 I'm John Biddle, I'm the organizer of the Buffalo PHP Meetup, one of the co-founders of Buffalab with Mike in the back there. Senior engineer at Centicore, and I'm going to talk about herding cats. The lessons I've learned organizing meetup groups over the last eight years or so. So you're sitting home alone, eating ice cream, Googling to see if there's local groups that exist for people like you, let's say, since and when that exists, but you don't find that group, but you still want to surround yourself with like-minded people that you want to learn from, and maybe you want to teach them something too. So start the group. It's not that hard. There's a bunch of tools that exist. Meetup.com is the most popular one, but everyone hates it, but everyone uses it. There's a lot of problems with it. I'll talk about another tool that we get to in the future, but it costs about 12 bucks a month to get started if you buy it for six months. It makes it pretty easy to create events. So when you get to start it and you create your first venue, I highly recommend a common public place like a coffee shop, spot coffee here locally, just so people when they join your event aren't scared of location and the people themselves, so they just shut down. So that's probably step one. When you create your event for the first time, have a descriptive title, explain a bit about what the event is, who you are, where it is, when it is, how to get there, how to park when you get there, and a bit of a description of what you look like so people can find you, which is really important. And then I forget what the next slide is, so we'll find out in a second. There we go. So be pretty casual with the first event. Just introduce yourselves. Get a skill level for the people that are there. Get to know each other. These may be people that you're going to spend a lot of time with over the years if it gets big. But don't get discouraged if only one or two people show up. Do the same thing you were going to do if 400 people were going to show up. Introduce yourself, explain what the group is about, and get to know each other. That's really important if you want the group to live along well. But remember that you're running a show, so bring content at least for the first few meetups because your users aren't generating content. You don't want to just talk about the weather for two hours. You really need to have a reason for people to show up at your event. But if you're not a subject matter expert, bring something that you guys can do as a group. It's one of the most amazing learning experiences you can have as an adult to do things as a group. And you can have the more experienced members help out that group and they'll learn a ton that they didn't know before just by helping out other people. Let's see. So when you go up to the next venue, when you get a bit bigger, still stay in a kind of public space, but go to a common meetup place like Co-Work Buffalo locally or Z80 Lab, those events as well. That way you're not scaring off new members, but you have a lot more space and room to grow if it gets it that way. And bring food. It costs maybe 20 bucks a month to feed 10 people, which is about the average size here at Buffalo. And everyone comes when there's free beer. There isn't free beer tonight. Boo to that. But be nice to Troy. So this is mainly for tech meetups, but if you have a recruiter coming, don't push him away. Be nice to him and treat him like any other member. Worst case scenario, you get a new person interested in the topic. Best case scenario, one of your attendees gets a job offer. But it's going to be rough when you start out. You're going to have scheduling problems and you won't have enough content and people won't know how to generate content or know how to get there. But remember, it'll get better over time when you have people generating your own content, when you get help from other people in the community, when you get help from other organizers, when you'll finally settle down in the spot. And it's amazing when you finally get there. And I've run out of Simpson slides after this. So I'm going to talk about a bit more specifically on how PHP, on how Buffalo PHP runs their group. So we run it every second Tuesday of the month. The first 45 minutes of the meetup are beginner content. The next 30 minutes are an introduction and food and networking stuff for non-technical users. The next 45 minutes are advanced content for the really advanced users if new people want to stick around in the camera. And anything after that, I usually stick around as the organizer. If anyone just wants to talk shop or has any horror stories, by the way, if you notice this mic, it wasn't near my face at all, during this entire thing, so sorry for people in the back. So why do I divide content? So that the advanced people don't get tired during the beginner content and the newbies don't get unbelievably scared when I throw around big words at them. So two tools that are kind of local, the first one is kind of local, nextbox.com is what we're trying to use to replace a meetup. It's great, it's developed by a couple of guys in Rochester, Lale Brown, and what are they? Oh yeah, I'm sorry, I forgot your name, terrible sorry. And the other one is Doodle, which is a great scheduling tool. And the most important part to remember is to have fun. You are passionate about this. That's why you started this in the first place. So in the frustration you get from organizing the event, don't lose sight of the fact that this is supposed to be fun for you. And that's it, I've been Sean Doodle. If you have any questions, see me outdoors.