Running a successful(ish) meetup

Fair warning — my writing style has been, at best, charitably described as Whimsical, I refuse to subscribe to the “buzzfeed” style of bullet point reductive reasoning. So buckle in and grab a coffee/tea/beer/random juice extract.
This morning I got into the office with my cup of coffee and settled to go through my morning routine — greet colleagues, banter a little (I’m still very new in my role so scaling it back from “full on banter James”), boot up computer (still getting used to a MS machine), check emails, prioritise the morning, review job applications that have come in overnight and set up calls.
Then I check my Linkedin — that wonderful holy grail of networking heaven, the “Personal Coaches” repeating the same tired (inaccurate) rags-to-riches stories, the posts with background pictures of beach sunsets, strange yoga poses that look suspiciously like a form of torture with thoroughly unhelpful repetitive statements such as “Believe in yourself” along with dubious quotations attributed to business leaders that I very much doubt have spent more than 30 minutes (total) glancing at these blue and white pages, probably wondering how their name was taken so tangentially in vain.
I’m alerted to a number of notifications, to which my immediate reaction is fear — have I made a comment that’s been taken the wrong way? Am I now a public disgrace? Has someone spotted a grammar error on a Job Description I’ve written? Am I about to become the latest Recruiter pariah to all and sundry?
Nope, not this time — I’ve had a number of people congratulate me on two years of co-organising node ninjas.
node ninjas (yeah, we’re still thinking about the name) was founded in 2012 by Romain Prieto– one of the first to bring node.js to Sydney in a commercial capacity and had grown the fledgling group from 9 attendees to 40. Unfortunately he just didn’t have the time to run it on his own so I volunteered to help. We now have a membership of 2500 and regular attendee numbers of over 110 every month.
I’m not known as the most introspective or sensitive of folks, but I feel the need to reflect on a few lessons that I’ve learned, real ones. Every day I see new meetups being formed, more gatherings of like-minded people and I’m often asked, how do you run a successful meetup? How do you get speakers? How do you get sponsors? Do you make money off this? You should make money off this! I’ll try and answer some of these and more without getting too into the usual navel gazing of a Linkedin article.
Know why you’re doing it.
I first got involved with node ninjas working at Tabcorp with Romain, we were hiring node developers and, at the time, were one of the only ones in Sydney doing so. Hiring is hard. Hiring a skillset where there’s two people outside your company in your location with the skills to do the job is ridiculously hard. I felt node ninjas would give me a chance to get inside the community, learn more and also get to know people who could be candidates.
How wrong I was. Technology communities are exactly that. Communities, disparate people of different backgrounds, coming together for a common purpose. This community was about improving knowledge of node and javascript as a whole — jobs are a part of that, but a small part. I had to change my mindset. My personal career success had to take a backseat and become a bi-product of being a contributor to this new community.
You may want to set up a meetup for a new technology or interest, but don’t do it for personal profit. This may come, but the primary reason is you have passion. I was lucky, I found mine: to actually contribute to open source development, not through code, but through taking the time consuming stuff away from those who actually do the hard stuff that I could never do. It’s got to the point now where I won’t work for a business that refuses to allow their engineers to open source non IP related technologies. It helps if you know this before you begin.
Find your role
In any community, everyone has a part to play. If you’re a co-organiser, your role is to help run the meetup, but you have more to offer. Free advice, free introductions and free help. These are all aspects that are not just things you can offer, but that you should.
Listen to the community
In my experience, software engineers are amongst the most opinionated bunch of professionals in the world. Ask a yes/no question and you will discover that there are still 24 possible answers. Here’s the thing though — don’t dismiss these points of view, they’re all valid:
“I’m learning node, but I feel like all the talks are over my head”
Lesson learned: We’re not catering to all parts of our community: juniors and those transferring their skills are feeling left out and leaving the meetup disheartened.
Solution: Encourage more entry level talks, focus on a scale of difficulty so the talks at the higher end of complexity are after more accessible talks.
“I’m uncomfortable with the business nature/privacy policy/news article about the sponsor”
Lesson learned: Everyone has the right to their views and opinions and we as organisers need to take on the need for diversity within the community.
Solution: Widen the usual sponsors and locations, encourage other users of node to host the meetup. This allowed us to broaden the appeal, while still acknowledging the sponsors that supported and continue to support us. Run the meetup agnostically. No matter who we work for — on that evening, we’re only representing the community.
Your speakers, sponsors and attendees all come from the community. The community is what will determine the success/failure of a meetup. They will at times move between these three pillars.
Plan
Yeah… I’m crap at planning. My unofficial motto since childhood has been “no rush, in the nick of time will do.” Sadly, that doesn’t work so well with meetups: Saying you’re going to run a Christmas extravaganza and realising you haven’t even thought of what the quiz questions or prize will be until 4 days before isn’t a great idea.
Even something as simple as having the right A/V adaptors will become a vital question. You can have every single mini display/HDMI adaptor under the sun, but someone WILL turn up with a random linux distro with exotic drivers and require a firewire connection. Also, make sure you have spare batteries for the microphone, having it die as you get to a punchline is distressing.
Hosts will drop out at the last minute, pizza will arrive late and at times you will run out of beer. You need to plan for this. Sometimes there is nothing you can do, there’s no backup and you have to cancel at the last minute. Be honest, tell everyone what happened, why and what you’re going to do about it in the future.
Be realistic on numbers
Not everyone will turn up. Despite the scary looking eleventymillion people that have said they will turn up to your host’s venue, you can usually count on around 2/3rds actually arriving. It’s a rule of thumb that holds pretty true. Other meetups deal with this by only opening up sign up for a short window close to the event and capping the numbers, we decided not to do this and it seems to have worked out. Trial and error, your mileage may vary.
Factor in three slices of pizza and two drinks per person (plus 3 for co-organisers — it’s thirsty work), keep a margin of error — I’ve never seen leftover pizza at a meetup and if you do? Give it to the homeless on the way home.
Accept help
You can’t do this on your own — speakers alone are difficult to find, many feel their speaking skills are not good enough, their slides lack punch, the topic is boring and redundant. Many need to be encouraged, coached and you need relationships to do this.
Romain and I could not have got this going to the scale it has without the help of Jess, Tanya, Sean and James and we will be eternally thankful to them.
Don’t handle money
Many have different views on this, however, I personally think that if you’re running an open source meetup, you need to abide by that ethos. Handling money requires transparency in the form of open books, rigorous bookkeeping, Excel spreadsheets, setting up companies, ABNs, accountants, the loss of one’s soul. OK the last one is a bit overblown, but I am notoriously crap at paperwork and I’d rather not have the question of impropriety raised. I know some that do handle money and do it well. I have tremendous respect for them, I couldn’t do it.
Don’t get personal
You will get criticised, your motives will be questioned, people will try and set up meetups that overlap with yours, you will screw up your introductions, that ever so funny ice breaker you’ve been thinking about all month and giggling to yourself about will bomb.
Organising developers can be a lot like herding cats (if you’re a dev that disagrees with this — look at your slack channel for the last time anyone tried to get any form of consensus), be patient and decide on what needs to be done, then do it. You’re never going to please everyone.
Remember why you’re doing this, remember your passion (ugh, navel gazing much?).
Enjoy it
Why would you give up your evenings every month, hours of your time in sourcing, arranging talks, packing up chairs until 11pm, arbitrating on hosts, begging for new hosts, scrabbling around at the last second to find a new speaker? You need to enjoy it, you need to love being part of something.
So after helping to run node ninjas for two years, what have I learned?
My pool of prospective candidates have become friends, I’ve learned more about technology as a whole and the way open source not only works, but is supposed to work, I’ve met industry legends, found totally new mentors who don’t even realise they’re educating me and encouraging me every day. I don’t even hire javascript anymore. This has become fun.
Technology in Sydney is booming, the collaboration between enterprise, medium sized businesses and startups is unlike anywhere else I’ve been. Our community of engineers and technologists hails from all over the world but that Australian tradition of “mateship” is alive and well. I’ve seen people get their first jobs in Australia, find development partners, get extra income for working in their own time, contributors have volunteered time to help with a Masters Thesis and most importantly, I’ve seen attendees gain the confidence to share their knowledge and experience with everyone else.
Lastly thank you to everyone that has helped, given advice and sponsored us. Thoughtworks, Tabcorp Digital, Nine Digital, Cammy, Lux Group and SafetyCultureare all fantastic contributors and employers, you should totally look them up.
Lastly, thanks to everyone that has, does and will turn up to the meetup. You ARE the community and you ARE what makes it work.
So, should you do it? Hell yes.
node ninjas runs on the first Thursday of every month and you can sign up for updates on meetup.com
