Daniel Rotter

Posted on Nov 8 • Originally published at danielrotter.at

Don't be shy, start your own meetup!

#meetup

Some time ago I stumbled upon this mastodon post by Josh Goldberg about starting a meetup, which – as a meetup founder and organizer myself – I found quite interesting. But the reason for that was not that I recognized so many similarities, actually for the exact opposite reason: My experience with starting and continuing to run our VlbgWebDev meetup was completely different, mostly because I felt it is much less work than Josh made it sound.

I think the main reason for these different paths is the area in which these meetups take place. Josh's Boston TS Club takes place in Boston with a population of almost 5 million in its metropolitan area. My guess is that all kind of (developer) meetups were already existing and running for quite a time, given their huge number of potential organizers and attendees. In comparison, the "Vlbg" part in our meetup stands for Vorarlberg, which is the westernmost state of Austria. It only has about 400 thousand inhabitants with Dornbirn being the biggest city, which recently has reached a population of 50 thousand.

When I saw Josh's post I immediately described my experience starting a meetup, but I had the feeling that this would warrant its own blog post. So in the next few lines I like to described that in more detail.

The inspiration

Back in 2013 I spent my exchange semester in Copenhagen, Denmark. During that time I attended CopenhagenJS a few times. I really liked the experience and thought that it was a pity that nothing like that existed back at home. I have been told that there was a regulars' table called "Online Stammtisch Vorarlberg", but it was not very active at the time anymore and the format was also very different from e.g. CopenhagenJS.

After returning from my exchange semester I started working at MASSIVE ART and told my colleagues about CopenhagenJS. Especially Thomas Schedler motivated me to start a meetup in Vorarlberg and our employer MASSIVE ART promised to support us by providing a venue for the meetups.

The topic

The number one question was the topic of the meetup. We definitely wanted to gather the web development community from the area, so it had to be something web development related. At MASSIVE ART we mainly used PHP and JavaScript, but from what we knew from other companies in the area we were afraid that doing a PHP or JavaScript meetup would attract too few developers to reach a critical mass. We then settled for web development as a topic, since we felt that there might be enough people being interested in that topic and interested people would be willing to learn a bit about the concept of languages they are not using in there everyday's work. I still think that this is the sweet spot between being too narrow (e.g. focusing a language) and too broad (e.g. just a development meetup). Until today we use that topic, but we try to use it as liberally as possible, i.e. any topic that a web developer might be in touch with is allowed, which includes web technologies like HTML, CSS and JavaScript directly, but also databases, server-side programming using any language, logging, APIs, and nowadays also artificial intelligence.

I think a relatively broad topic like ours only works in not so urban areas, since – even though it goes against their cliché – developers like to talk to other fellow developers. However, if there are more specific meetups meeting their interests better, they are likely going to visit those instead of the very generic one. And the likelyhood for that increases with the number of people living in the area.

The format

After deciding on the topic we had to define the format of a meetup. We drew a lot of inspiration from CopenhagenJS and set it up like the following:

The meetup takes place on the second tuesday of each month
The venue is provided by a host that changes from month to month (with MASSIVE ART being the backup)
The drinks are also provided by the host
There will be two talks (lasting for someting between 15 and 60 minutes) for each meetup

Some of this things changed a bit over time (e.g. the meetup is happening on the third wednesday now and hosts also started to provide food), but mostly this is how it works for us until today. Since some time ago we also have a summer break (July and August), because usually these are not the best attended meetups, which should not be a big surprise given that's the holiday season. For similar reasons we started not doing a "real" meetup in December, instead we go to the local Christmas market.

The first meetup

I guess this is the most tricky part, given that you usually do not have any visibility at that point (unless you are a well-known figure in the industry). In order to match our format we needed two speakers, so that was our first goal. Luckily, Erfan Ebrahimnia was working at MASSIVE ART at the time, and volunteered to have a talk about Grunt. Additionally, we have tweeted (yes, I did that at the time) to find another speaker, to which Christoph Klocker responded to suggest doing a talk about Sass. And yes, both of these topics were cutting edge back then!

After finding some speakers we were able to set a date: the 10th of December 2013. A few weeks in advance I started doing a few Google searches to find some companies doing web development in the area and sent emails consisting of just a few lines explaining what the goal of our meetup was (mainly learning and networking) and some event information (where, when, and the talks). The email also included a link to our Lanyrd page, on which interested people can register for the event. Since most email addresses I found on the world wide web were some generic company contact addresses, I also asked to forward that email to their developers.

To my surprise 25 developers showed up, which is a very good number for doing something out of the blue! The talks were nice and many people also stayed for the networking afterwards. In my opinion the first meetup was a real success and motivated me to continue running the meetup. The most important trait for a meetup organizer after the first successful (or even not so successful) meetup is persistence. Having a fixed date like the second tuesday of every month really helps with that. If you are being successful the pool of people knowing about the meetup will definitely grow, because attendees will tell their friends and co-workers about it.

The rest of this article will explain how we kept the meetup going.

The organizers

Currently I am organizing the meetup with Philip Heimböck, in the past Johannes Moser, and the previously mentioned Thomas Schedler were also co-organizers.

It would be nice to have a bigger team, but all attempts to achieve that have not lead anywhere until now. I would say even doing it alone would be worth it, although the community might not survive if that single person gives up. But even if that happens it is better to have had a meetup than it would never have happened. And who knows, maybe you get to know some regular meetup visitor who steps up helping with the organization.

I have heard about other meetup organizers doing a lot, starting from fund raising, printing merchandise, recording videos, organize catering, etc. All we do is finding hosts and speakers (more on that later), add the monthly event to meetup.com, and announce the meetup on our LinkedIn group and a Slack channel. I don't track time, but it really does not feel like a lot, my guess would be that I am spending less than 4 hours a month organizing. So if you are afraid that organizing a meetup is a lot of work, trust me if I tell you it does not have to be. Maybe the meetup would be more successful if we put more effort into this, but since we are not getting paid for that the way it is currently going totally works for me.

The audience

Our audience varies stark. We've had all kind of numbers starting from 3 up to 70 attendees for a single meetup, and I would say something between 20 and 30 attendees is the average. We have fairly regular visitors and some people only showing up if they are interested in one of the talks. The biggest factors regarding the size of the audience are most likely the topic of the talks (I guess you know which topics are currently hyped) and the venue (how many of the employees stay for the meetup and usually more people also show up out of curiousity if a company moved into a new office).

Having people attending your meetup is kind of the reward for organizing it, but it still should not be overvalued. Of course, if every meetup only has a low one-digit number of attendees I would probably lose the motiviation to organize it, but at the same time I do not need to have over 50 people at every meetup to keep going.

Something interesting we have observed is that after the pandemic (or at least after the lockdowns) the number of attendees increased and stayed on a high level. I guess people are tired of sitting in video calls all day, and are happy to make some real connections at a meetup, even if it is not within business hours.

The speakers

Getting speakers is probably one of the hardest parts. There are not loads of people who like to talk in public, and sometimes it feels to me like there are even less of them among developers. Especially at the beginning we often had the same few speakers, and sometime I also had to chip in myself. I have also heard similar things from organizers of other meetup groups.

However, the situation improved quite a bit for a while, leading to a potential speaker having to wait for over an entire year from suggesting a topic to me to actually presenting it. The cause for this was two-fold: First, there were just many people suggesting topics at the same time coincidentally. But the second cause constantly helps us with finding speakers: Companies realized that if they only host and do not provide a talk, it looks to the audience like they do not have any interesting work, making them less attractive in the eyes of potential new hires (because at least on reason companies do this to improve their reputation and in turn have an easier time to find new employees). So it became way more accustom that the company hosting provides at least one and sometimes even two talks. They still run the topics by the organization team, which ensures that the topics are interesting and at least helps avoiding having talks which are only about presenting the company.

At the beginning we sometimes only had one talk, because we did not find enough speakers. Then it got a bit better, and later we sometimes had no talk for a meetup at all. Then we started to think about using alternative ways of providing some learnings. Some things we did when we had no talk at hand were:

Code golf
Code katas
Public code reviews
Watch a recorded conference talk
Group discussions
Attendees showing their setup

The code golf meetup (which is about solving a problem with as little source code as possible) was not the best visited one, but it certainly was one of the more fun ones. People were really eager in presenting their solutions and had a good time trying out stuff you probably would not do when writing an application you have to maintain for a longer time.

Once we also had a public code review, where a solo developer showed what they have implemented and actively asked for feedback, which I enjoyed as well. The "Show your setup" sessions also were interesting, since people seem to have an easier time to just quickly present a small interesting tool.

The others did not work that well for us, but I guess if you have no speakers they would also be okay. I think it is still better to have a meetup with such alternative sessions than skipping the meetup altogether (see my point about persistence above).

The hosts

As mentioned in the section about the first meetup, the easiest way to get started is to host at your employer's office (assuming you are employed). We did not ask for much from the hosts at the beginning, it was only allowing people to be in the office, have some screen or projector available, and provide some drinks. In my case MASSIVE ART was kind enough to host the first five meetups.

After some time attendees started offering to suggest hosting at their office (or their employer's office), so slowly we expanded the number of hosts. Some of these companies are my go-tos nowadays, in case nothing comes up by itself, and (I think) they happily host the meetup whenever I ask them. I just want to give them a quick shout out starting with the companies hosting the meetup most often:

As you can see, there are quite a few! I did not expect that when I have started this. But companies seem to like give back to the community.

Over the years the expectation of what a host provides also shifted a bit. Today we also expect them to provide some food, so that nobody has to leave the meetup hungry. Also, as mentioned before, they often convince some of their employees to do a talk, which makes organization also much easier for us.

Your turn!

This is the most important advice in this article: If there is no meetup for a certain topic in your area, then do not be afraid to start one! All it needs is to reach out to a few companies via email or get in touch with developers in your area via platform like LinkedIn (I guess that makes it even easier compared to when I started).

The worst thing that can happen is that you stop organizing after a few tries, because nobody shows up. So as said, nothing to be afraid of.

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