 Hi, everybody. Welcome to our panel here. You know, I suppose we should start by explaining the title instead of doing introductions now that I actually look at this because it might not be clear why we picked this title. The to beer or not to beer idea came from the fact that a lot of meetups, just like Drupalcon, involve a lot of beer. But not all meetups do, of course. We're going to talk a bit more later about the different kinds of meetups and whether or not they do include beer. But that's where the title came from and I hope that made some sense when you were perusing the session selections. Why don't we introduce ourselves? Paul, let's start with you. We don't have to get that closer. Hi, I'm Paul Johnson. In my day job, I work for Live Link Media in the UK. But I put a lot of effort into promoting Drupalcon. So I'm the social media lead for this conference and I help the Drupal association with a lot of their marketing. That's why I'm on the panel because I think Drupalcon is one of the biggest meetups in the world today. We've learned a lot over the last 18 months and we want to share some of the experiences we've had so that you can take those ideas and not go through the pains that we've had. I'm Addison Berry and I work with Lullabot. I have actually, for the five years of my Drupal career, avoided any kind of event planning at all because it seems like a very scary thing and people get burnt out and freaked out. But when I moved to Copenhagen, we had some basic beer meetup actually. But there was sort of no place for new people to actually plug in to the community. So I started up a meetup because I wanted to have one and I was working with a Drupal ladder and it was a great way to have a meetup. It's been a really interesting experience for me and it's actually a lot easier than I ever thought it would be. Not that there aren't difficulties. So that's where I'm coming from. Hi there. I'm Brock. Sorry about all the shuffling up here. Karen's kind of in the limelight here. But hi. I'm a developer at Lullabot as well. And I'm from Washington, D.C., where I've recently inherited some of the organization of the local user group. Before that, I had been running the Drupal ladder meetups in sprints in the D.C. area and will continue to do so. But those are the sort of the where I'm coming from with the meetup group planning stuff. Hi, I'm Karen Casio, tech girl geek, everywhere. And I regularly attend the Drupal, we call them debug meetups in Denver and I decided to start about to, I guess maybe it was just last summer, Drupal chicks or now we call ourselves women in Drupal meetup and actually converted that recently to Drupal ladder learn sprints and soon to be issue sprints. And I think that, well, the community is the heart of Drupal and that's why I actually, I run the Drupal, well, I'm the community Drupal global track chair for Drupal cons because I believe in the community and I believe that the meetups, our smaller meetups are also what keeps the community together. So it's like, what can make, I came up with this idea because everyone, the meetups are so important, how do we make them awesome, talk to these awesome people and they said, yeah, that's a great idea, let's have this panel. And then they gave us this humongous room. Yeah, they gave us too much room. Intimidating. Can we jump into it? Let's go. We're gonna try to keep these, we have a number of things we'd like to talk about. So we're gonna try to keep them sort of brief because it turns out that we can talk at length, the four of us. So we'll try to keep them on the short side. And feel free if you have questions or ideas or anything at any point, raise your hand, just give us a wave. So as a little side note, too, this is really built to be interactive. So you're gonna only see questions, not a lot of points on here. If you have something you wanna add to the points, if you can come up to the microphone, just so we can have it on the recording, we wanna hear your input on how do you make your meetups awesome or what you'd like to see at your meetups. So as we go through the questions, so we'll go ahead and start. Before we get started, just super, super quick. Can we just have a quick show of hands of how many people organize meetups in their local area? Oh, okay. Awesome. Excellent. Good start. Is anybody in here who wants to have a meetup in their area or trying to work that out? All right, awesome. So we have lots of advice that can be given not from here, but from there. So these questions are for everybody in the room, not just for us. This will be a lesson learned sharing time. Right. This is supposed to be... So I don't think we have to tell many of you then why you might plan meetups. I think anybody who's been to DrupalCon knows the allure of getting a bunch of nerds together. Certainly there are different reasons why those people come to meetups and things like that. Some of the ones that we talked about were newbies who are new to Drupal or haven't used it at all and wanna find out some basic stuff, find out what it is, what they might be getting into. You have the more advanced people who might be coming for like training session kind of presentations, stuff like that. And then of course you just have the people who just wanna come and hang out and maybe drink beer if that's what your group does. There's a very social aspect. I mean, obviously we know each other because of the software, but I have a lot of really awesome friends and I hang out with them and sometimes I don't even talk about Drupal. Don't record that. It's my way out of the house and I'm parenting for one night. One of the reasons that I've heard is that a lot of people are freelancers and they spend a lot of time working on their own and then they wanna go to a meetup just for a bit of companionship. So the meetup could actually be working together. It didn't necessarily be in the evening, so that's another idea. Yeah, that's a good point. Making business connections is a big thing. I'm curious, at other people's meetups, do you get a ton, like when you go around the room and introduce everybody, is about half the people there hiring? No, that seems perhaps regional. Oh, more than half? More than half? Yeah, we seem to get a lot of recruiters and a lot of, come work for us, we have a boat kind of stuff. They're still hiring, by the way, if you live in D.C. and want to ride a boat. Let's talk a bit about the different kinds of events we might have. You wanna start? I went to one of the meetups in London and they had quite an interesting approach where they'd set up separate tables and it was kind of dynamic each time they met. Each table, people would just define amongst themselves what they were interested in talking about. Almost like a mini bath, can't be? Yeah, exactly. So that was quite interesting, it was completely different to the meetups that I go to where we usually have a speaker, but we tried an idea out recently where we've had remote speakers so we had our Google Hangout and that worked really well. And I thought that in areas where perhaps there aren't that many people and you haven't got enough people to speak every month, the world's your oyster. You don't actually have to... Yeah, and kind of how perhaps Lollabot work. They're never sitting next to each other and they're working and it's just translating that into meetups. It worked really well. Actually, you have some experience with the remote meetups, right? Yeah, we get down here. Oh, are we going down the road? We don't need to. Okay, so I've been doing meetups and I do... I alternate between Denver and Boulder because I'm smack in the middle and I think the women in Drupal meetups weren't big enough to do one in both places each time, plus I don't think I could get out of the house two nights a week, a month, plus go to the regular debug meetups. So I was doing one in either city and coming up with my own presentations and then after DrupalCon, Denver, I learned about the Drupal Ladder, which if you haven't heard about that... You can talk to one of the three of us or the steering committee for that. And so I've changed my meetups to Drupal Ladder meetups and two or three meetups ago, I did part of it remote because I had people wanting to do the meetups, but they were not physically in Denver or Boulder. And so I did... one that had remote abilities and I had three or four people show up remote through Drupal Hangouts. I mean, how do I keep saying that? Google Hangouts. And the rest... there was only two besides myself in the actual room. And we had to end up not doing Drupal Ladder, we ended up playing with the Google Hangout toys because you can put little hats on, it's a lot of fun. But it was still a... They find meetup as well? Yeah, it was still a proof of contest though, it was really fun. And then this last one I did before I came here, I did it completely remote because I couldn't get to the situation because my husband is actually working out of state now, so I actually did the whole meetup and I had eight people online at one point. And we spent a few minutes playing with the Google toys, but then we actually... I actually did a full-on presentation of the Drupal Ladder and people were doing installs in their local machines at home and got really good feedback and a lot of people were saying, thank you, I can't get out of the house more than one night a month also. So this gave me an opportunity to join another meetup without actually having to physically go somewhere. One person was coming from a coffee shop so it gave another option and I also had a couple people from really remote areas, saying that there's nobody... no other Drupal community members anywhere near them and they're like, you know, I feel isolated. One of the criticisms to get at meetups is that they're at the wrong level, so they may be too easy or it's not meeting the needs of the people who are really sort of high-end. And if you mix all these people together, somebody's not going to be happy. Whereas if you do remote meetups, you can actually hang out with the people who are on your level more bogus to your group or specialist subject. Yeah, like break the meetups up more because people don't have to invest as much to actually get to somewhere. Yeah, so in Copenhagen we had this beer meetup and that was like the style of meetup was, yeah, meet at a bar. We had no presentations or no laptops or anything. It was purely social and it was, you know, these are people who work on Drupal and kind of know each other through other channels and then get together and just hang out and talk shop sometimes and talk about other things as well and sort of just extend the social network. But we also, now we've started this other meetup which is, again, based on the Drupal ladder and so it's basically people learning how to contribute to core together and helping each other figure out like, how do I install stuff locally? What issues should I be working on? And so ours is, so we basically have a beer meetup basically a working group meetup. Like we don't have a presentation. There's nobody standing up at the front sort of telling everybody what's going on. It's more like we get together and sort of self-organize around what aspects of stuff people want to work on but it tends to be really focused on working on the community, not someone's website. Because there are definitely instances where people can come in and just be like, I'm building a website and I expect everybody here to help me. And so all of our activities and working group stuff we do is focused on community contribution. So those are the ones that we do. So in D.C., for the past several years we've really just had sort of the beer meetup. We have a bar that's very friendly because we come on a Monday night when no one else would and buy a bunch of their beer. And we do kind of lightning talks like people will do a five-minute talk but I've been finding more and more recently that people are less satisfied with those than they had been because we haven't been doing new things. There was a push about a year and a half ago to do more of the get in an office space, sit down, somebody presents a topic and those were really well attended. We had three or four of them before the guy who was organizing them moved. So that kind of petered out. But there's been a new push recently that people don't want to hang out at a bar for whatever reason or are underage and can't get in. Children can use Drupal too and they want to come and learn how to do this stuff. I don't know how many people we may be excluding just by the fact that they can't even come to these events. So I think what kind of events you plan really depends on the community where you are and what kind of stuff people are going to want. It sounds like the beer-only meetups had been working pretty well for you guys for a while and they had for us, but at some point there were a lot of people who were excluded from those. Exactly. And just people who don't like to be in a bar is also really hard for new people who do not know the existing people to find us and know who they were even looking for. And then you're in a bar and there's this group of people and you just have to walk up to them and be like, you guys do Drupal? You know, I'm so awkward and so uncomfortable for a lot of people. It's even putting signs up and saying this is the Drupal table, people who are all drinking and talking and stuff, and someone has to break into that. And that's really uncomfortable, especially for someone who's new. The other consideration about having alcohol is that in a venue is that you're restricting younger people from coming in and some of the brightest people in Drupal are actually under drinking very... Totally. So another thing that Paul brought up is also how often these things happen, because I think people have this expectation that the beer meet-up, you know, I'm chaining myself to whatever. But I'm curious what the average is. We do ours monthly, basically. The beer meet-up is monthly and then the new working group one is monthly-ish. Basically, when I'm in town I travel quite a lot. But what about you guys? Well, in the preparation for this panel, we've got a state of meet-ups survey and I had about 130 meet-ups around the world respond. And we've summarized the results from that, so I won't drill into too much of the detail. But one thing that I did notice was that the weekly event seemed to have a much lower attendance. So the average about 10. Whereas when you go to monthly it's about 15 people and then you figure out it's about two months, it's about 25. So it seems that if you don't have them too often you get a bigger crowd together. People just can't commit to coming out often. And one thing that really struck me was I go to the Manchester meet-up and I always had this idea that well, we were quite small. But the average around the globe is about 10. And some of the meet-ups are only two or three people. So I think the general thing was that people should just do it. And even if it's only one or two people if it's two or three people it's still because it can only grow from that. It's a meet-up. I'll say that our Boulder and Denver ones they're monthly and we're getting like 20, 25 people for the general meeting, not the Drupal Ladder meeting, but the Drupal Ladder meeting starting to grow too. But the Drupal, women in Drupal one when I was doing was getting three or four. So, cool. We do monthly as well. Does anybody else have a different kind of meet-up that they would like to share? Do we have a microphone? Yeah, we do. We just kind of pass that around as needed. A microphone. So I work part-time at Stanford and it's not well, except for the last two months it's not officially been associated with meet-up per se. But for the last two years I've been doing on the third Thursday of every month from three to five in Coverley Library I do what I call Drupal's drop-in help and the idea is that people who are first it was just within the Stanford community people who need help with their Drupal sites and then people who have Drupal experience would come and people who need help would get it people who can give help would give it and the idea was basically not to say that these are the helpers and these are the help-bees but to say well, you know, you may be in the middle and you may have come with a question but here's this really new person and you can answer their question. I was actually surprised when I started out there was about six which was more than I was expecting for the first session and it's been growing since then in the last two months I have also announced it on the local Silicon Valley Drupal user groups meet-up thing and now we're getting about two dozen whereas before it was about a dozen and one of the things that's been really key to this for us has been that it's been consistent at a time that everybody knows even if they don't see a message or something that every third Thursday from three to five this will be happening. Consistency is really key. We're all leaning in on that one. And that's the thing is even if it's only consistently every two months that's fine. You don't have to have something as consistently every single month. If that's just too much and the community can't do that and you're not willing to organize that just say we'll do this and if there's demand for increase and other people are willing to step up that's great but consistency I think is really probably pretty key. Speaking of growing your meet-ups can you talk about the URL at the end of the the question was about the survey and where the summary is We'll flash it. My name is Christopher me and Axel we organized the Drupal Meetup in Stuttgart and we do something else too we call it Drupal co-work day because we are also active in the co-working scene and what we do there is making a whole day where you can sit together with other Drupal people just do your own work and if you have a question you just shout it into the room and everybody else helps or helps not and it's just a great way to work together all day and just get knowing everybody else better and getting projects done together and it's growing too for the next meet-up which is the next co-work day this office already have 10 attendees who subscribe for that and then we have another one in my little office co-working space and I don't know the actual counts of that but I love the co-work day because it's so you get work done and you can just ask everyone and it's very together it's very familiar and still effective and we had the problem so we were such a possibility to get people in there so we went to the co-working day and we tried to have a meet-up at the same date in the evening so we can go there gather them in the co-working day and then have a meet-up nice the co-working day is more like a park and you can present what goes through the park Riley what did you work on today how do you create access to the park from say 100 kilometers away this is interesting because it's not only in the evening event but they can go there for a whole day and stay in time so they can come over yeah I'm actually not organizing any meet-ups but since the organizers aren't here I think that their experience shouldn't be wasted so I was living in near Frankfurt so I joined the local Munich and Frankfurt groups and I still get spam from both of them so basically here in Munich the situation is we do monthly meet-ups of two types so every Wednesday the first Wednesday of every month we have a meet-up at Einfeldhaus which is a cultural center in which we have a room a projector provided by a local company that is now famous across all of Europe and so we have this projector and we do presentations and one of the things that I admire a lot about Martin which was organizing the meet-ups here is he has to annoy people to do these presentations or else we just arrive and okay what we are going to talk about one of the good things is after one hour and after that one hour we all go down we have dinner we have some beers there was some discussion on the format because some people wanted to skip straight to the beers so what they did was on the third Wednesday of every month there is the Drupal Stammtisch well the Germans here can correct my German please and in Stammtisch we just go straight for beers so basically two meet-ups every month in Frankfurt it's more or less the same thing except the presentation one is every two months and it alternates with the beer one and the same thing Karsten who is organizing it in Frankfurt asked to annoy people he just annoyed me to do the presentation for the next one and this pattern of both wanting presentations and beers which was actually when I organized meet-ups in Portugal was something that I managed to to marry because we basically met at a bar that had a projector at some point and this allowed you to actually have some beers and have some snacks while your colleagues were doing the presentation so this pattern that I see is it common in the US that basically blocks minors from entering most bars if you're not 21 or older you can't even enter the bar it sounds like that's the case in the UK we don't have that problem here in Europe it's definitely it's definitely dependent on where you are your community and what's going to work in Boulder and Denver we bring beers and pizzas in should we move on to the next one? I don't want to cut up a discussion but we've got like six or seven more things we're in more than 20 minutes like we said any one of these slides could be our conversation let's talk briefly about growing your meet-up and I know Paul's got some experience in the marketing side of things do you want to talk about that stuff or do you want to come back to that? that's true we do aside from marketing which we'll talk about promotion but I guess conceptually well in my experience we have the beer meet-ups which we call well, horrible Danish but that's beer in Danish so I love the name so we had the beer meet-ups and like I said though it was really not conducive to getting new people coming it was the same people coming all the time or just like a small group of people that were kind of rotating around and expanding and a lot of the people were like I know there are lots of people in Copenhagen doing Drupal but they're not coming to the meet-ups and we're not getting them engaged with our community we're not growing at all we were totally stagnant and the thing is like it was very much sort of like an old boys club kind of it was like the people in Drupal who already knew each other who were getting together and that's not necessarily what a beer meet-up is in other places but that's what was happening in Copenhagen and then once we started doing sort of this working group like learn how to contribute and how to learn like we were presenting it in terms of like you'll learn things about Drupal so that you can contribute and you'll meet other people and all of a sudden all of these new faces started to show up when we just sort of changed the format of what we were doing or gave another alternative and so and again like having this idea of having maybe one style of meet-up one month with a different style of meet-up and mixing those things up you know yeah you might not get like 50 people at your one meet-up and something like that but if you get 25 people at one and 25 at another and you've got like a whole different group of people going on we've seen a huge increase in new people showing up now and now some of those new people are showing up at the beer meet-ups because they're getting to know people in an environment where they feel more comfortable and then they can come to the beer meet-up so for us like that was like it's been a big change not that it's astronomical numbers but when you go from having like four people at a beer meet-up or five people and having more like a dozen people who are coming to meet-ups that's a pretty significant change in a matter of two months it's over 100% so that's what we did in Copenhagen at least to sort of do it is shake it up a little bit in terms of what we were providing to people one of the bits of advice that came out in the survey was that you should make sure you choose an accessible location so it could be that if you're struggling to grow your event that maybe you're actually holding it in the wrong place or it's not convenient or it's the wrong time there's no parking available and people who don't live in the city can't come in because it's too much of a pain in the ass we just recently learned this in DC and actually I don't know how feasible this would be in other communities but we posted a survey about SurveyMonkey or something like that just what do you think of the venue and how often we have it and the types of meet-ups we're having and in like 75% of the responses we got people said I hate going to this bar it's too far away from public transit there's no parking, it's hard to get to after work, you know, right during rush hour and stuff like that and I think that probably clued us into the fact that we need to make a change because a lot of those people responded to the survey because they don't come to fix I don't know if that would work everywhere if you don't have the online community for your local group I don't know that you'd get the survey to enough people to get any good information but that worked for us Aside from any marketing you might do online you should try and drum into the people that come tell your friends because everyone has this network of friends and usually people don't it never occurs to them to mention it outside of the time they come or they assume that people already need to be Drupal people in order to come to a Drupal event which is a fair enough assumption but completely not necessary and so once people are like we don't have to do X, Y or Z even if you do an event every couple months that is specifically geared towards new people, strangers who just want to poke at Drupal a little even if you only get one or two new people who are sort of just checking things out then that can spread and that can grow your community by sort of specifically reaching out to the people who don't come you know making the real effort on it rather than assuming build it and they will come right, build it and they will come anybody else think of the suggestions? why grow your meetup that's a good question there are alternatives that still grow the community well that's true yes certainly the business networking side of things is important to a lot of people like the freelancers you mentioned earlier just getting more potential networking contacts around it sounds very businessy let's wear a suit and talk and exchange business cards but there is some aspect of that a lot of people find jobs because they meet people at the bar but certainly the getting more people involved in the community and you said there are other ways to do that but I think having having people there in person that you can not coerce or encourage but if there are people at your meetup and you're doing a talk on how easy it is to contribute to core and you guys should try it I think that's a much more effective way to reach those people and drive not drag them into the community worst drag I know I'm making this sound just terrible but I think having them there in person is a good way to welcome them to the community embrace them to the community I'm sorry I work for a small company my boss is using Drupal and he brings me to this Drupal meetup and I'm like okay and it was a crammed room and I couldn't see anything and it was okay that was nice but then later on I kind of moved on and I was like okay I'm going to go to meetup by myself and I walked in and I was kind of intimidated and anybody who knows Greggles he's awesome he walked up to me and he said something but made me realize he recognized me and I don't know if it was a meetup or a Drupal camp and I was like whoa these people recognize me I'm not some stranger because especially as a woman I hate to walk into a room and just become part of the if you don't know me I will walk into the wall and you won't see me and anyone who knows me will be like Karen will be a wall filer but I will if I don't know you I will become quiet and the fact that somebody walked up to me and made me feel welcome it was like oh okay I can do this I can be part of this group and then look at me now for me the two biggest points about why grow meetup are FaceTime is really important in an online community and secondly sustainability I don't want to run meetups forever and I need other people like at a certain point you need a certain sustainable level of people who are attending in order for other people to take over the tasks and help run things so that the group doesn't completely go away when I decide to move away from Copenhagen or whatever else is happening like having other people in the group and a variety of people in the group to be able to take over other tasks and do other things and grow and end things in other ways that may not be making the meetup grow bigger so to me I want the meetups to grow for sustainability and personal reasons I don't want to have to run this meetup forever because I'm not going to that was one of the things that came out of the survey that you just don't take all of the responsibility yourself because it's just too much work as well and you need it to be of a certain size as well and there's some variety in the subject matter that happens within the group as well if you have more people they bring different things to the table and let's talk about New Orleans for a minute one minute already part of the thank you sorry if you have a variety of types of meetup you're doing community things you want to grow it but if you want to do things like code sprints actually what you may want to do is have people who are already established in that community and a small group of them who can be very focused on what they're doing so that might be a reason why you don't want to grow that sort of meetup the nature of the meetup could definitely change things indeed should we go on to this one small idea to counter the wallflower problem I'm part of a hacker community and every meeting we start with introduce yourself in one minute everybody, the whole audience and then next time you recognize people and if you are there for the third time you can say something new or hey I'm working on this project or I'm organizing this event and that's really helpful and improve social relationship within the group and we do that too so if you do that next time you're like did they remember that I said anything it's the introduction I introduced myself but when somebody says I remember you, it's so much better the next time people show up they're like okay I don't have to sit there and be brand new again let's talk about new meetups for a minute you've started one you had one going on in the city we did unrelated and I think we all totally agree on this and everybody here started meetups so we're taking one over I think the number one rule of how do you go about starting one is to start one that is do it find some location even if it's a lot of people I don't know where to do it I don't know how to talk to people and the bottom line is there's groups.druple.org it's there as a platform there are other platforms you can use to communicate what you want to do in setting up events but that one is there, Twitter is there and finding a venue if your first meetup is like I'm going to be at such and such bar if anybody wants to talk about drupal come by and have a drink or I'm going to be at such and such cafe I'll be in the back corner and if anybody wants to come and if it's one other person huge success like it's not I don't think the barrier is that high so to me that's what I just basically came up with a venue I asked one of the drupal shops hey do you have office space that we could use after business hours and they were like sure that sounds great and I just posted it on groupsdruple.org and I said we're doing this different kind of meetups thing I've never seen before showed up one important point is you don't need to have permission from anyone to start a drupal meetup that's the whole point of drupal the person who wants to do it makes it happen it's very bureaucratic and also there may be three or four other people in your city who are thinking about doing it and if you do one then they'll come out of the woodwork that is yes on our group somebody mentioned the co-working days which is a new drupal co-working group on groupsdruple.org because more and more people have been doing it and I work from home so just the other day I posted on our group would anybody be interested in this and I got 30 responses in a day which is a lot for our group it turns out everyone else has been waiting for someone to do it and I didn't have any plans or anything I just said who's interested and now I'm hoping one of those people does pick up the mantle and make it happen I may have accidentally done so I posted this before going to Germany for two weeks so someone else can deal with it in my absence I hope we've talked about the assumption that everyone works in drupal but we mustn't forget hobbyists the guy in the garage is just typing in my own computer doing drupal next door and you don't know about it that was cute that was the biggest hobbyist right there in the back and we can talk more about promotion and stuff like that in terms of getting the word out that's of course a large part of it but in terms of the logistics of starting a meetup you simply start to tell people to meet at some location it could be a park you don't have to be inside you don't have to have internet to talk about drupal keep still keep still go outside we'll move on to the next so once you've got your events whether it's an existing group or you've just created a new one how do you make it run smoothly well I'd say one of the big things is well like we said consistency and just do it but once you're there every question, every statement is acceptable so nobody should be well scoffed at it to a degree to a degree if someone's being really rude or aggressive then that's not acceptable I'm assuming you mean more like there are no stupid questions like new people can feel well kind of acceptance and if someone does can you do a 15 minute presentation versus 15 minutes there should be somebody to kind of hold them to that 15 minutes because you get the 15 minutes that's like okay we're now running into our beer time so it's time to stop so there needs to be somebody keeping track and kind of monitoring the session sessions no stupid question that's one of my inputs I would say for mine I try to be clear about what we're doing at the meetup when I post it and spread the word about it so A that people actually know what to expect because if you are just like we're going to meet up and someone comes in expecting that someone's going to do a tutorial on how they can use or someone's going to be there that's going to help them build their website and they come their expectation may not match what you're doing and that ends up just creating disruptions and annoyances for a lot of people so setting the expectation when you even announce or explain what your meetup is I think is a big step in terms of having things actually go smoothly for example if you're hosting a sprint make sure that's clear because if people show up without laptops expecting to learn something new that's not I think Karen touched on an important point not just for women but just for anybody considering to come to a meetup it's quite a daunting first thing to do because you don't want to look dumb you don't know what level so taking that first step it's quite a big thing to actually communicate what that particular meetup is about so you can decide to take that leap at the right point it's at your level maybe it's one where then sort of on the other end of that if you are organizing the meetup be friendly to new people if you see someone who is alone go say hi it's hard to remember sometimes how nerve-wracking that first meetup really is because there's probably people there who have written modules you use and they're like little celebrities of sorts so it can be intimidating if you get new people get their details if they don't come back you can contact them you can drag them and coerce them back into the group and if they don't come back maybe you should ask them why they didn't come back that's actually an excellent point oh is that what you're talking about I also think it is important and again a parent touched on this is that being aware of time if you tell people it's a one hour meetup then end the official meetup after an hour if other people want to stay around and hang out that's fine so that those people who need to leave or expect to leave can leave without feeling like an ass because they need to go they can leave but that's socially awkward and so create some closure we're wrapping the meetup up so let's help clean up let's do whatever create some space and then be like hey if other people want to hang out what do you guys feel like doing that's fine but people who need to leave then actually have an exit and keeping to those times that you say is important because then people don't want to feel trapped they don't want to feel coerced and trapped I think it's also important to start at the right time as well otherwise you're going to have people drifting in that can be just as bad well I don't know if this is global or not but tribal folk tend to be about 15 minutes late in my experience not in Denmark no are they on time I need to work on that how's the culture there not so much a questions observation I mentioned before the kind of meetups that I do are a little bit different and one of the decisions that I made in the beginning was the idea that it was a drop in thing it's a two hour space and it's explicitly said drop in any time in these two hours so we've kind of it's the same thing if we're making clear what the time expectations are which is basically you can drop in or drop out and this has actually really helped us particularly a lot of the people who are coming from Stanford this is part of their work day and they're coming because they have work questions that they need answered and so the ability for them to know okay I can just come for 15 minutes and get what I can get and then I'll be able to go but I think being very clear about those expectations I'll just do them Excellent Thank you I think this is Paul's area of expertise How do you promote those videos? So we've done this survey and I think I'm not going to drain on too much about it really because I've produced a document which you can go and download in fact there are two there's one that gives a summary of the state of Dufal Meetups that we've been working with with Jeffrey McGuire Jam who is producing the conference Right out there in the corner on the floor So it's part of the conference Organizing Distribution of Drupal which is going to power DrupalCon We're packaging up a marketing kit so you might want to for now you can go to the session page with documents but one of the things that really came out was that a lot of people don't know about groups.drupal.org so it's a good idea to use that but a significant proportion of people who use Drupal just spend their time on Drupal.org so that's an issue and some people that run Drupal Meetups didn't know that there was an event content type within groups.drupal.org or meetups in there because that goes out onto a calendar at groups.drupal.org which you can subscribe to and it goes out onto the new Drupal site Drupal Drupal which is a great new site which plots a map of all of the meetups in the whole of the world and Drupal events as well I think and one thing that really surprised me was that only 5% of meetups actually use email to promote their events and it's a little known fact really that email is the unsung hero of marketing to give you some evidence 67% of people that receive the Drupal email open it and read it you send a tweet and it's got a very very short lifespan if you're following quite a few people it just disappears in no time and it's the same deal with Facebook so people use groups.drupal.org Twitter is pretty much the de facto place to communicate to Drupal people but if you're trying to get outside of that echo chamber then you need to be looking at other areas and one of the big things that people talked about was that meetup.com when they started using that they found instantly that the numbers grew and one of the reasons for that is because it's got quite a lot of features which draw you back constantly I went to the London meetup once I signed up on meetups.com and I keep going back because it gets my interest and it's a bit like how Facebook is always you know when you go back someone said something I know you what you have to click the link to know the one thing I will say about meetup.com is again I think that can be very regional in Denmark the only people who use meetup.com are expats like there is a PHP group on meetup.com but that is the only non expat group on meetup.com in Denmark so again that can be very regional and there really isn't a local equivalent of that kind of a thing that's going to be a really regional thing I know in the UK and in the US those can be really big things but may not be in other places you haven't heard of meetup.com just real quick it's kind of a social side I guess you can say like every month I schedule whatever and it will send out emails it's for interest groups so you can even have single women over 40 or moms with tots that work from home or whatever the tots work from home it sends out emails it sends out reminders and it's kind of nifty like that and then it also says hey I noticed you joined this group you might be interested in this group meetup.com for their meetups another issue is around planning ahead there's two reasons for that one is the person who is actually handling the marketing of the meetup can schedule a number of messages to go out with a tool say like Hootsuite which is the social media tool and that's free but it also if you plan ahead people know when your event is going to happen a long time in advance even if you don't say what's going to happen on those dates you can go back and change the node on groupsupdrup.org people can plan it into the calendar and are expecting it if you just fire a tweet out the morning before then you're not going to get the numbers that you expect and try and be consistent if you're going to send out a message try and do it at the same time every month so if you do use email send it out on the same day if you can because then people learn to expect it so as I say we've collated all this into some Google documents which you can look afterwards I think we can probably move on just one more thing too in terms of promotion is also not necessarily limiting yourself to promoting in Drupal channels there are lots of PHP groups all over the world they tend to be larger than Drupal groups other related technology groups and a lot of times open source projects are totally cool with letting you promote your events as well through those channels and so you can also do that contact some other group that's around and say hey we're doing these meetups can we post on that do you guys send emails out or whatever and you can also reach a whole crowd that you wouldn't normally hit just by talking to the other groups another simple thing that you can do is actually get people to just take a photo on their iPhone and publish that because just actually seeing the group could be enough to see oh it's a friendly place and oh I think that looks really interesting it kind of humanizes it there are people there oh my god no how were we the only one there that's probably another fear too if I go to there is anyone else going to be there next slide so this is sort of our catch all for anything that might be left anything else anyone wants to add can I do one real quick I haven't exactly figured out how to articulate or do this well but of course one of the things we mentioned before is to be consistent about your scheduling so people know when to expect things and stuff like that but one thing I've found is that there are people who have an obligation every Monday night or something like that so they just will never be able to make it on a Monday so one thing that I've been trying to do is especially with our sprints is scheduled in different locations around the area and on different days of the week in hopes that people can make it but that totally throws out the consistency entirely so I don't know yet I haven't done enough yet to determine whether or not it's going to destroy everything I wanted Paul to share that survey with someone from the DA because it's pretty clear that we need what I said this morning in the bof that we were in we need Drupal.org to be able to identify our users and tell them there's a meetup because they don't know about groups Drupal.org it seems obvious and they don't know that there's a meetup in your town and there's an event running up next to it Drupal probably does it already I see that Martha behind you is nodding her head probably let's try and work on that Oh yeah Martha being from the DA That's a great suggestion Does anybody else have any other general tips or thoughts about meetups or questions or how to Hi I come from Barcelona I've been organizing that meetups for three years now and advising other groups in Spain some subject that keeps coming back and forth is the organizer burnout because I've been doing that for three years and there is no backup and other Spanish groups have the same issue they organize something they do that for a while constantly they follow more or less the tips but they end up not doing it so maybe the summer is probably the killing point they stop in July and they don't come back so I don't know if you guys have some tips or something I would love to have answers to that too I have some advice you have more people having more people not just growing but actually asking other people hey for this meetup I'm actually going to be out of town but would you mind the venue set up and all these things but could you actually just be the person to greet people and make sure that stuff happens we're having other people actually help in planning stuff not asking someone I wouldn't advise just asking someone hey you want to take it all over but having other people help you run it so they actually understand what it means it means that when you're not there for them to step up or have more than one person who can step up so it's like if you have people who are sort of helping run the meetup and one of those people steps out there's still two people to help make that meetup actually happen and it's not something that's going to happen naturally in most instances it's something I think you need to cultivate and you need to walk into it you need to identify people who would be down with that a lot of people are willing to help but won't volunteer to help and simply asking makes a huge difference it's like that chorus and dragging I think it's being prepared to actually let go as well some people end up doing everything because control freaks there's no say it as you think succession planning is key and I didn't have a question but instead an invitation you guys have talked about kits in other situations around the Drupal Ladder for example and I know that Megan has talked a little bit about kits for meetups as well which probably helps with some of the issues you're mentioning and even the transition of leadership do you have just a second to describe a little bit about the kits that you're thinking about well certainly on the marketing side with the campaign organizing kit describes in great detail the sort of messaging that you'd want to do around a bigger event but the I intend to translate some of that so that it could be used in the context of a meetup so yeah this is all things that are in the pipeline and I think Jam and I will be working quite closely on that as well and I would say Jam's given a thumbs up that was on the floor the Drupal Ladder is a really interesting initiative to get people involved in contributing right now contributing back to core especially if someone is starting a new meetup we're trying to think of something else to do it is actually a really good idea that can attract people and we're setting up there are lessons that are already written and there's activities for people to do at meetup already written we have documentation on how do you run these learn and issue sprints as we call them they exist so there's sort of in the sense there's sort of a kit around that which we're working to improve and we have our plans and sort of our roadmap for how to improve that stuff but that's a great way to just be like I don't really know what to do at a meetup but you can use the Drupal Ladder resources on Drupal Ladder.org as well if you want to yeah I'm just thumbing through the print out from the code advisor I think it's a very useful document because it tells you what sort of things you should be doing on Facebook, on Twitter and the various channels and thinking about things like the tone and the frequency and how do you actually grow your audience in the social media channels so you can just change the word camp and put meetup almost there and I think we can probably add some extra flesh to it to bring it more into relevant to meetups we have time for one more one more question, it's Europe well actually it's an answer to his question what we do in the Netherlands we have the Drupal Tech Talk which is basically monthly or bi-monthly it's basically for devs only it's not that hard but that's what happens because it's highly technical and what we do is we ask companies where the developers are working can we have the dev talk at your office at night and provide us with food and beer of course and that works actually quite well because the workers at the company pick up the organization of that tech talk so it's I'm sorry for the word so it sort of helps sustain itself yeah it helps sustaining itself and all the companies are actually saying can it be at our place the next time because it's also a great way to promote your own company of course and have all the developers in your company and what I like also very much about that setup is there are no managers involved so you can talk about clients and problems and the the market in the Netherlands is very small so it happens quite a lot that clients hop over from one Drupal shop to another oh my god you got that client now that's actually quite cool that's another reason to have meetups and no managers involved that's basically it so that's working in them cool that's a great idea where can you find those kids we had on the previous slide here up on the session page for this session we're going to the second bitly link there just goes to this session page we're going to update that with some links and information as you guys are getting that together these documents are part of a bigger initiative so it's a bit of a moving feast so these URLs send back to our page on the Munich site I think and as the document locations change we'll update them on the Munich site so you'll be able to find them as they get better and we are full out of time so please do remember to rate the session as with all other ones and thank you so much for coming yes thanks a lot