The Premday Manifesto

Premday is a small group of people running real machines in real rooms with real heat and real bills. We meet, we swap war stories, and we try to make on‑premises infrastructure a little less lonely — together. The rules below are the unwritten ones, written down. Read once, apply forever; like firmware, they should be small, well‑tested, and rarely changed.

Among ourselves

We care about on-prem infrastructure, not scale

We leave business at the door

Engineering first, always, as equals. Inside the user group, no one is a competitor, a champion, or an industry analyst. We are operators with the same problems and roughly the same scars — and that is what we are here to talk about.

We attend to engage, not to recruit

We are here to swap notes, and share experience. Premday members do not use meetings, mailing lists or coffee breaks to apply for jobs or recruit candidates. Everyone is a peer first, and Premday spaces should only be used to further Premday goals.

We respect what is shared in the room

What is said in Premday stays in Premday — unless the speaker says otherwise. Incident details, internal numbers, roadmap hints, and unfiltered opinions are confidence by default; ask before quoting, screenshotting, or repeating.

We share the blunders too

It’s ok to fail but not to blame. Outages, dead‑on‑arrival batches, and “we should have known” moments are often the most useful things we can offer each other. Bring them. We will listen, learn, and never use them against you.

With vendors

We have no preferred vendor

All vendors are treated equal. The group does not endorse, rank, or blacklist any vendor on behalf of its members. Individual companies buy from whomever they like; the user group will not put a collective thumb on anyone’s scale.

We give technical feedback

We tell vendors plainly what works and what does not — that is the whole point. We never weaponize the group as leverage on a deal, a renewal, or an escalation. We thrive for actionable feedback.

We do not talk price

Prices, discounts, rebates, and contract terms are strictly between each member and each vendor. Premday is a technical user group, not a buying group — emphasis on user.

With our content & creations

We default to open source

Tools, scripts, dashboards, and best practices we build together belong upstream. When in doubt, the answer to “should we open this?” is “yes — under which license?”. Closed by default is not the Premday way.

We respect upstream

If we build on someone else’s work, we honor their license, credit their authors, and contribute fixes back. Forking‑and‑forgetting is not our culture; neither is relicensing what was never ours.

We disseminate, never monetize

Published talks, slides, recordings, and shared group outputs are in the commons. No member sells them, paywalls them, or repackages them as a commercial offering — neither for themselves nor for their employer.

We share knowledge, not personal data

Privacy by default. Aggregated learnings, yes. Nominative attendee lists, photos, or contact details shared with third parties, never. What we publish about the community is anonymized by default, and stays that way.

The smell test

If you are unsure whether something fits the spirit of Premday, a useful rule of thumb:

Would you be comfortable saying it to the whole group, on the public mailing list, with the lights on?

If yes, you are probably fine. If not, sleep on it — and if still in doubt, ask the user group privately on usergroup-private@lists.premday.org.