Ask HN: How do you increase the connections in your community? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you increase the connections in your community?

30 pointseloycoto6 comments

Hello!

Do anyone have a tip about growing communities? Or how to increase the connections between the community?

Vigo (North-west of Spain) is a small city with a 300K population, and we get quite impressive large tech community, nowadays our monthly meetups are around 70 attendees and more than 150 different persons that attend at least two meetups.

Make this group was pretty easy, I use to call to few R&D companies in the town per each meetup and explained the idea, as soon one employee attend to one of our meetups, they use to repeat. The meetups are always full (limited space) and in the last meetup I did some research, and we have more 34 companies represented, that it's a good number regarding R&D businesses in the town.

These talks are running ok, but I tried to make more connections across the attendees, for future R&D projects, and share more knowledge outside the meetup. But after each meetup, we use to go to do some networking, but always are the groups of the same 3-4 guys that are already friends. So no new networking across them.

We've run these meetups for a year, and we are focused in IoT and some industrial technology(Best fit for the town). All the people ask me for things, new projects, etc.. but no to other people into the group.

- How can I improve this? Does it happen this in another country? is it only in Galician context? How do you increase the feedback in the meetups? Any idea?

It's quite crazy, but now I have the feeling that all related with this meetup is routed by me, and I want to have a fully distributed people, any idea how can I improve this?

Best Regards and thanks!

I'm not sure if you've ever tried this, but years ago, I was part of a group that operated like this:

a.) Meet in a meeting room for a talk about some topic. b.) After the talk, anyone interested would walk over to a pub for some drinks and conversations.

We noticed roughly the same thing that you noticed - we'd lose roughly 90% of our attendees between step a and b. So, we decided to switch things up a little bit and started meeting in a pub. A local watering hole had a private room that they'd make available to us once a month. Then, we'd arrange for some delicious smelling appetizers to be delivered right when the educational portion of the evening was ending...

Between delivering appetizers and staying in the same venue, we managed to change things around and we ended up having a majority of people stick around for at least a cup of coffee and some food after.

Being Galicia, I'm sure the delicious food part can be easily accomplished :)

Never thought about that. I'll check, thanks!

Hello from Barcelona!

I understand that Barcelona is a much bigger city with an even bigger tech community but given that we catalans are incredibly closed when it comes to our circles of friends I think I can share a couple of things that are working out here.

- We have a Slack for tech people in the city. This is really bringing the community together, even when the used techs are different. We used to have (and still) different slacks by tech / meetup community etc but we are slowly bringing them together.

- Some of the events/meetups allow people to have 1min presentations on what they do/need etc. Because most of the events involve beer in the end (not only the techie ones!) these 1min intros serve as a good excuse to break the ice when the beer time comes. It's way easier to start a convo with a stranger if you have this 1min of info than if you've got nothing. "Heyyy!! So you are doing a drone that brings medicines to old people, this is great I've been working on a drone that..." You get what I mean.

- It is incredibly important that the "drinks/networking" take part on the same place where the events are held.

I think people is shy in general in these types of events, especially techies, but obviously have a lot to talk about and share, so I think we just need to find ways of sparking conversations.

We have a local python Meetup. Here we have a half an hour break between talks for tea and snacks. So that's half an hour you need to somehow spend and leads to some interesting conversations. Just before we break, the organizer reads out Names of attendees and their interests/specializations (like, Ms. A - Django, Mr. X - databases, Mr.Y - systems programming, Ms. Z - machine learning, etc) while the respective person stands up. None of us are experts but we may know a bit more in that field compared to the person sitting next to us. The floor is also open to others who wish to make their interests known. Sometimes we are lucky to have some prof or real experts in too.It takes barely 2 mins, but serves as a good conversation starter for the next 30 mins. The conversation also tends to continue after the meetup is over.

I helped found www.onesalon.org , and from that have experience building global community. Happy to chat if you'd like. Username at gmail dot com

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