
Starting and Running a User Group - techielass
https://www.techielass.com/starting-and-running-a-user-group
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patrickdavey
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.

Good luck to anyone running a meetup!

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bsder
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_.

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orev
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.

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oicu812
I'm disappointed this article didn't mention the MeetUp or Eventbrite sites,
which are the two major sites that are used to organize user groups.

It's naive to think most user groups could avoid using one of these sites.

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techielass
Thanks for the feedback, I completely forgot to include that but have now
amended the blog. :)

