The chapter playbook

Getting started

Before your first event, get three things in place: a chair who is a practitioner (not a Fortinet employee), a Luma calendar for the chapter, and a first topic worth an hour of people's evening. Do not wait for a perfect venue or a big list. A good virtual session with ten of the right people beats a half-full room.

Read the charter template, adopt it, and fill in the local parts: your region, your metro areas, your cadence.

Cadence

The pattern that has worked: monthly online, quarterly in the room. Tight enough to stay useful, light enough that nobody burns out running it.

• Virtual, monthly. One hour, one topic, screen shares and real configs. This is the backbone that keeps the community warm between in-person nights.
• In person, quarterly. Where the relationships actually get built. Rotate venues around the metro so the same people are not always the ones driving.

Whatever you pick, publish it and hold it. A predictable cadence is worth more than an ambitious one you cannot keep.

Running an event

Luma is the system of record. Every event lives there, so the calendar is always current and RSVPs stay in your own tools, not a vendor CRM. A workable run of show for an in-person night:

• 5:30Doors and foodPeople arrive, grab food, and settle in. No program yet.
• 6:00SessionThe chair opens, states the Chatham House Rule, then hands off to the speaker or topic.
• 7:00NetworkingThe real value. Keep it going as long as the room wants to.

Open every meeting by stating the trust rules out loud. It takes fifteen seconds and it sets the tone that lets people speak plainly.

The probationary period

A new chapter runs three events on a regular cadence before the recognition vote. This is where a chapter proves it can hold a room, not just fill out a form. Keep it simple:

Trust rules in practice

The three trust rules are not decoration. Here is what keeping them looks like on the ground.

Roles

• Chair. A practitioner who runs meetings, keeps the cadence, and owns the relationship with the steering committee.
• Steering committee. A small group of practitioners who set the agenda and hold the chapter to the charter.
• Co-organizers. Anyone helping with venue, speakers, or logistics. Useful from day one so the chair is not a single point of failure.
• Liaison. An optional Fortinet-side contact for logistics. No vote, no veto.

Spinning up your chapter site

Each chapter gets a subdomain of diagdebug.com (for example pugetsound.diagdebug.com). Your site links the network's base stylesheet, so it matches the rest of the network out of the box, and layers a small local stylesheet for anything specific to your chapter.

Every chapter site carries a How Meetings Work page. It is the single clearest thing you can show a first-timer: how a session runs, what the trust rules mean for them, and what to expect. The network provides a template so you are not writing it from scratch.

Winding down

If a chapter can no longer keep its cadence, that is fine, but say so. Tell the steering committee and the chapter is set to inactive rather than left looking active. The network repoints the subdomain and updates the directory. Nothing is deleted; the record stays in git history.

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