The Format
How meetings work.
FortiPNW runs on a simple rhythm: monthly online, quarterly in person, always practitioner-led and technical. Here's what a session looks like and how the group is run.
Practitioners set the agenda
Every session is chaired by a member of the steering committee — practitioners who operate this gear day to day. They pick the topics, line up the speakers, and run the room. The content is technical: a real deployment, a real failure, a real teardown, followed by open Q&A.
Chatham House Rule
So people can speak candidly about what's working and what isn't, meetings run under the Chatham House Rule: anything said can be repeated, but not attributed. Share what you learned; leave names and companies out of it. It's a standard user-group norm that keeps the conversation honest.
In practice Feedback travels as "several PNW shops are seeing X," not as who said it.
A direct line to Fortinet
A Fortinet Sales Engineer helps organize the group and takes part as a resource — answering questions, bringing roadmap context, and carrying the room's feedback back to Fortinet's product and engineering teams. When a topic is better discussed on its own, the steering committee can run a practitioner-only session.
Feedback that goes somewhere
The feedback raised in meetings gets summarized and sent to Fortinet, and we share what comes back with the group. There's also an anonymous form for anything you'd rather not raise in the room — it goes upstream the same way.
Fortinet's Role
Where Fortinet fits.
FortiPNW is an independent community, and Fortinet supports it — the same way a vendor supports its user group. Here's the split.
Fortinet provides
- Funding for in-person venues and events
- A Sales Engineer who helps organize and shows up
- Access to speakers, product teams, and resources
- Roadmap context and a channel for member feedback
The steering committee owns
- The agenda and the topics
- The speaker lineup
- How each session runs
- Whether a session runs practitioner-only
Shape of a session
A typical in‑person night.
Virtual meetings run the same way, compressed into 60 minutes with the networking replaced by open Q&A.
- 5:30 Doors Show up, grab food, talk to people who have your same problems.
- 6:00 Session Chaired by a practitioner — a real deployment, a real failure, or a real teardown — with open Q&A after.
- 6:45 Feedback round What's working, what's missing, what you'd change. This is the part that gets carried back to Fortinet.
- 7:00 Networking The actual reason people drive to Tacoma on a Tuesday.
Come to one and see.
The first session is a virtual kickoff on September 15. Join the community and we'll send you the details.