[HN Gopher] Starting and Running a User Group ___________________________________________________________________ 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_. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2020-06-09 23:01 UTC)