 Welcome to my talk. I called it making connections and it's kind of a reflection on the last 10 years of what I did in the WordPress community. So I put quite a lot of images of the last 10 years in there, so bear with me. I hope you can see them on the projector correctly. Otherwise, the slides will be available afterwards as well. I'm Simon. This was me back in 2012 when I started my very first WordPress meetup, but before that it took me quite some time. I started with WordPress in 2008 and it took me about three years to realize that other people use WordPress as well. I mean, I was aware that there are other people working with WordPress, but I did not expect them to be in my near vicinity, not in my own town. And it took me to my first WordCamp, WordCamp Cologne back in 2011 to realize there are other folks out there using WordPress, which was a strange moment for me. It took me another year to organize my very first WordPress meetup on November 15, 2012, and I never really stopped since then. I co-founded five meetups, two of them being WordPress meetups, three being WooCommerce meetups. I've organized two WordCamps, both of which nearly killed me. They were very stressful, so I'm even more grateful to local organizers like all of you to chip in the time and do the hard work. Back in 2012, I wrote a blog post, which felt like very WordPressy. Don't even try to read it. It's in German and completely useless. But we used Doodle to find our first date, and we sticked with the day of month ever since, so we had, I think, the second Tuesday of the month, and we used that over and over again. So that's the bare minimum, as I said. But let's go in a bit more detail, maybe, preparations. There are some things you might want to do upfront before you start your meetup, or maybe not before the first meeting, but at some point in time. This is the artwork we had produced a couple of years into our first meetup, where we said, oh, we need a nice logo, and we want to have some fancy header graphics for our social media and stuff like that. That's not something you have to do, by the way. Quite important on the list of preparations is find co-organizers. You pretty likely have a couple of people in mind already. You can organize a meetup on your own. I did that for a couple of years, but it's super stressful, especially if you want to do more than the bare minimum. It's nice to have a group of people around you can trust, and you can take maybe a month off if you have to do that for holidays or your own mental health sake. I already mentioned the date on the slide before, but I wanted to reiterate on that. I think it's very good to find a good date for my second meetup in Stuttgart. We had, I think, the third Wednesday of the month every month, and at some point we switched to another, I think, the second Tuesday. So we just moved that thing a week forward, but we doubled our attendees by doing just that, because it turned out that at the same time there was a blogging meetup. And there seems to be an intersection between blogging and WordPress. So have a look at your local calendars and find out if there's any collision in there. If having speakers for a meetup is your cup of tea and it doesn't have to be, it's super useful to invite them upfront. That way you have a set topic for a meetup, and you can simply go from there. You can write an invite, which I think is the next thing on the slide. And set expectations for the attendees you want to have at your meetup, so they know what they're up to. And if you're super fancy, and that's something we just started right before the pandemic, you can record talks that were held at your meetup. Like usually talks at WordCams are recorded. Those can be put up to WordPress TV afterwards. So other people can watch it or your attendees can rewatch it if they forgot something or want to recheck on some points made during the presentation. After the meetup there are some hyper-care things you can do in order to maximize the experience. It's a very American thing to say. Keep a close look at the comment section on meetup.com. For some communities there's quite a lot of chatter afterwards. People asking questions, people asking for maybe a link to a plugin that was mentioned, or they're asking for help with a specific problem. And being there in this comment section is very helpful. Same of course if you use other social networks, if you're like very active on Twitter or Facebook or Mastodon maybe. Be there, be engaged and help the folks who need your help. Something I think many even active organizers aren't aware of is ratings on meetup.com. If you attended a meetup, meetup.com will ask you for a one to five star rating and I think you can write some short text in there as well. This is very helpful for you as an organizer, but if you're just an attendee it's also very helpful to give your feedback on the speaker, on the topic, which helps your local organizers to improve their meetup. Very well organized meetups have blog posts they publish afterwards. And I have to say my meetups never did that. We're not that organized, we're just a mess, we're all over the place. But I think it's a very nice gesture to have like a written form at least for the main things discussed during the meetup. Think of it as like show notes for your meetup if you are into podcasts or something. And of course if you record the talk then make sure to upload it in some kind of timely fashion. If I don't upload our video the next day people will start asking for it on meetup.com. It drives me crazy and I usually say guys please wait a couple of days but people expect it to be there so it's nice to have it there. Let's go back to the preparation phase. And again yeah you can see that at least somewhat. Picking the right venue is super crucial for your meetup. And that depends I think on the country, on the region and even on the city you're in. But this image was taken in a local bar in Frankfurt where we went for our meetup I think in the second year that we had. And it's really important the venue you pick sets the stage for the meetup you want to have. If you were to organize a meetup in like let's say this room I think it would be quite natural to expect some kind of speaker and attendee hierarchy which is not necessarily something you would like to have might want to have. So think about the different settings and the different possibilities. I think for our Frankfurt meetup we had like everything imaginable. We started out in a private university which was really nice because we had nice desks. We had a projector we were able to show the people what we're doing. But also this private university was in a part of Frankfurt called Frankfurt-Pröngesheim which I never heard of before. And it took like 30 to 45 minutes by train from the central station to get there which might have been a reason why we spend like the first 12 months of our meetup all by ourselves. We were like four or five guys there and no one ever showed up. No no don't get me wrong that was great we had at a blast. We were able to try some things break some things learn a lot of stuff. But in the end it was not that cool if you want to have like an audience. So after this year we had to switch venues and we chose a bar in central Frankfurt which was really cool because yay a bar with like food and drinks and it was way closer to main station so people just went there. We grew substantially but that had its downsides as well because that bar had football screenings every couple of months during our meetup and I don't care for football at all. Not very German of me I know. And sometimes these screenings collided with our meetup sessions which meant that 90 minutes of that evening were just lost for me because I sat in that bar all the other folks were watching football and I was like just I don't care. So I was also quite happy to switch locations after another year again. This time we went to a local agency they provided us with a room we had to set up a couple of things by ourselves every month which was totally fine. We were able to have presentations again because we had projector and it was way quieter in the room which was also very nice if you want to talk to folks. So keep all of that in mind if you have like more of a school setting with a person in front talking to your audience maybe more of a workshop kind of situation where people bring their laptops work on sites or even want to do it more like eating with friends which is also completely fine and as I heard that's a very popular option here in Italy which is very cool I envy that. So these are the different possibilities and I brought another picture from my archive which is one of the last meetups we had in person before the pandemic started over in Stuttgart. Our meetup in Stuttgart grew a lot over time we started out as six or seven folks and before the pandemic hit we had regular meetups with 80 to 100 people and it's hard to find a venue for that because you have to cram all of these people in some kind of space and make it nice so we had that in at my old employers we had to place chairs every month which was fine but it was a lot of space for all to get around and there are a couple of requirements you want to keep in mind if you pick a new location. Top of the list for me at least is accessibility which I think is something the WordPress Foundation expects us to do as well so to have a room that's accessible for I don't know wheelchair users or people that just have a hard time climbing up a lot of stairs or something not a hard requirement but something I learned the hard way is pick a central location or at least something people have an easy time to get to don't go to Frankfurt point design because no one will join you there and I already mentioned that pick a suitable size for the meetup group you expect it's quite awkward in a big room to have just like four people sitting scattered around while at the same time if you have a room that's suited for 20 folks and you have a hundred people attending that's also complicated and the price which is something we had a hard time at now after the pandemic after the harder times of the pandemic because in general we don't have any money to pay for the venue if you have like a bar or a restaurant usually you don't have to pay anything because they just expect you to order some drinks some food and then everything's fine make sure that's the case up front but for a room for like 100 to 120 people which is what I was looking for it's really hard to find something suitable the foundation will pay some of the expenses for a I think limited amount of time so if that's something you have to rely on that's okay but maybe make sure you find a venue sponsor to get around some good sources I think I already mentioned all of them small bars yay great idea universities like this one also usually a good source for venues public libraries often have some kind of event space at least in Germany they do maybe we're strange I don't know which is also a good thing to get your meetup started I already mentioned agencies or companies maybe your employer or an employer of one of your co-organizers has a suitable room for you also a great choice and an odd one in this list living rooms I talked to Matt Malinwick a couple of years ago I think it was in Paris 2017 and he mentioned the way he set up the first ever WordPress meetup which was in his actual living room so if you are fine with strangers in your house maybe that's a venue possibility as well now that all the venue stuff is settled let's take a closer look at the format and maybe you can see me doing some kind of dance during the presentation I don't know what I did there so in Germany we usually have a speaker per night at our meetups that's not necessarily the right way to do it because I think there isn't the right way having a panel is also quite a nice solution for that you don't have to rely on a single person you can throw a couple of chairs there and have two or three people share the stage and discuss a topic or you open up the discussion to the whole group which is also quite a nice thing to do and have all people chime in with their experiences and their expertise the site clinic is a format that is quite popular in Germany in the last couple of years we have that at multiple meetups so people can bring their own websites and have them, I don't know, torn apart sound super negative have them be criticized in a constructive way so folks chime in with their expertise and say oh your search engine optimizations could be better oh your performance might be a bit better let me show you how to do it which is usually quite a nice experience for the people there and there's endless possibilities so just do your own thing again a couple of images this one was during our meetup I think this one from Munich is one of the best examples for the get together and just eat something it's the most German meetup experience I ever had there were pretzels and beer, lots of beer and they were just sitting outside and having a good time which was really nice and a panel discussion we had in Stuttgart during the last couple of months the last two, almost three years during the pandemic we had to switch things up quite a bit a lot of meetups went dormant for quite a while we in Stuttgart did not do that we switched to an online format immediately and I'm sorry I'm in this slide three times it will never happen again I promise we tried a couple of different things I think for the first couple of months I interviewed people during our meetup which is also an interesting thing but it felt like something you can only do for an online meetup and after that we realized that it's a nice opportunity to have because you can invite people from basically all over the world and we had speakers from New Zealand and Southern America joining our meetup German folks who moved overseas but who were able to give a nice presentation and that would never happen if we just had local speakers with us in the same room this is something I want to reiterate because starting a meetup can be quite hard that's why I called the section Hang In There and I want to encourage you to if you start a new group or revive an old group be consistent be there every time regardless of the amount of people showing up there was one meetup once in Frankfurt where was the only person there because no one else came that was okay I can cope with that but you have to be there you have to make sure it's a fixed date at least for us in Germany we do usually monthly meetups and it helps to have a fixed date every month like the second Wednesday, the first Tuesday whatever you choose, just stick with it if it works I personally also like to have a fixed venue so people don't have to look up directions every other month they know they have to get there at the same time to the same place and so on but it's also absolutely fine to switch venues up every now and then because your venue sponsor maybe has to have some other things done in the same room I already said that, just show up just be there, talk to the people at your meetup help them with their problems and they will come back that's basically the main message here in conclusion I brought a quote of Gandhi which I'm sure is something he said be the meetup you want to see in the world no two meetups are the same not in the same country and not even like neighboring cities the vibe will be different based on the venue, based on the agenda you said based on the way you approach the people showing up to your meetup and I think that's wonderful I travel around Germany once a year usually to visit every single meetup and it's always an experience because all the meetups are different in a wonderful way and I really love that about the meetup program Don't get caught up in perfectionism I wrote that down on that slide for myself mainly because I suffer from that I suffer from bad perfectionism and that's not necessary at all because the folks showing up at your meetup want the meetup to be great and they will be absolutely fine if you don't have fancy food provided for them if you don't have the fanciest of drinks or the fanciest of signage don't bother just be there, just talk to them and you can always improve later on and don't forget that the most important thing at a meetup are the people showing up or the people who want to show up so be there for them people, great so this is my final slide I promise some examples for let's call it late-stage meetup perfectionism the community in Glasgow had some roll-up banners printed which are completely neutral they use them at their meetup they use them at their word camp and they just have the basic amount of information they join the community with a couple of links to their meetup.com to their twitter account and stuff like that which is really useful I want to get something like that when I'm growing up at our meetup in Stuttgart we had the opportunity to do digital signage in the office building we were using we had a lot of displays there and we built something with WordPress to show some messages on these screens and these messages varied from this is the way to the toilets to this is what we'll do next time and the time after so that was a very cool project and now finally this is what I'm working on right now which proves to be quite difficult now that the pandemic situation gets better we want to return to in-person events while still holding the audience we gained during the pandemic which is sometimes very remote not in our own city so we're working on hybrid meetups which is a really hard thing to do and if you start a new meetup don't try to start with that but that's something I have quite a lot of fun with at the moment so this is the last 10 years of me organizing meetups thank you very much for your time and if you have any questions we can get to them now or later I'll be here for a couple of hours still thank you thank you Zivon any questions? ciao I'm Patricia from Geneva Experience Meetup Organizer and I have a question about when you go over 50 people isn't the foundation expecting you to to be a word camp instead of a meetup I don't think that they expect you to be a word camp because then we have to have a word camp every month I know that for example the meetup in New York has also more than 100 attendees quite regularly and they are still a meetup so I don't think you have to do a word camp automatically but you're encouraged to if you are a group of that size we tried a meetup day in 2019 in Geneva we were like 60 because when we do monthly 15 is not enough a lot of energy for only 10-15 people and especially post-pandemic but we were thinking to do now again a longer meetup like quarterly or something instead of monthly but then if it goes over 50 I have that memory or maybe I'm wrong about this so it's no problem for you to be like 60-70 I don't think that's a problem or at least I ignored it if it was a problem for now I will ask the community thank you I'm coming from a small town and usually it's very difficult you say interviewing also people can be a solution like getting the local business also interview it or online you have this idea you use it online or also in presence I'm sorry at some point you say that you interviewed a lot of people but will you do also in presence like calling local business or involving other meetup or something like that or you don't suggest to do that I would suggest to do that and that's something we plan to do as well so we will try to get again more involved in the local community and try to get everyone together again okay thank you thank you Zimo, thank you all