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A reawakening of systems programming meetups

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Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups

#31

Post by 1oooqooq »

Aurornis wrote: post #2

> I used to attend a bunch of meetups before the pandemic. But I quickly got disillusioned. Almost every meetup was varying degrees of startups pitching their product. The last straw for me was sitting through a talk at a JavaScript meetup that was by a devrel employee of a startup who literally gave a tutorial for their product. My favorite local meetups fell to problems like this. It was easy to filter out the DevR…

this is a problem of the job market.

most celebrated talks are from people well employed for life so they can talk shit at some system or protocol. from upnp to the persistent compiler worm talks.

those folks didn't expect to depend on their resume padding every 3 to 8 months to live.

likewise the people organizing the talks didn't depends on the status sending devRel people to expect sponsors.

this is exactly what doctorow is yapping about lately. but everyone only accept small points of the big picture.

Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups

#33

Post by __turbobrew__ »

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.

Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups

#36

Post by toyg »

> although 60 people say Yes initially, by the time of the event we have typically gotten about 50 people in attendance

That's actually pretty good. Most free events (of any kind) will typically see attendance rates around 30-50% of RSVPs.

Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups

#37

Post by packetlost »

__turbobrew__ wrote: post #33

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 poin…

> I do believe that it should be a mandate for the municipality to provide meeting space for local non-profit and special interest groups.

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.

Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups

#38

Post by II2II »

Aurornis wrote: post #13
weinzierl wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mentioned TUMuchdata requires a signed form, in German, handed over in person (not email) to join their community. I think this is not required to just attend one of their events. The events are at the university campus which is quite off, and makes it relatively inconvenient to get there if you are not at the university anyway. So, I guess they found a viable filter.

My closest community college allows venue rentals. The filter is that few people think it’s prestigious to speak at the local community college.

I work at a government facility that offers venue rentals. The rental contract states the facility name must not be used in order to avoid the scenario where someone tries to make a private event sound like it is endorsed by the government.

Oddly enough, the facility name gives the impression it is affiliated with an unrelated institution. This results in interesting conversations where one starts by dissuading grifting based upon the implied affiliation, and ends by telling them they are barking up the wrong tree when they try grifting based upon the actual affiliation.

If these people did not exist, many institutions would be far more generous with their space. That is especially true of colleges and universities, where there is often a strong desire to foster positive relationships with the community.

Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups

#40

Post by bonestamp2 »

packetlost wrote: post #37
__turbobrew__ wrote: post #33

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 poin…

> I do believe that it should be a mandate for the municipality to provide meeting space for local non-profit and special interest groups. 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 qu…

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.

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