The Sydney Tech Meetup is now part of TechSydney
This morning I sent an email to the Sydney Tech Meetup group (now known as the TechSydney Meetup)letting them know that after 13 years of running the group, I was handing organisation duties over to TechSydney.
Below is the text of that email. I’m certain that it is far better for the community and the meetup itself to go down this path so am looking forward to seeing what comes of the change.
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All,
An important and, I think, exciting announcement about the future of the Sydney Tech Meetup.
tl;dr After 13 years, we’re officially handing the reigns of this Meetup over to TechSydney. This is a good thing for this group and the Startup community more generally. NB: There has been no passing of private or personal information (e.g. email address) over to TechSydney as part of the handover as Meetup.com holds your account details, not the individual meetup groups.
First announcements to come soon…
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From our first meetup in 2007 the Sydney Tech Meetup quickly became an important component of the Sydney startup community. The meetup was driven by one goal — to make the Sydney startup community stronger. Part of that was running events that helped members of the community connect and part of that was supporting other activities with similar goals.
For many people the Sydney Tech Meetup was their introduction to the startup community and the first time they met other people like them and who understood them. Over the years more events popped up, co-working spaces started to take over the role of being the meeting point for those interested in startups and an ever-growing community meant that more and more niche meetups began to spring up and thrive.
This was all awesome but in the process of decentralising we missed out on some of the things that made the Sydney Tech Meetup so valuable early on:
- There were less informal interactions between people from different communities
- For those looking to engage with the community it became harder to know where to start
In 2016 a number of tech community members and I worked to create TechSydney to, amongst other things, take on the role of connecting those decentralised parts of the Sydney tech community. A key part of this was to support and supplement existing activities as part of our focus on helping to make Sydney a world-class tech hub. Events and meetups, whether new or existing, are an integral part of those activities.
In speaking with TechSydney Director Fleur Brown about their plans for setting up a new Meetup Group it dawned on me that this meetup has an existing audience, many of whom have experienced the benefit of connection the Sydney Tech Meetup had provided and that TechSydney was looking to provide through their group.
With that in mind, I’ve now handed the organisation of the Sydney Tech Meetup over to TechSydney.
*** Please note that Meetup.com holds your email address and account information, not the specific meetup groups, so there has been no passing of personal or private information over to TechSydney as part of this change.***
There has been a minor name change, it is now the TechSydney Meetup, but the most noticeable difference will be that the Meetup will be active again and this group, that was once an integral part of the Sydney tech community will thrive again — hopefully for another 13 years…or more :)
Stay tuned for the first event announcements coming out soon and if you have any events you’d like promoted through the meetup please feel free to contact Fleur on [address removed]
Kim.
