[HN Gopher] Starting and Running a User Group
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       Starting and Running a User Group
        
       Author : techielass
       Score  : 9 points
       Date   : 2020-06-09 08:42 UTC (14 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.techielass.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.techielass.com)
        
       | patrickdavey wrote:
       | 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!
        
       | bsder wrote:
       | 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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       (page generated 2020-06-09 23:01 UTC)