kubernetes, Terraform (well, when it was open source earlier in 2023 ;)), and the like are hot topics among platform engineers and DevOps practitioners.
- AI and Machine Learning: Personalization, scaling operations, LLMs… ChatGPT got the world’s CEOs salivating over AI once again - but this time it seems to stick!
Our most popular events + talks of 2023
Here were the top 10 OSDI meetup events by RSVPs, and the topics discussed!
-
India (Bengaluru) (
video) (
trip report) Our very first meetup back in October featured the talks:- Delta lake tables - behind the scenes by Apoorva Aggarwal (Microsoft)
- Data Quality Platform at CRED by Chintan Shah, Manas Bhardwaj, and Abinasha Karana (CRED)
- Evolving data infrastructure for scaling a data platform by Rohil Surana (Cloud@Pixxel)
-
Toronto ( video) ( trip report) Our September meetup also featured three amazing talks:- Scaling Analytics with Clickhouse: ingest at 100k/sec, query stateful data in under a 1/2 second by Maurice Kherlakian (Hookdeck)
- Apache Iceberg: enabling an open data architecture for large-scale analytics by Dipankar Mazumdar (Dremio)
- Postgres as search and personalization engine by Ankit Mittal (Instacart)
-
Berlin ( video) ( trip report) Hosted by our good friends at Wolt, our May meetup featured these great talks:- Building an Event Analytics Pipeline with Kafka, ksqlDB, and Druid by Hellmar Becker (Imply)
- How Wolt powers Logistics through the ML platform to deliver to millions of people? by Anıl Şahin, Stephen Batifol, and Kasimir Aula (Wolt)
-
Amsterdam (video) Our May meetup hosted at Adyen was a special “All Things ClickHouse” event, featuring:- ClickHouse: what is behind the fastest columnar database. Or how to make it click! by Olena Kutsenko (Aiven)
- Build for fast by Alexey Milovidov (ClickHouse CTO)
-
Stockholm Our first meetup in September, co-hosted by our partner Irori, was all about unlocking the power of Apache Kafka.- Updates on Apache Kafka Tiered Storage by Morvarid Aprin (Aiven)
- Implementing Event Driven Architecture with Kafka by Pär Eriksson (Irori)
- Second Day Ops for Kafka by Gustav Norbäcker (Irori)
-
Indonesia Our first meetup in July also featured our first meetup in Bahasa!- Big Contribution of Open Sources Database for Software Engineers by Arif Rakhman (EFishery)
-
Berlin (video) is back, this time for the November meetup.
- On the Journey of Redefining Stream Processing: What We Learned from Building RisingWave? by Yingjun Wu (RisingWave)
- From Postgres to OpenSearch in No Time by Gunnar Morling (Decodable)
-
London Our June meetup, co-hosted with the AI and Deep Learning for Enterprise meetup, featured:- An introduction into workflow orchestration using Apache Airflow by Ricardo Sueiras, AWS
- Mastering the Game of TL;DW - Auto-Summarization for Conference Goers by Ed Shee, Seldon
- How I help my customers solve problems with OSS by Davies Oludare, Confluent
-
Singapore The August meetup, co-hosted with Google, featured:- Choosing the Right Database: Exploring MySQL Alternatives for Modern Applications by Bhanu Jamwal (PingCAP)
- Hybrid and multi-cloud patterns for Kafka by Kaijun Xu (Google)
-
Berlin (video) makes yet another showing in our top 10, with the July meetup:
- Introduction to TiDB - a distributed SQL database by Mattias Jonsson (PingCAP)
- Beginners guide to balance your data across Apache Kafka partitions by Olena Kutsenko (Aiven)
Thank you! 
And finally, we want to give a shout-out to all of our amazing meetup (co-)organizers, speakers, hosts, and everyone who is involved in making these meetups happen. And also to the wonderful folks who show up every quarter to meet over pizza and soft drinks and nerd out about data stuff together! 
Hope to see you at another meetup soon! 