Hello, I saw a post about this group over on
RoR Link and figured I would introduce myself.Â
In the last half year, I've taken over the
Upstate Ruby meetup group which is based in Greenville, SC. The original hosts of the group are still involved, but COVID sort of killed the group (along with a lot of other groups in the area) and the original hosts didn't have the bandwidth to restart it.
I'm still largely trying to figure out the right way to do this so that we can build back our local meetup scene but not get burned out myself. So far, I've settled on allowing for an inconsistent schedule. I know the conventional wisdom is if you want to build a community you need to have a consistent schedule of meeting regularly. And that wisdom is probably correct. But in the end, I decided that wasn't sustainable for me.
The upside is that flexibility has allows the meetings to adapt to opportunity.
For example, the first meetup I held I did in conjunction with the local Linux user's group,
UCLUG, sort of crashing their normal monthly meeting. That group already collaborates with a
nearby town's LUG (Columbia) meaning it was a collaboration of three groups. I did
a talk on Kamal (MRSK as the time). I purposely picked that topic because it has a lot of interest from Ruby folks (being a creation of DHH and written in Ruby) but also has interest for others such as Linux folks who don't care about Ruby but they do care about app deployment. That sort of combined group was pretty successful with about 15-20 people showing in Greenville plus others online from Columbia and other places in the upstate. Lesson learned there was that collaboration with other groups on topics of cross interest is a good strategy.
The next meetup I did was more low key. Rails World had just ended and videos were posted online. I always want to watch conference videos but often don't make the time. Therefore I decided to do
a watch party for a meetup. Called it "Rails World: Greenville Edition". Since it was more specific to Ruby we didn't get a ton of people, but OTOH it was very low-key in terms of prep work. Put a few videos on my computer (downloaded just in case Internet was flaky) brought some popcorn to make it fun and 5 or 6 of us hung out and watch 2 videos and just socialized a bit. If your looking for a low-key "filler" event a watch party of conference videos I recommend and will do again.
Of course I've also tried to encourage members to present talks. Next week we have one of our members
do a talk on Rails upgrades (if you're in the area, come on down). By not having a consistent schedule we were able to pick a day that worked for the speaker which I think makes it easier to get someone to talk. We currently have about 7 people signed up for that which is pretty good considering the small tech community here.
The final thing I wanted to suggest was connecting with the local Ruby folks via local tech chat groups. Here in Greenville, we have a Slack group called
HackGreenville where around 180 daily active users (according to Slack) interact on all sort of different tech topics. We have a Ruby channel in there with many members which is a great way to stay connected between meetups and with folks that can't attend meetups.
Anyway, hopefully my experiences might spark some ideas for things to do in your own area and I hope I'm able to learn ideas other folks in this group have so thanks for creating it.
Eric