[Meetup Scala Days 2014] - How to find speakers? / How to keep it running?

[Renato Cavalcanti]

Many user groups fade away because of low activity. A community only exists when there are enough iteration between the members, therefore it's important to keep it running. 

Find speakers is not easy neither. You can start with your local pool, but depending on the size of your city/region you can exhaust it very fast. 

Tips:

• As user group organiser, you probably attend a couple of conferences a year. Invite speakers personally whenever you met them at conferences and keep in touch.
• You don't need to have always a rock start or top expert, everybody can talk and share their experiences in your user group. Promote a friendly environment so everybody feels comfortable to talk.
• Keep an eye on conferences happening close to your region, an international speaker may be around. Offer him to give a preview of his talk in your user group. 
• Not all events need to be a talk. Hacking sessions or just a beer are also valid user group activities. Why not a barbecue?
• "Bring your scala code events", in this kind of event members show what they have done professionally or only for fun. Works very well. No presentation, only show code to peers. Can be done in a pub for instance.
• Check with Typesafe if they can send you a rock star. :-)

Renato

[Andy Hicks]

Some more tips:

• Have the meetup at a consistent date, if people know that it will be the 'first Monday of the month' then its easier for them to plan around it. (it also make it easier organise as part of the event has already decided). If you can get the same location then that also helps 
  
• From experience the best nights to get people out are Wednesday/Thursday. Fridays people are always busy, Monday/Tuesday they are still recovering from the weekends. As for weekends then you always get lots of people saying it 'family time' however for something like an 'all day hack' then we've had a good turnout.  
  

• Remember that it should be as much as social event as a talk. A good speaker will get somebody to come for the first time, but an interesting chat with one or two people afterwards will be the thing that make them come back the following months. 
  

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[Sebastian Nozzi]

But we often have the problem of not finding enough people / talks... how do you deal with that? That makes it impossible to offer meetups "regularly"...

We kind of switched to an "on demand" (lazy) mode. If enough people / talks, then a meetup is organized. Not sure how well it's working, though.

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[Paulo "JCranky" Siqueira]

More often than not, I find that you can get speakers from the attendees them selves. During a meeting break, try talking to people individually to also broadcast the information that you are always open for people to speak. That has helped us a lot.

[]s,

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Paulo "JCranky" Siqueira
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