 I've been promoting 14 years and I've been in a number of different communities and I've never seen one as cool as Ruby. The language is really cool, of course, but the community is really special and it's kind of hard to put your finger on what is so special about it. There's a passion, there's a willingness to share and to support one another and those are pretty unique things, great online community. I think a lot of our communities are kind of catching up with some of that, but one of the things that's really interesting is our conferences. I mean, wow, we totally just knock out of the park with our conferences. This is actually a conference that I run in Boulder. Thank you. But the thing is, first of all, Ruby Conference is amazing and considering how it was back in 2001 when it started means it's a community driven, it's totally about you, it's about us. I mean, people would actually pay money, their own money to go to this conference to learn and share and collaborate with other people, whereas other conferences back then were very much about corporate agendas or marketing or selling products or what not. It certainly weren't quite as driven about the people who are in the seats as the Ruby Conference has happened. And it's amazing, I think, of all the regional Ruby conferences that are out there now. I mean, there's one nearly every month, during conference season, you know, from spring to fall, there's almost one every weekend. And right now there's a string of them down in South America, so it's amazing. I don't know if you realize how many of these conferences are out there, but they're everywhere. And of course, here we are in Kansas City and it's sold out. That's awesome. But I think we can do better. And although I'm not going to focus on the conference circuit or our online community, I think it's all great. I want to focus on local because I think that is where we can really amp it up here and it's also something that you guys all can do something about. So of course, we need to go on a community safari for this. This, by the way, is the Banjo Billy bus. So at Rocky Mountain Ruby on our B, we use this bus to take people from the conference hotel to the Avery Tap Room and have some awesome craft beer. Then yes, indeed, that's what we got in. So safari away. So there's three points that I want you to, there's two focus points that I want you to think about ways you can improve your local community. So the first one is we need more programmers. There are not enough people out there programming Ruby. There's too much demand. And I don't think one that schools are going to be able to keep up to the companies can train. I think that really this should belong in the role of the community to help find people that want to program and give them the path to get into that. Number two, leveling up, getting better. There are a lot of ways you can do this on your own online. But as a community, I want to see more structured ways that people who are new, who want to learn Ruby or who already exist in the community are doing Ruby a way for them to get better. And finally, if my thing will work, there we go. I don't know, field batteries. Community raising. This is the idea of going out and fostering communities or groups in places that are underserved. This is the idea that I was hypothetical. I don't really know, but let's say that you, there's nothing in Topeka, Kansas, but yet you might go and help start something in Topeka, Kansas to make that better, perhaps. So let me talk a little bit about my story. So this is Long's Peak. This is a view from long months about my back door. I moved actually to Colorado in 2005 from the Kansas City area. I was living in Lawrence. And when I moved out there, I didn't know anybody at all. Actually, my job was remote, so I didn't actually have office mates that I could go and learn the way of the land from. But I was a brave source. I didn't matter. I went out and networked aggressively. I also was discovering Ruby at this point. And I was really disappointed by that. There was no one talking about Ruby back then in the area. So I went and started to pull to Ruby to talk about Ruby because I wanted to meet other Rubyists and talk about that. And that's been about six years now since I've done that. And it's going great. But when I did this, I actually didn't know what I was doing. I just knew what I wanted to talk about Ruby. But I didn't know how to run events. I didn't know how to grow a user group or any of that sort of thing. I just started asking questions and just did it. And so a lot of what I'm going to share with you today is to help you do this sort of thing or other things like that without making mistakes and give you a leg up on the process. I also progressed into doing conferences. And I don't know how this actually happened. I think Mike Moore and Pat Eiler dragged me into Mountain West back in 2007. And that just sort of took off. I think probably a little crazy. So although I've done these things, I don't necessarily recommend you go Marty crazy route in terms of event organizing. But of course, now I have my own conference in Boulder. And I'm called Rocky Mountain Ruby. And it's a lot of fun. So we're going to talk about what you can do. Because you don't have to be Marty, you can actually be anybody who wants to help out and is willing to put in the effort, you can do this. Now this is a picture of Prakash Murphy. And Prakash, his only program about a year and a half, he came to the Boulder area and he saw myself out in Chad Fowler. And he said, I want to get better. I want to learn Ruby and I want to get involved. And so we gave him some advice. He really went to a he taught himself how to program, he got an internship and now he's consulting. And what's really cool is within about six months, he decided he wanted to help out build the local community by doing code retreats and bug mashers. He took it upon himself. He didn't ask me for permission. He didn't say, Marty, can you make this happen for us? He just went and did it. And he's loving it. And so if Prakash can do it, then any of you can do it for certain. So we're going to focus on local because I think that's where you can make the most difference. It's also the easiest thing for you to do. You don't have to go big do larger bits like this one. They're very daunting to pull off. You can do something very simple and something that is local, because that's where you can find the people you can bring them out, you can help them get better. And and it's going to be feasible for you to do this. So the thing I want to encourage you to do is be intentional. Don't be accidental about what you want. Think about what your goal is. Where are you going to try and accomplish? Don't try to take on too much. Take on just what you want to try to do. And think about my three points that I mentioned earlier, whether you want to bring new programmers in or maybe have an event that makes people better or maybe perhaps gross community in another location. Think about what you want to do. Who's aware of what this phrase means? This is an acronym, actually, this is MOTS. MOTS course, the creator of Ruby. And this stands for MOTS is nice. And so we are nice. Kind of funny, isn't it? Well, I think someone made from Japan coined that perhaps. I don't know. I'm not sure. Do we know who actually coined this? I'm not sure. I've known it for a few years. But this is really cool. And I think this is a great example of what I would call intentional community. Although, Matt's did not intend this probably when he first started. He went course created Ruby, he wanted a programming language that he would love to program and it would bring happiness back to programming. And so that drives a lot of what he does when he develops Ruby and build the language up. But it also, I think directs how he interacts with community. Very nice guy. And also, I think, with Dave Thomas and the people who got involved with Ruby as it came to the English speaking world, I think it drove sort of what they wanted to do and how open and how willing they were to share and how they wanted to help other people by spreading Ruby and doing Ruby comp. I think this all has set a template has driven sort of this pattern of how we as Rubyists are how we treat other people that is carried forward to today. I think it's pretty sure I guarantee that that this is why Ruby community is so awesome than what it could have been if somebody else was driving Ruby instead of Matt. And of course, I have a name for this. It's called the community template. And this is sort of an intangible, maybe energetic thing. It surrounds us, it penetrates us, it binds us together. And it's, you can think of it as like your intentions, what you intend to do it, you know, people feel it, they feel the vibe. And if you have, you know, want to make it competitive, or if you want to make lots of money, then that's going to come out and that's going to drive what this thing eventually becomes. So as you're thinking about what you want to do, your intentions will manifest in a certain way. You might attract certain people to your event, it might not attract certain people to your event. So I think it's very important that you're aware, you're kind of what what your intentions are, as you plan out your event. So of course, the first step you do is you plan out your plot, you figure out what exactly it is that you're going to try to do, consider what's going on already in your community, but give it some thought and go ahead and intentionally go about that process. Another point I want to make about this planning process is planning for your zone. Just like how you wouldn't necessarily take an orange tree from Florida, and try and plant it in Kansas City and have an orange grow, it's not going to work, right? Because orange trees don't grow here because it's the wrong zone. The same thing goes for community events. You know, if there's an event that's really successful in San Francisco, or say New York, or even Boulder, it might not fly so well here or in Des Moines, or maybe Wichita, Kansas or something like that. So you have to consider what's your local community like, you know, how many people are there? How what's the level of expertise in terms of programming? What sort of business community support for Ruby or for technology is there? And you have to consider those things before you set your ambitions for a certain type of event. I think any event can be successful in any community. It just you have to be realistic about what you're going to be able to pull out, at least initially. So there's three event styles that I'd like to you to consider as you're putting together your event. The first one we're going to talk about is lecture. And that is essentially what is happening right now. It is where you have one person presenting information to a large group of people. It is pretty good at say, inspiring and giving out lots of information coming a lot of ground is not so good for conversations. And it's not so good for you getting better, you pulling your skills, you might leave here saying, awesome, I'm going to go and do something about this, but you're probably not, you know, leveling up in your skill right now. The next component is social. And social, I think is really important. I think actually, the Ruby community has a social thing down pretty well. But I think that social is every community should have a regular social component that's happening. This is where you get you get together and you're hanging out, perhaps their beverages and there's food involved, but it's unstructured. It's allows people to have conversations. And this is where people will ask tough questions or will have those type conversations. And they will also form a bond with each other, they'll get to know each other, and they'll be a better level of trust and a sense of community that comes when you have these sorts of events happening on a regular basis. And finally, interactive. Interactive. This is your hackfest or code retreats, any sort of hands on workshops, things where people are working together with other people, doing actual things on their laptops or whatnot. And I think interactive sessions are probably underrepresented in local communities. I think it is definitely the one that is the best for honing skills and mentoring. And that is very important if you want to improve your the skills of the people involved in your community. Now this talk, I gave us a RubyConf and it was a lot longer there. So I distilled it down. And so one of the things I've done is I've taken probably a dozen slides out of this talk. And I put it on a blog post called a bit organizing 101. There's a bit like to it. These slides, they are available. I'll post a link probably through Twitter, maybe we'll retweet it through Ruby Midwest account. So you can get to this after the fact. But I've gone through a ton of things very low level, nuts and bolts types of things about how to organize and run events. Things like how do you find space? How do you find sponsors? How do you do budgets? How do you reach out and find people and tell them about your event? All kinds of things like this. And I encourage you also after you read this, if you're going to do an event type of thing, then after you read, if there's any questions or I didn't put something in there that you really want to know about, please leave a comment on the site and I'd be happy to either expand the post or do a follow up post. I will say one thing though or a couple of things about doing event organizing. And that is you should ease into it. Don't try to take on too much for your first event. And of course, I recommend you always start small and let it grow organically. You try to kill yourself by doing marketing and doing a lot of word of mouth and trying to get flyers and stuff out there. Do something simple, use Twitter, use word of mouth through your friends and the people you work with. Try to keep your event free and low cost. I mean the minute that you have a lot of expenses and you have to write checks to venues and to caterers and what sort of that, that really ups the ante and makes it a little more nerve wracking for your event. But you can do free events. They're great and I recommend you start with that. Of course, look for a sponsored space. You know, have audio video provided by people that either have the space or by other tech companies. And delays are expenses that you can't. You can always add this stuff on later on, especially if your events are taking off. So don't kill yourself trying to do it initially. So let's talk about the specifics points that I mentioned. I'm going to give you some concrete examples and some things you can think about to accomplish some of these things. So throwing programmers. The first thing I would say is consider how inviting your event is to newbies. If you are new to programming or to Ruby or you didn't know anybody in this group, if you were to show up to your event, how would you feel? Do you feel a little intimidated? Would you realize it's all over your head and probably would never come back? This is a real concern that a lot of our events, just by the nature of how they are and how they've adapted over time, they probably aren't that people aren't going to stick with it. And there are a couple of suggestions that you can do here. One, you can have, say, a section of your event, depending on what it is, be totally newbie friendly. Make it very clear that this portion of the event, no experience required, you don't have to have. The topic is covered, it's very introductory or whatnot. That's one of the way of doing it. The other one is actually have an event, a frequent event in your community that is totally geared towards movies like A Meet Ruby Night or a Intro to Programming Night. That would be another way that you can kind of push people who are new to your community to go into this and kind of get them introduced so that then they can come to your regular events and feel more comfortable with that. The other piece is diversity. This is Sarah Allen from RailsBridge and Sarah Allen and Sarah May do this RailsBridge workshop that specifically encourages women to get into Ruby Programming. And I think that diversifying your population is really important. I think that it's not easy and I'm not going to give you a lot of tips here tonight about how we could possibly do that mainly because it would take too long. And I'm actually not the most expert person on diversity. There's a lot of other speakers that have done talks that are on the video that are available that you can watch on this topic. But I'll say two things. First of all, you need to be hypersensitive about how your event is perceived by people of a different gender or maybe nationality or something like that. And you know, they will pick up these things. These cues, perhaps it's the language that's used in the meeting, perhaps it's how maybe some of the events that are happening. It's something you just have to be hypersensitive to to make sure that you aren't setting up any barrier that people are not comfortable with. The other thing you can do is explicitly invite them out saying we would like you to come to our event. And by doing so, they'll say, well, I really thought that I'd be welcome there but now that I have been invited, perhaps I'll come out. So these are two things that you can consider for diversity, but I do think it's an important thing, especially in terms of growing your population of programmers in your group. So reach beyond. And you don't have to be Reed Richards to do this. You can be just a normal world, a normal person not even during like that. And the thing the thing I want to say about this is we all have our tech circles. You know, our Twitter followers, people that normally frequent our events and that we normally talk to. There are more people out there than that, unless you're some amazing network, you know, awesome guy or whatever in the community. There's probably a lot of people doing Ruby or programming that would be really interested in your type of events that are out there that you're not reaching. They're not hearing, they don't know about your event, that you know, they're not getting the updates. And it's not going to be easy, but you can reach them. And so I think with this point is that you have to be creative and try some different avenues to go out and find them and let them know about your event. And again, like with diversity, you want to invite them out and make them welcome by having a specific event or part of your event. It's for them. Finally, the next generation. And that's with children. There's actually two kind of cool movements going on right now out there that is specifically for kids. And I know specifically about kids Ruby, that's Ron Evans and some of his friends bring that together. And it's really pretty cool. It's a lightweight curriculum. There's about programming geared towards children. It's fun. I think right now they have maybe a lot of days worth of material, but they're constantly expanding it. And this is something that you can go to the website and you can take this and you can run kids Ruby day or whatever in your local community. And this can be a lot of fun. This is a picture that Ron sent me from one of their events that they did. And I think it's a great way of introducing programming to the next generation showing this is actually pretty cool stuff. You know, this is not rocket science. You know, you can do this stuff and you can actually have a lot of fun on the way. So never too early to get them introduced to that. So here's a few other ideas that you might consider for expanding your growing your programmers. I've mentioned the new Ruby stuff, new programmer outreach. Cherry training workshops kind of like what happened yesterday is another great thing. It's structured. It's it's free. Maybe perhaps it's a duration only required. It gives back to the communities. There's a lot of good press about that. You might even be able to get a newspaper to do an article about your community training workshop, perhaps meeting mashups. This is something that we did in Boulder where we had the Boulder Android user group and the Boulder Ruby user group met in the same space the same day. We actually had two different rooms who weren't like fighting for the stage or anything like that. But but we did have a common space where mingling. That was really pretty interesting. You know, kind of picked under a guy's but you know, whatever it is. It's all fair. Volunteering at schools. There's a lot of public schools out there, middle schools and high schools that are happy to have professionals or dads, moms would not come in and talk about programming to their students. So another way of reaching out. So leveling up, giving people better. Of course, wherever I think about this topic, I think about Kathy Sierra and unfortunately she's not active speaking, blogging or on social media anymore. But her blog is still up. It's creating passionate users. There's the there's the link to it on the bottom there. And she has a ton of material. I don't really go into a lot of today, but she goes really deeply into how do you make people better? How do you make them rock when they're using your product or service or what? Yeah, I think that it would be worth your time if you want to go about this leveling people up, making them better to visit her site for about an hour or so. There's a lot of good material there. Toastmasters, Dr. Nick. Dr. Nick mentioned Toastmasters in the last year, year and a half. And I think this is really fascinating. This is an educational organization that's all about enhancing communication skills and leadership skills by doing things. And they have this real structured sort of program curriculum, if you will, of how you come in and things you need to do and getting to the next level. And I think it's a this is a model that certainly could work for programming, no doubt. And something you could possibly consider for your organization for an event you might want to do. And I thought of another parallel with this and that's Scouting. Scouting is another organization that's been around actually a hundred years, about the same time this Toastmasters was started. And it's very much hands-on skills improvement, you know, starting with very simple things to work here on what can pre-event skills. And it's something I think we could borrow. And it's actually my son here, he's in the front there working on a cooperative skill with another boy. I'm walking with these big boards on his feet. But so this is something actually we're starting. There's a repo down there which is called the Ruby Handbook, which is modeled off after the Boy Scout and Cup Scout handbooks. And there are basically activities or eventually will be activities. Right now, if you go to the repo, there's just a Ruby. That's all I was right now. I just started a few weeks ago and haven't got as far as I'd like, but there's a number of us in Boulder that are going to be working on this. And the idea is that it'll be small, different sort of activities. You can do like setting up your environment, you know, basic get work flow, you know, Ruby basics and stuff like that, that there'll be manageable chunks, they're self-guided, you can work on them on your own, and you can work, it'll be a great thing you could do some evening, you know, with the group of people you could work through an activity or two. And that's kind of the idea with it is it's just a lightweight guide that people could use to kind of cover the basis of basic programming. So hopefully that'll develop and become useful in the next few months. But there's the link to that. Coder Treats. I actually don't have to talk too much about this because Angel did a wonderful job mentioning Coder Treats. Coder Treats are awesome. We actually have the largest Coder Treat in Boulder in February. And of 60 people, I don't recommend a Coder Treat for 60 people. Too many. It was too big. It was overwhelming. Jad of Aller and Corey Haynes both facilitated this and it was, it was awesome but it was a little intense. So that you can imagine a closing circle. It was, we barely get everyone in their space in this big circle. It's very in. But, but Coder Treats are great. They're a great way of leveling their skills and they're a lot of fun. And it's awesome that of course December 3rd is Coder Treat Global Day. And I guess West has got the information on the local Coder Treat here in Kansas City. I know we have four of them in Colorado that we're doing. And definitely check it out. Highly, highly recommended. Yes, Angel. And there's still time to make it. That's right. And the Coder Treat model is so that you can go and do it. I would highly recommend you probably go to one first. So you kind of know what you do and how to go about facilitating Coder Treat. But the idea is that Corey wants you to do this. He wants you to do your own Coder Treats in your own community and you don't need Corey to show up. I mean I think he still likes to go to some of them but he can't keep up with all of them now. So Coder Treats. Some other ideas. Proper programming challenges. We have one of these in one of our Hackfest in Boulder where they have a little programming challenge. Kind of like what happened last night. But you can do something like that. Kind of like a Ruby quiz sort of thing. And I think because there are a lot of fun in terms of giving some sort of structure for people to kind of work on. And then bug mashes. Bug mashes are another great thing. You're likely to get back to the community. It's structured. It's a great way of pairing with someone and getting better. So community raising. I will mention only a few things for this and I'll let you read the slides. I'll mention a little bit on the last one. This is of course the idea that you're going into a place where there's not a lot of support for Ruby events yet and you're kind of helping one go. The last one is an interesting one that I like to encourage and this has happened with the Coder Treats is where you might set up an event in a community that you're not part of. And you'll go and of course you'll hopefully find someone there so you can kind of get word out. But the idea is that you'll have some cool like a Coder Treat or like a Ruby day or something like that that you can do like a one time thing and then hopefully after that's done there'll be you know a handful of people or more from that little community that might say hey let's keep this going let's do something with that. So that's an idea but so let's let's regardless of all these ideas I want you to be creative you know don't just do the boring old user group thing I mean I think the user groups are great I don't I think they're vital to have going in your community but I want you to be more creative now I want you to think about those three points I mentioned earlier and how can you make your community better by doing something interesting take some risk have some benefit and yeah have fun. So one thing about main organizing is it can be a lot of work and if you're not carefully can burn yourself out and that's no good so make sure you're having fun make sure that it doesn't become a chore and get help you know how people help you so you don't have to do it by yourself because that's the quick way to burn up so remember to have fun and I want to say it's also very very rewarding when I started doing this six years ago I had no idea the amount of growth that I would go through and I get a lot of feedback from people who approached me and say Marty I really appreciate that mentoring you gave me or you know that one event you ran I learned so much you gave me confidence to do these other things it's awesome so it's incredibly rewarding to do this sort of stuff so if you go on this path you will be rewarded so I highly recommend it so get involved make a goal be intentional about it smart start small and have fun with it and make your community better thank you what are bug mashes bug mashes are fairly informal gather where people get together and they work on bugs usually rails bugs in pairs for half a day or something you know for a number of hours so just take a project you know this is a project exactly yeah exactly and I know with rails bug mashes they've had a number of them out over the last year or so and you can you can reach out to Tindall out to Aaron Patterson and he'll they'll be happy to get you set up with with the ideas behind that how do you how do you do it yes so you're talking about how do you do it how do you do it how do you do it like lectures social and interactive yes you also talked about how difficult it is to get newcomers to feel comfortable yes so of those three types of events which ones do you think are the most appealing I mean the interactive is probably the best for getting them better but then you can have the environment how can you who's traveling and get them started okay so the question is of the three types of events out there the event styles which one would be most attractive to newcomers and I would say all of them first of all lecture people especially who are new like the thought of coming and listening to someone who knows what they're talking about giving them information getting them started social is very important too because then they feel more comfortable after they've kind of broken the ice and spoken with people okay now I've been more comfortable kind of letting my guard down and getting involved and of course interactive as you mentioned is the best for holding their skills and there's actually no reason why you can't combine all three in one event but you know how when you structurally that what you decide what you're going to do like you have someone in front or you have everyone on tables together in pairs you know or you have mailing next to some food and beverages that's where you decide which type you're going to do for this part of the meeting yeah yeah I did not I did not mention Kota copy Kota copies are cool and we have one that meets every in this informal thing usually at the same place same time and there's not a lot of structure that's great for people collaborating talking about what they're working on maybe asking questions so yeah I didn't really talk about putting coffee at all easy is why it's very easy yes it's a great way of meeting other people so certainly that's that falls into that social thing I think it's very great for you to have some really low-frequency events like that that just happen on an ongoing basis for people to come out to so Kota copies are a wonderful thing that's usually in new in new communities where I see people kind of starting out the Kota copies usually the first thing they do or maybe a hack fest where some business says okay you know this night for the hack fest it just understand that you're not going to get a ton of people to come out to it but but there will be people to come out there make sure you always have someone at least being there it really sucks if you say it's a code of coffee and no one from the group is there and people show up and say what is this socks man I'm the ones here so you make sure there's someone's always there I think I agree it's definitely great it's definitely great well unless you're a morning person triathlet and then it's not hard at all do you have your since 7 am? no I don't no I don't I agree something ends up is a bad idea because only the nutty people in the morning get up and exercise and train and all that I don't know we do that but if there's someone like that then they might do it but the other people are like and you're nuts I'm not coming to that all right they were done thank you