The meet-up in Bulacan last February 17 was the first of a series of meet-ups for the SteemPH Meet-Up Caravan. It was also my first time to host such an event and my first time to speak to an audience about Steemit in that fashion. I normally shy away from the thought of being a speaker and preferred one-on-one Q&As in previous Steemit gatherings I've been to.

About 5 months ago, my partner @steemitph wrote about our day in the first Steemit event we attended. In his post, A Day of Hug & Love with Art & Music | A #SteemPH Outreach & Steemit Promotion Event, he included the video above where you can see him speaking about Steemit in front of a crowd; I was the the one taking the video. After his speech, a number of people from his audience approached me to ask their questions about Steemit. I was happy to answer them one by one.

In the picture on the right, you will see @steemitph being his usual self, openly explaining his role as a member of the core team of @steemph.manila. We both attended the SteemPH Year-End Party last December, where he shared his experience about being a Sndbox cohort, and answered questions about Sndbox too. Aside from taking pictures, I was busy chitchatting with the newbies I was seated with. They too had a lot of questions that I happily answered.

It was an entirely different set-up in the Malolos meet-up, where both Red and I were in front of the group. I'm sure it didn't show but I was pretty nervous when the discussion began so I let Red take on the lead. It was not hard to warm up to our audience though and it wasn't long before I started to just be myself in telling them about my Steemit journey. They were listening intently to what Red and I had to say. I see them nod and smile whenever we point out things that are apparent in the platform, they also had their share of questions which only made the discussion more lively.

It was indeed an afternoon full of learning as I myself realized a lot of things after the meet-up.

• It is important to check if the venue has internet connection. Connectivity should be one of the deciding factors in choosing a venue.

• Setting up everything takes a lot of time. We need to allot at least 1 hour to make things presentable, ourselves included.

• The participants seriously want to make themselves better, which is why they are there. They normally have a lot of questions and we should be ready to answer most, if not all, of them.

• In voting for witnesses, the concern is more about why instead of how. We should go into details about why steemians should exercise their voting powers. Aside from the SteemPH-endorsed witnesses, we will also show them our own list of witnesses and also discuss why we're voting for them.

• Powering up is something that we should drive. We need to delve more deeply on how it is beneficial to everyone. We should provide more talking points about this.

Cavite Meet-Up

Topics

With these in mind, we have made a lot of changes to our discussion flow for our upcoming meet-up in Cavite. In fact, it has gone through a complete overhaul. We've decided not to discuss some of the topics, like Image Alignment, and Text Formatting. @steemnest can provide information on those in its post, SteemNest In Action | Joining the First Stop of the SteemPH Meet-Up Caravan. We will spend more time on topics like Witnesses, Powering-Up, and Content Creation. Some of the participants of the Cavite meet-up reached out for topics they want to be covered such as Bayanihan Curation and SteemAuto. These will definitely be discussed.

Venue

Cafe Moraco is about 75 kilometers away from our residence. It is located on Centennial Road, in Kawit Cavite. It was @watersnake101 who suggested this place and he wrote about finding it especially for the meet-up in his post, Meet Up Caravan Steemit Cavite Update.

Participants

Aside from the venue, I have @watersnake101 to thank for in collating the pictures and information I need to prepare our souvenirs too. In fact, he has been working with us in order to get the caravan to Cavite in the first place. He was one of the first people who reached out to us about holding a meet-up in their area. Since then, he's been actively recruiting people to join the event.

The next few days will be spent on tweaking our program flow, and in making sure that everything will go smoothly on the day of the meet-up. But generally speaking, we're all good to go. So to our Steemian friends in Cavite, we'll see you on March 10!