I was on the board of directors for a local Linux Users Group and can echo the difficulties in finding a venue. In a city full of empty office spaces on a weekday night it was virtually impossible to find a stable meeting location. Without a stable meeting location you are much less likely to establish a core group since people do not like to have to learn how to get to different venues. Mozilla hosted us at one point but the political tides changed there and we got kicked out. I think having strong buy in from someone in the C-suite of a company is the only real way to do it. Otherwise you are beholden to the changing winds of the company.
In the end we are now in a stable location in the local library, but only because we had someone on the inside. Previously when we approached the library we were stone walled without someone to grease the wheels.
I do believe that it should be a mandate for the municipality to provide meeting space for local non-profit and special interest groups. In many locations you can no longer pool some money with your buddies to buy a piece of land to build your clubhouse on. In my city there are many such clubs which were formed 50 years ago — the sailing club, the badminton club, the lawn bowling club, etc — but land is too scarce in many places now and we need the municipalities to pick up the slack.
That's what "community centers" are for!
A town next to mine has one of those, and any town resident can rent a room for a reasonable amount of money ($20 to $70/hour depending on room size). So as long as at least one group member is from the right town, the room is guaranteed.
In my experience $20-$70 an hour is too much. We were offered $50/hour meeting space at a local incubator, but the numbers never added up.
It is hard enough to get people to show up if it is free, requiring people to pay to attend a casual meetup would not work in our situation. Who is going to foot the multi thousand dollar per year bill for meeting space?
This is why municipalities need to provide this space for free. It is a very hard burden to get a single person to foot the bill for meeting space, whereas the municipality can charge everyone $50/year on their property taxes and build meeting spaces which everyone gets to use. People love to moan about taxes but I think this is one of those problems solved better in the collective.
Why should my tax dollars pay for your special interest group to have free meetups? How would we distribute access to this newly created resource equitably?
I don't disagree with the concept, but it gets hairy in the particulars. The problem is that of course we rarely ever get to vote on issues such as "should we build a community meeting space?" so we never really get to understand how the electorate truly feels.
Because they'll also pay for your special interest group meetup. If you don't have a special interest group, a low friction meeting place available makes you more likely to start one. Public space allows for a municipality to build a community.
Alternative take. I pay every month for a meeting space I cannot use because it has long term commitments when I need to have an annual meeting.
Because it's not just this but a bunch of random groups? My local library has events in meeting rooms for ESL speakers to practice English, baby book reading clubs, board game meetups, study sessions, sessions to help people with tech problems, immunisation, and of course .... book clubs.
The rule is simple: you running a non-commercial event? You can use the space for free. Commercial component? Pay an hourly rate that comes out to ~$5 per person or so. There are some restrictions on events based on space but it's an obviously good thing in the same way a public park or water fountains are.
As far as distribution, you could make these same objections about any shared space, from parks to roads.
In this scenario, contention for the space is the best possible problem to have, as it means the community is using it.
I'd suggest providing public space is a very important role of local government, to foster community interactions.
Why should your tax dollars pay education, healthcare, police, road repairs, etc? Because the society will be better off and you live in a society.
The education of a child your taxes pay for will pay off exponentially when this kid becomes a professional.
The meeting space your taxes pay could facilitate the creation of the next revolutionary software tech.
Taxes should be considered an investment that pays off not financially but by improving your life overall.
A bookable calendar and a maximum amount of monthly bookable slots per organization. Nothing revolutionary really.
Because you unironically live in a society, and it's give and take. Special interest groups are part of a civilized society.
The other solution is to get sponsors. In return for paying $50 a month (or whatever), they get to put a representative in front of a group of people for five minutes to pitch heir products. Or maybe they pay for the food at a place where you have a separate sponsor for the venue.
This is much the same way that DevOpsDays and other similar conferences are operated, just on a smaller scale of a few hours instead of a couple of days.
Just the thing meetups needed, corporate ads.
They actually do! The town waives the fee if event "primarily serves town's community". You only pay if there are many out-of-towners whose their taxes don't pay for community center.
I didn't mention this in my original comment because it seems irrelevant in context of programming meetup - what are the chances most of the members would be all from the a single town?
But can you really guarantee it at the same time every week?
But unless you're going to ask for contributions, this means the organizers are footing the bill every time -- and in my opinion, once you start collecting money you've doubled the complexity.
Japan has these. There’s local community centers basically everywhere which can be used as a meeting space for a token fee (I think it was like $5/hour last I checked). My local center in the middle of Tokyo is just three floors of rooms that people can use for whatever they need.
I'm interested and I need this. Do you have some additional info for me maybe? Thank you!!!
This is the one near my place. I suspect you can find a similar one nearby: http://sdh-takaido.sakura.ne.jp/kumin.html
(It was a bit more expensive than I remembered, but still extremely reasonable)
Thanks for the link! It's very reasonable, unfortunately a bit limited in terms of time (usual the programming meetups I organized went up until almost midnight). Still good to know that these kind of options exist.
You can generally find one by searching for ‘{town name}公民館’. I used one daily for a couple of months once as the internet in my new place wasn’t ready yet. Sometimes I would just ‘borrow’ the WiFi while staying inside my car. The internet is generally very fast and you’re not competing for traffic with anyone else.
A friend also organises painting classes in his local one.
In 2024 Japan you could also just buy a house for 10k USD and call it your club house :p
True, but you’d have to travel for hours to get there, which makes it kinda inconvenient unless you want to have a permanent club meeting.
“Permanent club meeting” is a nice euphemism for cult compound.
Not in Tokyo. The meme is that you basically need to pay somebody if you want to sit down and get some peace and quiet for a bit in the afternoon.
Even when a company offers meeting space, they can be overbearing about it.
I was involved a tiny bit in reviving a local interest group of high-powered programmers. Another person, who did all the actual hard work, of meeting organizing, got meeting space at a Big Tech company...
Unfortunately, as a Big Tech (and in the surveillance capialism space), it was complete with signing in with security in the lobby, getting a guest badge for the visit, going to whatever presumable compartmentalized area, and the company presumably doing all the snooping things they could think of...
Every time I considered going to a meeting, the idea of going out of my way to be Big Tech's b-word, before I even got into the meeting, was a turn-off.
I like your community centers idea. The public libraries here have some meeting rooms. Sometimes someone at a university department can open up meeting space to the public.
Someone else mentioned makerspaces, which is an idea I hadn't thought of, but maybe complementary to makerspaces, as well as great marketing for adding members.
This doesn't sound unreasonable to me if you were using a private companies space. The company providing the floor space and security.
Sure there may be easier venues but I wouldn't expect less than this if I was going to be using a company's boardroom for my meeting space.
It's a bit strange to not have a lower-security more accessible space, though. The previous company I worked at (which was quite security-conscious) hosted meetups like this in the cafeteria which, while not something that normally was accessible to the general public, could be opened up as such without exposing any other part of the building.
Yeah, but with some companies, you expect them to abuse the information they gain in the process of getting your name, getting your photo, etc.
I've seen meetups, hosted by Amazon in Boston IIRC, where upon exiting the elevator, you were unexpectedly required to sign an NDA-ish contract in order to leave the vestibule. Now preregistration deadlines, signing in/out, license capture, headshots, and NDAs, aren't necessarily unreasonable for a company. Nor bag searches, nor surrendering electronics to lockers. But as expectations diverge, between "private companies space" and "I'm just here for a room of conversation and pizza", the energy barrier to attending, discomfort, and absence, may increase. Microsoft Boston in contrast, was built with access-control elevators and a floor of conference rooms, and so could provide "just name the meetup at the desk and go up".
how many Watts did you require for the meet up?
I laughed when I saw that phrase also. And, to answer your question, it's dead simple: 1.21 Gigawatts
I wanted to talk about a general problem, without identifying a particular group. If I'd given it more milliseconds of thought, I would've said "niche", and of interest to that particular Big Tech.
I never realized this was something that was needed so bad, but yeah. In my city we have a bunch of privately owned venues that you can rent, but the cost ranges from reasonable to very not reasonable. To be fair, a lot of my local technical meetups just hang out at one of the quieter restaurant/bars in the area and it seems to work ok for them. The downside is you don't have any way to present anything. Another group I regularly go to is a local DefCon chapter that rents out space above a "barcade" (arcade + bar) and aside from being a bit hot in the summer, the vibes are great and the community doubly so.
I know some groups meet at a city library (many of them have meeting rooms that can be booked for free or for a small fee).
We had this same problem and ended up starting a (non-profit) makerspace where we now host several meetups. It's win/win really. We are all about building community and bringing people together with similar interests is a great way to do that. It has also helped us get more paying members.
Most of my local libraries close fairly early these days, I think the latest any of them are open is 8:00 pm. Because of that, the 7-8 pm time slot is popular and rooms get filled up pretty fast.
I recently found out that there's a local group for the 2600 Hacker Quarterly magazine that meets at the same Barnes and Noble cafe that my book club meets at monthly. They're open until 9:00 pm, which (in the case of the book club) gives ample time to talk about the books we just read, vote on upcoming books, and catch up on events in the area. If everyone has something to contribute, we can easily fill 2 hours of time.
I have been to meetups at bars/restaurants and it was impossible for me to follow conversations due to moderate hearing loss. Please take this into account when selecting a meetup location.
Wow, great article. Really struck a chord with me.
I help run the Boulder Ruby meetup ( https://boulder-ruby.org/ ). We survived covid, having to move venues multiple times, and the declining sexiness of Ruby. Thanks so much to our sponsors Mojotech (for space and drinks) and Github (for zoom). We're still looking for other sponsors for pizza support--if you are in the Boulder area and are interested, please reach out.
The meetup is smaller than it was pre-covid, but it is still a great community. We have newer members, one time visitors (often from a bootcamp, looking for work) and regulars. It's a good mix, and the social chatting before the talks are one of the grat . I actually have enjoyed having a zoom option (for when you can't get to the meetup or to pull in speakers from out of town with no budget), but the in-person experience is far better.
I wrote up some tips for wrangling speakers here: https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/3283 because that is what I focused on. It's actually fun to reach out to folks and offer up the opportunity to speak. I never had problems with devrels doing talks, myself, as long as it was super clear that it wasn't a vendor pitch, but rather a discussion of some technical issue. (I was a devrel, so maybe that is why it didn't bother me?) But having a required corp speaker is a clear no-go for me.
That's a bummer your library was an obstacle. I worry a bit about mandates because many meetups are not formal non-profits. The best thing to do is to keep costs low and look for companies who recognize the value in fostering community. They're out there! Consulting companies are good options because of their business model :) .
We still use meetup.com because inertia, but the recent price increases makes it seem like it got acquired by Broadcom. We'll be exploring alternatives, but want to make sure our pages don't get taken over by a squatter. (I've heard about that happening with other meetups.)
For startups? In my anecdotal experience, it's nodejs/javascript, but the HN data says python: https://www.hntrends.com/2024/may.html?compare=ruby&compare=...
And I should be clear, it is really the declining sexiness of Ruby on Rails. Lots and lots of systems folks still use ruby. I personally think that Rails is one of the best languages for delivering a web based MVP, but if you look at the number of participants in the Boulder Ruby meetup, it is much lower than it was 10 years ago.
We still have a number of folks (like me) who like ruby so much that even though they are not using it in their day job, they show up for the meetup.
With GPS its not so much the location but thr change in time commitment. The new location is never 5 min from the preious but 30-45 min difference. People in these groups often have busy lives so if your 3hrs suddenly becomes 4hrs its simply less of a headache to cut the unnecessary thing rather than change 50 other things in your schedule. Eventually this scheduking effect shakes off all thr people in the group with other time commitments.
Yes, generally people are adverse to change and like routine. Going to a new location requires figuring out how long it takes to get there, where do you park or get on/off transit, where is the building entrance, where within the building do you go, etc.
It is important to have consistency in time, location, and consistency to build a thriving meetup.
I run a dance practice 2x a month and there's more.
You need to make sure it's on the same day on cadence (we have 2nd and 4th sundays).
And we also spam out fb event invite (use what you want here, email etc) about 1 week prior to "remind" people it's coming.
These things tend to be incredibly effective.
Also when dealing with a venue offering to book out the whole year will get you some leeway with things as you are taking away a LOT of scheduling time for them; which matters.
I would highly recommend trying out a spot for a few months first before committing.
There's a local developer meetup group in my hometown, a town which doesn't have a lot of local developers, ban me for essentially disagreeing with them in a private Discord DM. My crime? Telling them I don't like my hometown (and possibly for being the only known gay person). Meanwhile, their group's amenities are tax payer funded and allows their publicly funded power trips because they found someone to "grease the wheels" (aka cronyism).
If special interest groups are entitled to access to public resources, then I think their "board of directors" should also waive their right to filter out people from their group without some intervening third party auditing.
It's nice to use public infrastructure, but what you're suggesting already exists in some parts of the US, and it's abused. These "non-profits" are not necessarily philanthropic, or in the public's interest.
I'm sorry to hear about your experiences, but I don't think some huge bureaucratic red tape will be any better. What will happen is that all the toxic assholes who will rant, make creepy remarks, etc. won't be told to buzz off, because doing the whole third party auditing will be too much effort and costly.
And I also think it's fine to exclude people for subjective reasons, even if it's (marginally) "tax-funded". If you go to the JS meetup and keep complaining about how bad JS is then maybe it's best that you stop coming. Generally very contrarian and combative? Maybe it's best those people also stop coming.
People that go to Sunday mass to proselytize that God doesn't exist (or to an atheist meetup to proselytize that God does exist) are also not welcome. Saying "it's tax-funded, and therefore it should be open to all" would lead to absurdity.
In the end we have to accept that not everything is perfect, and that trying to achieve 100% fairness typically makes things worse.
Well, I live in the bible belt, and I'm pretty certain it was discrimination in my case because one of their "board of directors" posted a homophobic tweet the same day I was banned. It's an example of how we shouldn't mandate hosting any "special interest" groups using tax dollars, which was the GP's point.
I was not challenging the sole purpose of the group as in your example, they simply retaliated for personal reasons irrelevant to the group's purpose, which is unprofessional. The group is about software development, not my hometown. The only reason I was even talking to their admins in DM is because they were harassing me with confrontational dialogue over a tasteful joke that went over their heads. It's a toxic group, and our public university shouldn't be hosting their events.
I ran into this sort of problem when trying to put together an explicitly non-profit tech meetup (talk about your projects, nothing commercial allowed, no cost to attend) at my local library; because I wasn't a "community group" but rather just somebody trying to assemble a loose group of individuals from around the Bay, they wouldn't let me do it.
But then what is a "community group" if not that?
A lot of the co-working spaces around here let members host tech meet-ups for free, I assume because it serves as good advertising.
France provide such public meeting space for non profit. It’s convenient.
It does happen in the US as well. On a city per city basis.
While venues are difficult, don't overlook the added complications that are caused by insurance.
A lot of "venues" want you to show that you are carrying liability insurance. That means you have to be an actual 501(c)3 along with a bank account.
I wouldn't shy away from some exclusivity in order to keep the venue size reasonable.
Perhaps there's a local hackerspace in your area that'd be willing to host your group?