Starting and Running a User Group

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!

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.

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.