I help run a ruby user group. Getting speakers for our monthly meetup was often painful and somewhat stressful. Then two things changed:
1. A friend offered to help run it jointly. My (silly) default position when someone offers help is to say no. That time I said yes and I'm extremely thankful to them for offering. Running a meetup with one or two others is far better than on your lonesome.
2. We were still struggling to get people to give talks. I suggested a high risk strategy of using a doodle poll and trying to get a years worth of people signing up to give a single talk. If people wouldn't commit we'd shut the group down. We had a years worth of talks offered within the week.
We've employed the same strategy of booking in people at the start of the year for 3 years now, it's working really well.
I have been associated with several different user's groups of various technology levels and we always find a couple particular things are the hangups:
1) Insurance
If someone gets injured while at your meeting, you need this. In addition, practically every venue demands this.
2) Venues
This always seems to be a perennial problem. First, finding a venue that is in a useful spot is difficult. Second, evening access is really a deal-breaker for most venues. Third, does the venue have parking that doesn't suck? Fourth, does the venue have infrastructure for a tech meeting and can you access it? I can go on and on. Getting a reliable venue is really hard. And, once you find one, you'll probably lose it after a couple years, so you always have to be looking.
3) Getting young people to show up
I don't know what it is about user's groups/meetups, but it only seems like those of us of greybeard age and older show up regularly. Which is odd, because we greybeards used to go to these groups when we weren't greybeards.
On 2) I’ve seen groups that try to use restaurants, and it’s almost always a bad idea.
On 3) The graybeards came of age when doing tech stuff was only for the nerds, and they needed a way to see other likeminded folks. Today, being in tech either makes you cool, or at least it’s normal (though maybe not much longer given what Big Tech is doing), so there’s not such a strong need for a community outside of “regular” life. You can also meet a lot of community needs virtually.
As someone who's thought about starting restaurant-based meetups around various hobbies, wondering if you can fill in why this is a bad idea, to save me the trouble of finding out the hard way.
Regarding 3, I think it's a very interesting notion that normalization/cool-ification of tech work may have obviated much of the drive for meetups. Can you also please elaborate on "maybe not much longer given what Big Tech is doing"? I'm wondering if we're talking about a stance on tracking/facial recognition (although maybe it's something else?). Regardless of the stance, what would the "not much longer" entail?
6 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 29.6 ms ] thread1. A friend offered to help run it jointly. My (silly) default position when someone offers help is to say no. That time I said yes and I'm extremely thankful to them for offering. Running a meetup with one or two others is far better than on your lonesome.
2. We were still struggling to get people to give talks. I suggested a high risk strategy of using a doodle poll and trying to get a years worth of people signing up to give a single talk. If people wouldn't commit we'd shut the group down. We had a years worth of talks offered within the week.
We've employed the same strategy of booking in people at the start of the year for 3 years now, it's working really well.
Good luck to anyone running a meetup!
1) Insurance
If someone gets injured while at your meeting, you need this. In addition, practically every venue demands this.
2) Venues
This always seems to be a perennial problem. First, finding a venue that is in a useful spot is difficult. Second, evening access is really a deal-breaker for most venues. Third, does the venue have parking that doesn't suck? Fourth, does the venue have infrastructure for a tech meeting and can you access it? I can go on and on. Getting a reliable venue is really hard. And, once you find one, you'll probably lose it after a couple years, so you always have to be looking.
3) Getting young people to show up
I don't know what it is about user's groups/meetups, but it only seems like those of us of greybeard age and older show up regularly. Which is odd, because we greybeards used to go to these groups when we weren't greybeards.
On 3) The graybeards came of age when doing tech stuff was only for the nerds, and they needed a way to see other likeminded folks. Today, being in tech either makes you cool, or at least it’s normal (though maybe not much longer given what Big Tech is doing), so there’s not such a strong need for a community outside of “regular” life. You can also meet a lot of community needs virtually.
Regarding 3, I think it's a very interesting notion that normalization/cool-ification of tech work may have obviated much of the drive for meetups. Can you also please elaborate on "maybe not much longer given what Big Tech is doing"? I'm wondering if we're talking about a stance on tracking/facial recognition (although maybe it's something else?). Regardless of the stance, what would the "not much longer" entail?
It's naive to think most user groups could avoid using one of these sites.