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:
This lib is maintained, still a bit out of date and has a few flaws. Like using the same client for JIRA Cloud and JIRA OnPremise (different APIs).
But most of the flaws have been evolved over time, while Atlassian switched strategies.
I am preparing a roadmap for v2 where I implement a lot of reliability features, like context support, but also separate APIs for OnPremise and Cloud and easier access for custom fields.
Watch the github repo if you want to stay up to date.
Author of https://github.com/andygrunwald/go-jira here:
This lib is maintained, still a bit out of date and has a few flaws. Like using the same client for JIRA Cloud and JIRA OnPremise (different APIs).
But most of the flaws have been evolved over time, while Atlassian switched strategies.
I am preparing a roadmap for v2 where I implement a lot of reliability features, like context support, but also separate APIs for OnPremise and Cloud and easier access for custom fields.
Watch the github repo if you want to stay up to date.
I am a huge fan of Go. My question here would be more like: Is this comparable? A lot of people outside of google contribute to Go.
Are similar standards applied to the Go Review Process like to internally created software?
A Question that came up while reading: What happens when I start with collecting all the ideas and too many ideas are coming up? Do I need to put a particular focus on managing these ideas? How to treat the team fairly when everyone comes with an idea?
Due to my experience you are in a very lucky position if there are too many good ideas popping up in your team. Of course, you also have to manage them and do some prioritization, in the best case together we the team to get the buy in and to find the most promising projects you want to work on. Maybe you also have to align them with company goals but so far, I haven't encountered a situation when ideas were impeding the business.
I am an organizer of a Web Engineering Meetup in Düsseldorf, Germany, for > 6 years (https://www.meetup.com/Web-Engineering-Duesseldorf/). We run the event every month, with 50 up to 90 people. Indeed, our no-show rate is something between 40% and 50%. This is heavy, but we know it and calculate it in.
We run the complete meetup non-profit. Never put a euro in. Never got a euro out — everything based on sponsors. Our motivation is to learn, share knowledge, and have fun together. And we want to make it accessible for everyone to learn about web engineering.
Switching to the new cost model will reduce the no-show rate, but makes it 1000% times less accessible. In my opinion, Meetup.com is creating a higher barrier to enter a community. If we, the organizers, would pay for the attendees, we would pay 100$ up to 180$ every month. We have no interest to afford this.
Furthermore, what I don't get: Meetup is charging a lot of money for thousands of groups. The web platform is stale for>2 years. The last major feature was a facelift in design. But no feature that helps the organizers or users. The iOS app had some releases, but the app is far from a great UX. Flaky everywhere. I ask myself: What is this company doing? Where does all the money go?
Friends who run similar groups are thinking already to move away. Many people from the US think the same.
It's also going to make it more likely companies that want to market to developers will pay to have a lot of 'meetups' that are really mini conferences for that company w/ lots of sales and marketing pitching the attendees
There’s https://github.com/phoet/on_ruby which is the software used by a few ruby meetups in Berlin and other cities. It’s a bit bare-bones but relatively simple to host.
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-...