Why We Need Remote Meetups
Some months ago, while talking with André Pitombeira about meetups in Berlin, I figured out that where I was living had relatively few meetups. As I thought about this, I think many people outside of the major global-technology hubs probably have the same experience.
The idea was not to create more content in the internet! You know, the internet is already full of amazing videos on youtube or tech-sites. The purpose here is to create a community, probably of closely-linked people who are studying/learning something.
I’ve been working remotely from more than one year on various personal and freelance projects, I know how effective a remote environment can be and I think many people would benefit from a remote conference (essentially).
There are a couple close analogs on the Web. Check out:
Some of them are paid services commensurate with their production quality and their need to pay content providers. The idea I had in mind it was something totally free and open source. I’m not saying those other services are bad, I am just proposing an alternative.
Seeing this problem and thinking about potential solutions, I came across meetup.com, a cool website to manage meetups. There a couple meetups in my city and also I can see others meetups in cities around the World. The obvious major issue with Meetups is that these gatherings are constrained to a certain small geography.
Damn it! I don’t want to be limited to my city. I would like to have a kind of remote meetup.
I was looking for people whose common factor was an area of interest, not just a geographic location; Passionate developers who aim to improve their technical skills everyday.
I was looking for people near/far from me who may be interested in learning something. Passionate developers who aiming to improve technical skills everyday.
After that, I did a quick domain search. I found www.remotetalks.com and I felt it was a good name for the project. In my mind, it should not be my project/idea, it should be everyone’s idea. An Open Source project.
In the future, we may expand the concept of a remote talk to something closer to a meetup. So I also purchased www.remotemeetup.com — Perhaps this could be a great use case for virtual reality! So far, I’m just using www.remotetalks.com until I have a better understanding about the requirements/functionalities for a remote meetup.
I can only say thank you for all the friends who helped me, specifically: Iuri Fernandes, Filipe Costa, Marcos Brizeno, Isaac Shapira, João Moura, Kirill Timofeev, Rafael Sales and all the Slack channel people who have helped me privately.
So far we have connected 50 passionate developers and friends from over 8 countries.
Remote Talks can be ideal for developers who find it challenging to go to meetups locally. It can be a great service for professionals and enthusiasts who are seeking to update their skills and broaden their network.
It can be hard to start something new. There are so many apps, services and sites. I’m open to feedback and I want to hear from YOU!
We have completed 4 talks/meetups so far and it was a pleasure! I met a lot of great people and we hope to have a few more over the next couple months.
If you have something in mind and you want to help this project, please join our Slack channel: https://remotetalks.herokuapp.com/ or send an email to franzejr@remotemeetup.com and it will be a pleasure talk with you!!
