7 ms·

Eight years of organizing tech meetups (2023)

134 points by luu 2y ago

otoolep 2y ago
Thanks again to @eatonphil, for the opportunity to talk at Hacker Nights. Online meetings, like the ones Phil organized, were really important between 2020 and 2022.
- hackernewds 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - eatonphil 2y ago
    Astroturfing?
- eatonphil 2y ago
  Thank you for speaking!
dfex 2y ago
Thanks for this timely post! I have been kicking around the idea of starting a meetup in my city to meet interesting people in my field. Being a freelancer on large projects in my day job, it sometimes feels like I'm out of the loop for long periods of time.
chewxy 2y ago
I've been running GolangSyd for about 8 years now, and previously Sydney Python for about the same amount of time. I found finding sponsors to be one of the hardest things. One of the last Sydney Pythons in which I gave a talk on machine learning had ~250 people attending (PyConAU at that time had roughly as many people I think). So large that the pizza bill was way more than the host (who was the sponsor as well) had anticipated, so we were no longer welcome at that venue. And said host is a well known billion dollar Aussie company. Thankfully for GolangSyd, my cohosts have been extremely talented with finding sponsors. This gives us a lot more opportunity to do weirder things like https://gogogogogo.casa https://gogogogogo.casa . Running meetups are hard work, full stop. On the other hand, I've gotten to know some people very well and some of my best collabs have been thru these meetups. Running a meetup was a way for me to overcome my own reluctance to socialize.
- cdogl 2y ago
  I remember seeing you at GolandSyd meetups before you took over running them. Nice job!
  - chewxy 2y ago
    Haha I remember you and your SaltStack talks at SyPy. Shame you moved to Melbourne. Hey, coffee's better here now (https://www.timeout.com/sydney/news/experts-have-ranked-the-top-cities-for-coffee-and-sydney-came-third-in-the-world-040424 https://www.timeout.com/sydney/news/experts-have-ranked-the-...). Wanna come back?
- crummy 2y ago
  250 people is an insane number for a meetup!
  - rexreed 2y ago
    Not really - the NY Tech Meetup / DC Tech Meetups would regularly have hundreds of attendees, and a few others like the Data Community DC ones had quite a few. Even in those larger numbers, sponsors are flighty and often unappreciative.
    - pcai 2y ago
      > Even in those larger numbers, sponsors are flighty and often unappreciative. Can you elaborate on what you mean? In my experience running meetups, sponsoring is an expensive and thankless activity akin to a donation
      - datadrivenangel 2y ago
        Current organizer of Data Community DC here. It's a lot of work to get a sponsor, and they tend to churn after a year or two when the individual advocate moves on. The best sponsors know the value of long term community engagement. Bad sponsors are more transactional, and want to really see the short term value they get.
agcat 2y ago
This is a great post. Specially the tricks section. I have been organizing Casual Breakfasts for Developers for last 4 months every 2 weeks. And it's been amazing, have learned so many new things.
wcedmisten 2y ago
I recently started a tech meetup [1] in my small city (Charlottesville, VA), and was surprised at the amount of interest! One tip for finding a space, try your public library! Mine has plenty of meeting rooms that can be booked for free. I initially was buying pizzas for the meetup, but they didn't really get eaten, so now I don't bring anything but an HDMI cord. [1] https://cvillecreativecoders.com/ https://cvillecreativecoders.com/
- linsomniac 2y ago
  >try your public library YMMV, our public library has free meeting space, however they absolutely will not let you sign up for a room monthly. One of the biggest issues is having a consistent meeting schedule, juggling the day/time makes it hard. You'll never find a time that works for everyone, so just pick one that works for the core participants. I was heavily involved in running several meetings for ~20 years, and we'd regularly have 30-50 people at them. We got space from, at various times: Businesses, Universities, NIST, Hackerspaces. Check around, it can be pretty tough to find space, especially for larger meetings and meetings that need projectors for presentations, but we always were able to find a place.
  - genuine_smiles 2y ago
    > they absolutely will not let you sign up for a room monthl Ours seems to
crummy 2y ago
I live in an area where the low population doesn't support language-specific meetups. So I run the 'Nelson Dev Group' meetup, where we have a short talk (on anything) then a lean-coffee style group discussion. The idea is that if a topic is outside of your interests, there'll be something else for you. It works pretty well and we've been running monthly for about two years now.
- grecy 2y ago
  Huh, I live in the other Nelson on the other side of the world that commonly gets mistaken for yours and just thought "no way there is a dev meetup in Nelson!".
  - crummy 2y ago
    it's your fault autocomplete address fields think I'm in Canada!
  - woleium 2y ago
    The one with Shambhala!
    - gnabgib 2y ago
      Naa, that's Salmo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shambhala_(music_festival) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shambhala_(music_festival) 25th anniversary this year
  - gnabgib 2y ago
    There are 23 places called Nelson in the world (AU, CA, NZ, UK, US).. so one of the others https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson
- sbrother 2y ago
  Nelson, BC?
rexreed 2y ago
Some of my own experience: Meetup.com is an awful platform that now has a value-extraction owner who will just make it even worse, as bad as it is now. Don't use Meetup.com. Second, being a meetup organizer is a thankless task. People have no idea how much work goes into the operation, and this article helps show all of that. But after all the work is done, there's no glory for the organizer. There's no loyalty or appreciation, so if you disappear tomorrow, people will just go somewhere else, and few months later forget you even existed. After running meetups for many years, even big ones, I realized it's not worth it, and I'll never do it again. The same goes for big events, such as conferences, etc. It takes even more work to run and organize those, not to mention the cost, and there's simply very little juice to squeeze.
- mofosyne 2y ago
  Do you know of any alternative we can do to escape the meetup ecosystem? I would have hoped by now we got at least a federated alternative like mastodon.
  - rexreed 2y ago
    There's plenty of alternatives if you're looking for event registration. My preferred at the moment is TicketTailor.com, but there's everything from Eventbrite to Luma to Brown Paper Tickets. Now they won't bring you the community, but you can get community from Discord channels to LinkedIn Groups to X and other social media. Meetup is awful in that they hold your group hostage and you have no way of moving your members, so if you decide no longer to run the Meetup one day, they will let you walk away, but anyone else can just step up and take over the group and do whatever they want. Even worse than Facebook groups.
    - probably_wrong 2y ago
      I find your phrasing of "your group" interesting. I've taken over a Meetup group after the original organizer vanished, and I never felt that the community was mine. I was just the guy keeping the ball rolling, same as the one before and same as the one who took over afterwards. I consider few things as annoying as a single person deciding that a community is done for good.
solraph 2y ago
I've run various meetups in the past, some of which have been successful, some not. The biggest thing I learned was that you if you start it, you have to drive it. If you take a few months off, don't expect anyone else to pick it up and run with it, even if they offer and you give them the keys to do so. Nowadays I don't have time for anything too involved. Instead of meetup.com, I "run" a small private group (which is me with a mailing list and a google calendar invite) of remote IT workers in Inner North Melbourne (AU) who catch up for beers once a month (email in my profile for details) It's surprisingly better in some ways. The group is tighter, and there's far less stress.
neilv 2y ago
> I just said I'd be ordering pizza for anyone interested in staying after work to hack on Linode-related projects. I was willing to pay for the pizza, in part because I didn't want to risk being shut down by asking. I did this (paid out of pocket, for a refreshments draw) while a poor grad student, for a department-wide interest group meeting series that I started. There was some silly barrier getting funding, and I didn't have time for silliness, so I just paid. I made the refreshments theme simply "chocolate", a different form each meeting. Which not only had some novelty appeal, to students accustomed to scavenging free food, but also the cost per person was pretty low. Remarkably good attendance, and people seemed in a good mood.
aag 2y ago
I've run the Bay Area Lisp and Scheme meetings for a few years. I took over from a series of other people who ran it before me. It has been a highly rewarding experience, but since the pandemic, it has been challenging to find people to give talks. If anyone is interested, please get in touch. We'd love to hear about your project. https://balisp.org/ https://balisp.org/ https://balisp.org/videos https://balisp.org/videos
greekanalyst 2y ago
"10-20% actual attendance versus RSVP seems normal." In my experience, the more niche the audience the larger this number.
- Raed667 2y ago
  I saw some people experiment with a small booking fee. 5$ that will get reimused if you attend. The theory is that it would be more of a commitment when you have taken out your wallet.
  - arp242 2y ago
    Counterpoint is that you've paid so you feel less bad for not showing up. The solution is to just accept that some people won't show, and that's okay. Many meetups are fundamentally social events, and sometimes people just aren't in the mood for it on the night. That's okay; even the most extroverted person feels like that sometimes. Especially when "social" means "be social with strangers", which at least double the effort. And what's the alternative? Force people to come against their will with a long face? Aside from being unworkable, that would be silly. Some people get very worked up about this, but IMHO this is like getting worked up over the weather. Perhaps understandable in some cases, but also totally pointless and changes nothing.
- langsoul-com 2y ago
  A count point is that the larger the event, the higher the flake rate. Niche or not. I suppose things become impersonal. When meeting a few friends, you wouldn't not attend unless there's a really good reason. But if it's a friend's party with a decent number of people, such thoughts aren't front of mind any more.
- _tom_ 2y ago
  This maybe driven by your platform. The only way to "bookmark" an event you are interested in on meetup.com is to click "going", so people do that. If there was an "interested" option, the flake rate would go way down.
  - 2y ago
langsoul-com 2y ago
Hackathons, although fun and a great way to work with cool people you wouldn't do normally, is not cheap. A weekend hackathon I attended costed them 50k AUD... Absolutely NUTS. Finding space and the people are the two hardest elements. Space is extremely expensive, thus without sponsors, it'd be quite difficult starting out. So cafes, restaurants or public spaces are the only option. However, much time is spent simply scoping out the places to see what capacity they'd hold. People is the next difficulty. If your city isn't large, you'd probably not find people at all. Advertising is a massive chore, and finding which communities contain your interest groups AND have people in the area is time consuming. Personally, I do not thinking hosting is worth it, unless there's absolutely nothing else nearby. If there's already a book club, just join that and chill. Leave the hosting stress to someone else if possible
- langsoul-com 2y ago
  Meetups are extremely variable in attendance. There's always a minimum flake rate. Spaces like restaurants or cafes do not like it if you'd book for 20 and Max 10 showed up. That's a good way to not be welcome again. So places that can accommodate variable people is better. However, that does mean more time scoping out the capacity at the general time of the meeting. Going there 8am is irrelevant when the meetups at 7pm. The atmosphere and ambience is important as well. A venue with insane echo is atrocious, or one a bit too busy. Too noisy in terms of the crowd or the music speakers are directly above the tables. For conversational meetups, these are make or break things.
  - langsoul-com 2y ago
    So all this time and effort is just to maximise the probability of success. Despite all this, a fucking monsoon hits an hour before your event. Nobody is coming and you'd be there, at the venue, all alone with several tables connected... The most miserable position. And I'm not even started with actually hosting the event, with different personalities, mix between people who know each other and those who don't. You know how 3's a crowd? Well, a crowd becomes a separated tribe in meetups and tend only to really interact between each other... Bruh, the entire point of the Meetup is to meet OTHER people. They could just go out for lunch if they only wanted to chill by themselves. So part of the hosting game is integrating everyone together, whether it's the solo, couple or group. And make sure there's no flame wars as people believe in different shit and have wildly different reactions to what's said. You know the book, how to make friends and influence people. Need another edition for how to meet up and host an event without everything burning up!
andygrunwald 2y ago
I have been organizing a local tech meetup in Düsseldorf, Germany, for the last 11 years. We ran it _every month_ (except for the pandemic). This year (2024), I stopped doing it. I share a lot of comments here. Especially the effort, which is not seen/appreciated. What I don't share is the trouble finding sponsors. Local (tech) companies are often happy to sponsor a room, food, and drinks for the evening. In exchange, they get a slide in the intro speech and the opportunity to present themselves. Recruiters are not welcome. This worked pretty well. If you want this, this is a different question. However, I summed up my learnings from organizing over 90 meetups in two blog posts: * Lessons learned from running a local tech meetup for 11 years (Sunday 14 January 2024) - https://andygrunwald.com/blog/lessons-learned-from-running-a-local-tech-meetup-for-11-years/ https://andygrunwald.com/blog/lessons-learned-from-running-a... * Lessons learned from running a local meetup (Tuesday 25 October 2016) - https://andygrunwald.com/blog/lesson-learned-from-running-a-local-meetup/ https://andygrunwald.com/blog/lesson-learned-from-running-a-...
neilv 2y ago
Are there benefits to Meetup.com, other than one more way to advertise, and maintaining a list of recurring participants? I assembled the `boston-lisp-announce` email list pretty easily (while promising people no noise/BS that would make them regret joining). And I let someone else do the actual hard work of planning and running meetings. No Meetup.com required.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
segmondy 2y ago
Well I definitely feel better running my meetup, I thought it was a failure, but would get 6 people on a bad meet and up to 40 on a good day. I ran it out of my own pocket, getting space was a pain. Most companies wanted to come sell their product, at best they will volunteer to buy pizza & soda, sometimes they didn't. After covid, I couldn't find anyone to take over and I let it lapse. I want to start one, but not sure I have the mental energy to devote to it.

134 points by luu 2y ago

Thanks again to @eatonphil, for the opportunity to talk at Hacker Nights. Online meetings, like the ones Phil organized, were really important between 2020 and 2022.

hackernewds 2y ago
[flagged]
- eatonphil 2y ago
  Astroturfing?
eatonphil 2y ago
Thank you for speaking!

dfex 2y ago

Thanks for this timely post! I have been kicking around the idea of starting a meetup in my city to meet interesting people in my field. Being a freelancer on large projects in my day job, it sometimes feels like I'm out of the loop for long periods of time.

chewxy 2y ago

I've been running GolangSyd for about 8 years now, and previously Sydney Python for about the same amount of time. I found finding sponsors to be one of the hardest things. One of the last Sydney Pythons in which I gave a talk on machine learning had ~250 people attending (PyConAU at that time had roughly as many people I think). So large that the pizza bill was way more than the host (who was the sponsor as well) had anticipated, so we were no longer welcome at that venue. And said host is a well known billion dollar Aussie company. Thankfully for GolangSyd, my cohosts have been extremely talented with finding sponsors. This gives us a lot more opportunity to do weirder things like https://gogogogogo.casa https://gogogogogo.casa . Running meetups are hard work, full stop. On the other hand, I've gotten to know some people very well and some of my best collabs have been thru these meetups. Running a meetup was a way for me to overcome my own reluctance to socialize.

cdogl 2y ago
I remember seeing you at GolandSyd meetups before you took over running them. Nice job!
- chewxy 2y ago
  Haha I remember you and your SaltStack talks at SyPy. Shame you moved to Melbourne. Hey, coffee's better here now (https://www.timeout.com/sydney/news/experts-have-ranked-the-top-cities-for-coffee-and-sydney-came-third-in-the-world-040424 https://www.timeout.com/sydney/news/experts-have-ranked-the-...). Wanna come back?
crummy 2y ago
250 people is an insane number for a meetup!
- rexreed 2y ago
  Not really - the NY Tech Meetup / DC Tech Meetups would regularly have hundreds of attendees, and a few others like the Data Community DC ones had quite a few. Even in those larger numbers, sponsors are flighty and often unappreciative.
  - pcai 2y ago
    > Even in those larger numbers, sponsors are flighty and often unappreciative. Can you elaborate on what you mean? In my experience running meetups, sponsoring is an expensive and thankless activity akin to a donation
    - datadrivenangel 2y ago
      Current organizer of Data Community DC here. It's a lot of work to get a sponsor, and they tend to churn after a year or two when the individual advocate moves on. The best sponsors know the value of long term community engagement. Bad sponsors are more transactional, and want to really see the short term value they get.

agcat 2y ago

This is a great post. Specially the tricks section. I have been organizing Casual Breakfasts for Developers for last 4 months every 2 weeks. And it's been amazing, have learned so many new things.

wcedmisten 2y ago

I recently started a tech meetup [1] in my small city (Charlottesville, VA), and was surprised at the amount of interest! One tip for finding a space, try your public library! Mine has plenty of meeting rooms that can be booked for free. I initially was buying pizzas for the meetup, but they didn't really get eaten, so now I don't bring anything but an HDMI cord. [1] https://cvillecreativecoders.com/ https://cvillecreativecoders.com/

linsomniac 2y ago
>try your public library YMMV, our public library has free meeting space, however they absolutely will not let you sign up for a room monthly. One of the biggest issues is having a consistent meeting schedule, juggling the day/time makes it hard. You'll never find a time that works for everyone, so just pick one that works for the core participants. I was heavily involved in running several meetings for ~20 years, and we'd regularly have 30-50 people at them. We got space from, at various times: Businesses, Universities, NIST, Hackerspaces. Check around, it can be pretty tough to find space, especially for larger meetings and meetings that need projectors for presentations, but we always were able to find a place.
- genuine_smiles 2y ago
  > they absolutely will not let you sign up for a room monthl Ours seems to

crummy 2y ago

I live in an area where the low population doesn't support language-specific meetups. So I run the 'Nelson Dev Group' meetup, where we have a short talk (on anything) then a lean-coffee style group discussion. The idea is that if a topic is outside of your interests, there'll be something else for you. It works pretty well and we've been running monthly for about two years now.

grecy 2y ago
Huh, I live in the other Nelson on the other side of the world that commonly gets mistaken for yours and just thought "no way there is a dev meetup in Nelson!".
- crummy 2y ago
  it's your fault autocomplete address fields think I'm in Canada!
- woleium 2y ago
  The one with Shambhala!
  - gnabgib 2y ago
    Naa, that's Salmo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shambhala_(music_festival) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shambhala_(music_festival) 25th anniversary this year
- gnabgib 2y ago
  There are 23 places called Nelson in the world (AU, CA, NZ, UK, US).. so one of the others https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson
sbrother 2y ago
Nelson, BC?

rexreed 2y ago

Some of my own experience: Meetup.com is an awful platform that now has a value-extraction owner who will just make it even worse, as bad as it is now. Don't use Meetup.com. Second, being a meetup organizer is a thankless task. People have no idea how much work goes into the operation, and this article helps show all of that. But after all the work is done, there's no glory for the organizer. There's no loyalty or appreciation, so if you disappear tomorrow, people will just go somewhere else, and few months later forget you even existed. After running meetups for many years, even big ones, I realized it's not worth it, and I'll never do it again. The same goes for big events, such as conferences, etc. It takes even more work to run and organize those, not to mention the cost, and there's simply very little juice to squeeze.

mofosyne 2y ago
Do you know of any alternative we can do to escape the meetup ecosystem? I would have hoped by now we got at least a federated alternative like mastodon.
- rexreed 2y ago
  There's plenty of alternatives if you're looking for event registration. My preferred at the moment is TicketTailor.com, but there's everything from Eventbrite to Luma to Brown Paper Tickets. Now they won't bring you the community, but you can get community from Discord channels to LinkedIn Groups to X and other social media. Meetup is awful in that they hold your group hostage and you have no way of moving your members, so if you decide no longer to run the Meetup one day, they will let you walk away, but anyone else can just step up and take over the group and do whatever they want. Even worse than Facebook groups.
  - probably_wrong 2y ago
    I find your phrasing of "your group" interesting. I've taken over a Meetup group after the original organizer vanished, and I never felt that the community was mine. I was just the guy keeping the ball rolling, same as the one before and same as the one who took over afterwards. I consider few things as annoying as a single person deciding that a community is done for good.

solraph 2y ago

I've run various meetups in the past, some of which have been successful, some not. The biggest thing I learned was that you if you start it, you have to drive it. If you take a few months off, don't expect anyone else to pick it up and run with it, even if they offer and you give them the keys to do so. Nowadays I don't have time for anything too involved. Instead of meetup.com, I "run" a small private group (which is me with a mailing list and a google calendar invite) of remote IT workers in Inner North Melbourne (AU) who catch up for beers once a month (email in my profile for details) It's surprisingly better in some ways. The group is tighter, and there's far less stress.

neilv 2y ago

> I just said I'd be ordering pizza for anyone interested in staying after work to hack on Linode-related projects. I was willing to pay for the pizza, in part because I didn't want to risk being shut down by asking. I did this (paid out of pocket, for a refreshments draw) while a poor grad student, for a department-wide interest group meeting series that I started. There was some silly barrier getting funding, and I didn't have time for silliness, so I just paid. I made the refreshments theme simply "chocolate", a different form each meeting. Which not only had some novelty appeal, to students accustomed to scavenging free food, but also the cost per person was pretty low. Remarkably good attendance, and people seemed in a good mood.

aag 2y ago

I've run the Bay Area Lisp and Scheme meetings for a few years. I took over from a series of other people who ran it before me. It has been a highly rewarding experience, but since the pandemic, it has been challenging to find people to give talks. If anyone is interested, please get in touch. We'd love to hear about your project. https://balisp.org/ https://balisp.org/ https://balisp.org/videos https://balisp.org/videos

greekanalyst 2y ago

"10-20% actual attendance versus RSVP seems normal." In my experience, the more niche the audience the larger this number.

Raed667 2y ago
I saw some people experiment with a small booking fee. 5$ that will get reimused if you attend. The theory is that it would be more of a commitment when you have taken out your wallet.
- arp242 2y ago
  Counterpoint is that you've paid so you feel less bad for not showing up. The solution is to just accept that some people won't show, and that's okay. Many meetups are fundamentally social events, and sometimes people just aren't in the mood for it on the night. That's okay; even the most extroverted person feels like that sometimes. Especially when "social" means "be social with strangers", which at least double the effort. And what's the alternative? Force people to come against their will with a long face? Aside from being unworkable, that would be silly. Some people get very worked up about this, but IMHO this is like getting worked up over the weather. Perhaps understandable in some cases, but also totally pointless and changes nothing.
langsoul-com 2y ago
A count point is that the larger the event, the higher the flake rate. Niche or not. I suppose things become impersonal. When meeting a few friends, you wouldn't not attend unless there's a really good reason. But if it's a friend's party with a decent number of people, such thoughts aren't front of mind any more.
_tom_ 2y ago
This maybe driven by your platform. The only way to "bookmark" an event you are interested in on meetup.com is to click "going", so people do that. If there was an "interested" option, the flake rate would go way down.
- 2y ago

langsoul-com 2y ago

Hackathons, although fun and a great way to work with cool people you wouldn't do normally, is not cheap. A weekend hackathon I attended costed them 50k AUD... Absolutely NUTS. Finding space and the people are the two hardest elements. Space is extremely expensive, thus without sponsors, it'd be quite difficult starting out. So cafes, restaurants or public spaces are the only option. However, much time is spent simply scoping out the places to see what capacity they'd hold. People is the next difficulty. If your city isn't large, you'd probably not find people at all. Advertising is a massive chore, and finding which communities contain your interest groups AND have people in the area is time consuming. Personally, I do not thinking hosting is worth it, unless there's absolutely nothing else nearby. If there's already a book club, just join that and chill. Leave the hosting stress to someone else if possible

langsoul-com 2y ago
Meetups are extremely variable in attendance. There's always a minimum flake rate. Spaces like restaurants or cafes do not like it if you'd book for 20 and Max 10 showed up. That's a good way to not be welcome again. So places that can accommodate variable people is better. However, that does mean more time scoping out the capacity at the general time of the meeting. Going there 8am is irrelevant when the meetups at 7pm. The atmosphere and ambience is important as well. A venue with insane echo is atrocious, or one a bit too busy. Too noisy in terms of the crowd or the music speakers are directly above the tables. For conversational meetups, these are make or break things.
- langsoul-com 2y ago
  So all this time and effort is just to maximise the probability of success. Despite all this, a fucking monsoon hits an hour before your event. Nobody is coming and you'd be there, at the venue, all alone with several tables connected... The most miserable position. And I'm not even started with actually hosting the event, with different personalities, mix between people who know each other and those who don't. You know how 3's a crowd? Well, a crowd becomes a separated tribe in meetups and tend only to really interact between each other... Bruh, the entire point of the Meetup is to meet OTHER people. They could just go out for lunch if they only wanted to chill by themselves. So part of the hosting game is integrating everyone together, whether it's the solo, couple or group. And make sure there's no flame wars as people believe in different shit and have wildly different reactions to what's said. You know the book, how to make friends and influence people. Need another edition for how to meet up and host an event without everything burning up!

andygrunwald 2y ago

I have been organizing a local tech meetup in Düsseldorf, Germany, for the last 11 years. We ran it _every month_ (except for the pandemic). This year (2024), I stopped doing it. I share a lot of comments here. Especially the effort, which is not seen/appreciated. What I don't share is the trouble finding sponsors. Local (tech) companies are often happy to sponsor a room, food, and drinks for the evening. In exchange, they get a slide in the intro speech and the opportunity to present themselves. Recruiters are not welcome. This worked pretty well. If you want this, this is a different question. However, I summed up my learnings from organizing over 90 meetups in two blog posts: * Lessons learned from running a local tech meetup for 11 years (Sunday 14 January 2024) - https://andygrunwald.com/blog/lessons-learned-from-running-a-local-tech-meetup-for-11-years/ https://andygrunwald.com/blog/lessons-learned-from-running-a... * Lessons learned from running a local meetup (Tuesday 25 October 2016) - https://andygrunwald.com/blog/lesson-learned-from-running-a-local-meetup/ https://andygrunwald.com/blog/lesson-learned-from-running-a-...

neilv 2y ago

Are there benefits to Meetup.com, other than one more way to advertise, and maintaining a list of recurring participants? I assembled the `boston-lisp-announce` email list pretty easily (while promising people no noise/BS that would make them regret joining). And I let someone else do the actual hard work of planning and running meetings. No Meetup.com required.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

segmondy 2y ago

Well I definitely feel better running my meetup, I thought it was a failure, but would get 6 people on a bad meet and up to 40 on a good day. I ran it out of my own pocket, getting space was a pain. Most companies wanted to come sell their product, at best they will volunteer to buy pizza & soda, sometimes they didn't. After covid, I couldn't find anyone to take over and I let it lapse. I want to start one, but not sure I have the mental energy to devote to it.