I have been organizing a local tech meetup in Düsseldorf, Germany, for the last 11 years. We ran it _every month_ (except for the pandemic). This year (2024), I stopped doing it.

I share a lot of comments here. Especially the effort, which is not seen/appreciated. What I don't share is the trouble finding sponsors. Local (tech) companies are often happy to sponsor a room, food, and drinks for the evening. In exchange, they get a slide in the intro speech and the opportunity to present themselves. Recruiters are not welcome. This worked pretty well. If you want this, this is a different question.

However, I summed up my learnings from organizing over 90 meetups in two blog posts:

* Lessons learned from running a local tech meetup for 11 years (Sunday 14 January 2024) - https://andygrunwald.com/blog/lessons-learned-from-running-a...

* Lessons learned from running a local meetup (Tuesday 25 October 2016) - https://andygrunwald.com/blog/lesson-learned-from-running-a-...