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# The US Networking User Association at Networking Field Day 37
- URL: https://www.bitsinflight.com/usnua-at-networking-field-day-37/
- Published: 2025-03-24T12:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-16T16:00:34.000Z
- Description: Tech Field Day gave the USNUA a slot at NFD37. I walked the delegates through what it is, how the chapters run, how we keep sponsored events vendor-neutral, and Scott Robohn shared what year one of the Virginia NUG looked like.
- Author: Jason Gintert
- Tags: media, video, NFD, nfd37, usnua

*Networking Field Day 37, presentation to the delegates. Published 24 March 2025\. With Scott Robohn on the Virginia NUG.*

Tech Field Day gave us a slot at NFD37 to present the US Networking User Association to the delegates, which for once put me on the other side of the table. The short pitch: a vendor-neutral environment for network engineers to talk shop, with beer.

## Where it came from

About nine years ago it was the Ohio Networking User Group. There were VMware groups, Linux groups and vendor-run user groups, but nothing neutral for people who run networks. Fifteen people showed up to the first Cleveland event; at peak we were drawing 120\. The best part was watching people who had been colleagues or customer and provider a decade earlier find each other in the room again. COVID turned that into Zoom happy hours, and the pause gave us time to turn the Ohio model into a template other regions could run. When I gave the talk we had 28 active chapters on the slide and 36 on the website, which tells you how fast it was moving, with 57 events held the year before.

## How the chapters run

Each region has a local organizer or two, and our event coordinators handle the sponsors, the venue logistics and the speaker wrangling behind the scenes. The format is a presentation followed by a panel, with plenty of time in between to talk, and the local group decides the flavour. Pennsylvania turned their panel into a podcast. At the Network Automation Forum we ran the Great Debate, EVPN versus layer 2 leaf-spine, in front of 250 people. EVPN won, with some question of ballot stuffing. Presentations are non-selling by rule: open technologies and interesting problems, like the Ohio retailer who built their own open-source router for 1,600 stores. We moved from state-based to city-based chapters after Phil Gervasi pointed out that nobody in upstate New York wants to drive to Manhattan, and that is why Texas has several and why Seattle and Northern California were in the works. The delegates asked about the gaps on the map, and the honest answer is that some launches fall through on sponsorship or organizer time.

## Neutral, but sponsored

The question I always get: how is it vendor-neutral if vendors pay for it? Sponsors cover the venue, food and drinks, typically five or six per event across four sponsorship levels, and they get their brand in the room rather than a pitch slot. Organizers carry literal yellow and red cards. We have shown a few yellows, and one red, to someone who would not stop cornering an attendee for a purchase order. We review every deck before it goes up, and we have caught the occasional last-minute switcheroo. Membership and events are free; everything sits at usnua.com, with recorded talks, webinars, slide decks and a Slack with a channel per region. We also ask at the start of every event who is hiring, because getting new people into the industry is part of the job.

## Scott's view from Virginia

Scott Robohn co-founded the Virginia NUG and ran four meetings in its first year, which he admitted was aggressive. His lessons: hyper-local matters, so they stayed in Reston and moved to a venue on the Metro when people asked; the corporate back office, and Kayla Anthony in particular, means organizers do surprisingly little administrative work; and adjacent meetups with security and wireless communities are a promising format. He had visited a dozen other NUGs to see how each one differs, and pointed out that the panel is a low-risk place for someone to present for the first time. My favourite example of that is the engineer from our local electric utility who gave his first-ever talk, nervous as anything, about going from Ansible to Python frameworks, and then spent the rest of the night answering questions from a crowd that wanted to hear more.

[Watch on YouTube →](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kvrTpGW1KM&ref=bitsinflight.com)