I've been running my local ruby meetup for about 6 years now. It was pretty stressful to begin with, trying to get people to give presentations, or thinking of one myself.
Then maybe 4 years ago I had the idea of threatening to shut the meetup down unless we managed to get 11 people to sign up to do a presentation once a year. This basically meant we had an entire year's worth of talks sorted by January.
We've been doing this every year now for the last 4 years, and it's working really well. It's not _my_ ruby meetup, it's the community meetup, I'm just helping facilitate it :)
If you are going to try it... I'd discussed it with my two wonderful co-organisers before we put it to the group... and, we really would have shut it down. I think if you just half threaten, well, might not work so well :)
We used a doodle.com poll with a set of months and just let people say which one(s) they could do.
Then maybe 4 years ago I had the idea of threatening to shut the meetup down unless we managed to get 11 people to sign up to do a presentation once a year. This basically meant we had an entire year's worth of talks sorted by January.
We've been doing this every year now for the last 4 years, and it's working really well. It's not _my_ ruby meetup, it's the community meetup, I'm just helping facilitate it :)