Starting a Bot Community
Our First Bot Meetup 🤖 #BotTO
March 31st, 2016 marked major milestone for us and our community. After incubating and planning the idea, we kicked off our first ever #BotTO meetup series in collaboration with our friends at Slack.
Every new technology platform needs to have behind it a dedicated group of people who are interested and willing to participate and share their experience. The bot and messaging space is no different. With the steady rise of “conversational commerce” over the last year, its become abundantly clear that we are on the cusp on a new shift in tech. Bots and the platforms that they are support on, hold the promise of more efficient automation in both our personal and professional lives. To mark the rise of this inevitable new wave, we have taken it upon ourselves to help build out Toronto’s bot and messaging community by hosting these monthly/bi-monthly meet ups.
Our inaugural event took place on March 31st at the One Eleven Richmond technology accelerator and event space. Co-hosted by Slack, we drew a crowd of just under 100 people and heard presentations from:
Roy Pereira (@roymap) — founder of Zoom.ai,
Corey Pollock (@cpollo01) — Creator of SlackList.info
Matt McCausland (@idiotbanter), founder of Sam.best
Don Goodman-Wilson (@DEGoodmanWilson)— Slack’s Senior Developer Relations Advocate
They discussed everything from the future of work, the power of AI, the importance of building Slack communities and the origin of Matt’s Sam.best project. We are truly at a pivotal moment in this space and as Matt pointed out, no one really knows where it’s going, but we can all agree that it’s definitely evolving and picking up more momentum day by day.
We want to take this opportunity to thank all of the people that came out last week and expressing your interest in our emerging new community here in Toronto. We couldn’t be more happy with the turnout and the support from all of you.
You can bet that things will only continue heat up. We are only in the first inning of the bot wave.
Our next event will take place on April 21st at Shopify Toronto HQ at 6PM. We have some amazing speakers lined up and we’ll get a chance to hear about how Kik and Shopify are both leveraging messaging and bots.
Make sure to join the Meetup community to get notified about the event:
We look forward to seeing you there!
Robleh & #BotTO team
