We had our “first” BEKUG MeetUp last Thursday. Her...

# belgium

[Tim Schraepen]

We had our “first” BEKUG MeetUp last Thursday. Here's a small experience report.

We were a total of 15 attendees eventually, which is really nice for such a short notice publication of a MeetUp event.
Experience level varied from “student learning Kotlin in school” to “started using Kotlin in beta”.

After sandwiches & beers, Simon gave a talk about the general state of Kotlin and the current possibilities of Ktor (teasing a bit the future strengths of api documentation via static code analysis).

Then we took a small break before I explained the OpenSpace format since there were a couple people who never experienced it before.
OpenSpace is a liberating structure, in which you build an agenda with all the attendees. It provides guidelines that put you in the driver's seat:
you have a question about a particular case at work -> that's a session;
you just read a cool article about Exposed and want to try it out -> that's a session
you want to try-out a workshop you came up with -> that's a session

It works like this: everybody writes down session ideas, one by one they get pitched and put on the whiteboard (in an Options space), after everyone's done pitching we all go to the whiteboard and drag the session ideas into timeslots and bam, 5 minutes later there's the agenda.

After our time was up there was some time to give feedback on how to improve next meetup.

Thanks for showing up!
Thanks to Kunlabora for providing food, drinks and a location! 💙💚
Thanks to @simon.vergauwen for his inspiring talk to help get things going.

Hope to see you at the next one in February 2026 (exact date to be announced)!

[CLOVIS]

I'm very interested if you have further resources on that format, to port it over to other KUGs

[Tim Schraepen]

Good point!
Mentioned it's a Liberating Structure but forgot to link to it. 😅

Here you go: https://www.liberatingstructures.com/25-open-space-technology/

[Tim Schraepen]

I see they still mention the “law of two feet”, which has been renamed to “the law of freedom” to be a bit more inclusive.

[CLOVIS]

Thanks!

[Tim Schraepen]

If you like we can do a relatively short online meeting where I can explain how I’ve been running openspaces.

[CLOVIS]

Thanks, I'd be interested to do that someday, with my cohost