Growing your user group

[Marius Soutier (CGN)]

Hi there,

I'm Marius, organizer of the local user group in Cologne, Germany. We've been meeting for over three years now but are still struggling to build and engage a bigger member base. It's usually the same 3 + 2-3 varying people at any given meetup, and most of them aren't using Scala professionally so it' only me and two other guys who are doing any presentations. The rest is very passive. In Cologne there are only very few (next to none) companies using Scala, and most people seem to be more interested in PHP, Ruby, and Java.

We meet once a month, but I had to leave Cologne for 8 months due to a project, and during that time the group was completely inactive and I'm now trying to reboot it.

Here are the things we've tried so far:

* Moved from bars into a coworking space so we can hold presentations

* Contacted people on LinkedIn and Xing in the greater area (various other cities are close to Cologne, e.g. Bonn and Düsseldorf)

* Spread the word by talking to local people at other meetups and conferences

* Account on Xing and Twitter (https://twitter.com/scalacgn)

Next step will be to create a group on meetup.com which will hopefully increase our visibility.

Do you guys have more suggestions? Any input is welcome!

Cheers

- Marius

[Konrad 'ktoso' Malawski]

Hey Marius,

at least in Poland (Kraków where “all” user groups agreed and moved together to meetup, and Warsaw later on)

meetup.com had helped us a lot in terms of letting attendees from other groups know about our other initiatives.

Also, foreigners (as in UK / US / Swedes too) when they visit a city they might randomly check meetup,

whereas finding a group’s site is a bit harder. We’ve won quite a few speakers due to such “let’s randomly check what’s up in krakow”.

Good luck!

— k

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Konrad 'ktoso’ Malawski

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[Mario Camou]

Hi Marius,

One thing we've found useful in Madrid is collaborating with the local Java User Group. We've given one joint talk (a brief intro to Scala) and will be giving some more. That way you can gain visibility with people who are working with Java and are interested in Scala.

Regarding meetup.com, be prepared to have many people sign up but have many less actually go to the meetings. In our case we have ~150 people signed up. In the last meetup we had 40 people show up out of ~80 that said they would go. For our next meetup we currently have 35 signed up out of which we expect about 10-15 to actually show up.

Cheers,

-Mario.

[Paulo "JCranky" Siqueira]

For us (Scaladores, São Paulo, Brazil), meetup.com definitely helped increase visibility. Its like Mario said: there will be many people signed up and much less participating, but it seems worth it.

Something else we tried just yesterday is being hosted by a big guy. Our meeintg yesterday happened at the Google office in São Paulo, and that alone seemed to bring a few new faces to the meeting.

[]s,

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[]s,

Paulo "JCranky" Siqueira
youtube | site | lojinha

[Marius Soutier]

Hey Konrad,

thanks for the ideas. It’s alive now :)

ww.meetup.com/Scala-User-Group-Koln-Bonn

Cheers

- Marius

[Vlad Patryshev]

I would just go to other meetups (like Java and/or Haskell and/or "functional programming") and ask if I can announce our meetup there. Not that we have a problem; our problem is that there's always not enough space to accommodate everyone.

-Vlad