 All right, hello, Guruko. Thanks for welcoming me back. So let's get right into it. I live two blocks from here. It's my favorite conference, not just for that reason, but that's pretty awesome. I'm a dad, a husband. I love Beach Volleyball. I run Yap and Yap Labs here in New York, and I have a nifty collection of Guruko shirts, adding another awesome one this year. So today, we're going to talk about tips and tricks for growing a tech community in New York City. These apply to other cities as well, but I'm going to speak from experience. Most of the ideas that I've put to the test growing Ember NYC. So what's so special about Ember NYC? Why are these creds, credentials, that are worth looking at? We've had 1,100 members now. We've been around a little over two years. We've run 49 events in that time. Typically, we run one evening of talks each month, and then two smaller events that we call Hacker Hours. We also have a pretty awesome mascot. This was this version of Ember Tomster. The mascot was designed by Samantha Penner. But more importantly, I think the way to understand what makes Ember NYC special is how people feel about it, what they say about it. So Ember is the most informative meetup that I've ever been to. It's an incredible community of friendly and supportive Ember Años, made up that term. It's a genuine sharing environment where people actually want to help. Corey, one of the group organizers, called this consistently one of the best and most interesting meetups that he's attended. And finally, somebody wrote, this is all from meetup.com. This meetup has literally changed my life. So those are pretty awesome. So let's share some of the things that I've learned. These are the top 10 tips for growing a great tech community. I won't be as funny as Letterman's top 10 probably, but what can I do? So tip number 10 is to think like a promoter. One of the tricks here is building anticipation with out-of-town speakers. The idea of an out-of-town speaker automatically engages people's kind of fear of missing out. It's not somebody that you're going to be able to see next month or next week. Spreading awareness through joint events with other meetups gives both meetups additional exposure. And so this can be super useful. Sometimes that's great for us for a broader JavaScript meetup in combination with a more niche thing like Ember. Being careful about not to schedule against competitive meetups. And by competitive, I just mean things, other meetups that the people that are attending your meetup also want to attend. And that's just to be respectful for their schedules. So these are great ways to start or restart things with a bang. Tip number nine is nurturing your speakers. So like in startups or any kind of thing in the tech space these days, you've got to always be recruiting. In this case, always be recruiting speakers. We run at our evenings of talks. We do two 30-minute talks and then three lightning talks, kind of like the one I'm doing right now. And lightning talks at a meetup are a great venue for people to have their first talk ever in their career. It's relatively low pressure, not too much on the line. And so you can often convince people who you know have a lot to offer to come and try that. I always offer to review people's slides and outlines just if they send it to me a few days in advance. I'll give them some feedback, which both makes them feel supportive that they're not in this alone, but also is going to help to make the content better for your users. And then finally, don't forget after the talk to give feedback to folks and just let them know, hey, you did a good job. This is a big step for a lot of people who have never spoken in front of a group before. Tip number eight is use of the net. This should be pretty obvious for us. But yeah, we didn't always have Twitter, meetup, YouTube. In fact, in the early days of MYCRB, this was the very first site that I could find on the webarchive.org. We were trying to figure out what Ruby Wiki to use for the site. Eventually, we selected one. I don't know which one it was. Things got a little bit better. But finally, we got to meetup.com. And now MYCRB has over 3,000 members and has run quite well. Thanks to the volunteer efforts from Lee Nussbaum. At our meetup, we've been recording the talks every month. And at first, I didn't know what this was going to do. But what I've found is that everywhere that I travel around the country and talking about Ember or working with clients, people say, thank you so much for posting the talks every month. I watch them regularly. And even some people here in New York who have scheduled conflicts and can't get to it really appreciate this. It's also awesome for your speakers to have the additional exposure and have their content live on just aside from that one night. Tip number seven is partnering with venues. And I think the key thing in my experience in having a good relationship with venues is to find a win-win relationship where the venue wants exposure in the community for some reason. Typically, that's for recruiting. But they are in line with the ethos of the community that you're trying to create. So they're not being overly aggressive in recruiting. And so once you can find those places, I think the key things you're looking for are places that it's got AV. You don't want to have to bring in your own AV equipment and food and drink, which we'll talk about in a second. In New York City, I really prefer buildings that don't have big security processes so that if you can find that even better. And take care of the relationship. The key currency that you have as a meetup organizer, as a tech organizer, is exposure. And so thanking your sponsors publicly frequently is great. So we could not do what we do without Pivotal Labs, Moveable Link, and Simple Reach. See what I did there? Tip number six, be welcoming. That means that you're or somebody on your team is the MC that you're connecting people. You're introducing job seekers to people who are hiring. That will make you a very well-loved person in the community. Remembering people's names using some of Chris Hunt's techniques, I think is a good idea. What I like to do is in between speakers doing ice breakers, where I'll ask everybody to find somebody they don't know, learn something about them, and how they're using Ember, and then call on somebody to share that back with a group. The last thing is probably not something that you've seen at many meetups, but we've done, and it's been pretty awesome, which is to play games. We started with Ember Jeopardy, and it started off with just some questions on a blue screen with the Emberty theme song. And then that inspired somebody in the Meetup Alex match near to create an open-source Jeopardy implementation in Ember, which we then used. And we've done several other game show varieties as well. I think the $64,000 pyramid was one. We haven't tried The Bachelor or Dating Game yet, but maybe that's in the future. Tip number five is about food and drink. And I can't say that this is very basic, but it's kind of key from a nursing infant to a family around a table. Food and drink is how we bond. And so you can't really talk about food and drink and tech events without talking about beer and pizza. And we've tried experimenting with something besides pizza, but the fact is that pizza, especially in New York City, is simply the most efficient and effective way to feed a large group of people that you can come up with. Beer is a little bit trickier. There's people who don't want to be in an environment around alcohol, which I totally respect. That said, there is also something very powerful about the event, what I call the event after the event. It's going out after the event to a local establishment, spending time together, just getting to know each other, again, bonding, which you're really trying to create is not anything so tied to your technology as you're creating a community of people who know each other, trust each other, and can work together. Tip number four is share the work. It's really easy to get burnt out trying to do all this yourself, which is a great reason to get help, but that's actually not the key reason. The key reason is that you want to provide a space for other people in the community to step up, to contribute themselves, and to become leaders in the community. So definitely delegate liberally. If somebody volunteers, don't say, yeah, I'll come up with something. Let them step up and be helpful. Tip number three is I call trumpeter values for lack of a better term. When I joined the Ruby community back in 2005, 2006, I really loved the vibe. There was no corporate dictator, there was no son, no Microsoft kind of telling us what to do, and there was this acronym that we always talked about at those early meetups, minus one, MOTS, you can hear a MOTS creator, Ruby is nice and so we are nice. And I always thought about that and still think about it today when I talk about things like why do we do hacker hours? And we do these smaller events because that's where bonding can happen. That's where we can welcome new people in the community and help them learn Ember, which I say is a value of our community. And in the beginning I say that because that's my vision for what I would like our community to be like, but over time that becomes what your community is like and it becomes the truth. Tip number two is consistency wins. Month in, month out, keep going, you'll grow, you'll attract other folks to help, even if it's slow going in the beginning. And my favorite hack for new meetup organizers is always make sure that you schedule the next meetup on the calendar before the one that's about to happen. If you do that simple thing, you will simply keep going because you've committed yourself to it, you've given people who are at this event time to clear their calendar for the next one. Finally, tip number one, small is beautiful. Small groups facilitate bonding and foster a supportive environment the way that big groups simply can't. Everything big started off small, including the community that we're all part of today. This is a photo that Jesse took back in 2006. We were at Bway.net around a table there. You can spot Francis there in the middle in the blue shirt and probably some other folks if you look closely that you'll know. And the rewards for growing a successful community like this are manifold. The connections you make will certainly help with recruiting, finding work yourself. You'll get to schedule speakers that teach you everything you could possibly want to learn, but really the biggest reward is to see it unfold in action in front of you and to see a thriving ecosystem that you helped you were part of creating. So with that, Q&A on the boat. Later, thank you all for your attention. Appreciate it.