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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
> I do believe that it should be a mandate for the municipality to provide meeting space for local non-profit and special interest groups.
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.
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.
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.
My personal Fav group killer is when the organizer announces
"Good News! We finally have a permanent location!!!!"
Then it turns out to be 45min in one compass direction outside of the city. Meaning the location will be 2+ hr drive one way for the 75%'ish of the members that don't live on that side of the city. Essentially killing the group on announcement. I've seen this happen several times.
I do get that running a group is hard, I've done it. Its just that at that point you may as well just throw in the towel.
Also for some reason its always a run down church or VFW location when this happens.
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.
> Why should my tax dollars pay for your special interest group to have free meetups?
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.
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.
> why municipalities need to provide this space for free
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?
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.
The organizer should pay if they don't want to get sponsor(s). As you say, expecting participants to pay is generally too high a hurdle. If they don't want to/can't have sponsors or foot the bill, then, yes, there just shouldn't be a meetup probably unless they can randomly beg space from somewhere. Dropping the bill on an amorphous "society" isn't really a solution. I have no problem with a town/city library offering space if it's available but there are many competing demands including lots of talks and activities that have no hope of attracting a corporate sponsor. There's no more reason for my town to support a Kubernetes meetup than a talk on medieval castles.
> Dropping the bill on an amorphous "society" isn't really a solution.
Why? Society (through the state) should invest in anything that can improve society overall. All the major progress mankind has achieved is based on collective investments.
And what do you mean by amorphous? It's pretty clear what society is: it's us, it's the aggregate of the people living in a community.
> but there are many competing demands including lots of talks and activities that have no hope of attracting a corporate sponsor
Which is exactly why I argue that we shouldn't leave to private sponsors such as corps to decide whether a meetup can happen.
There should be a space for whatever talks/events/meetups that don't fit with any private sponsor interests, e.g. stuff that has no direct commercial usage.
> There's no more reason for my town to support a Kubernetes meetup than a talk on medieval castles.
Yes, I think towns should support both. I'm certainly not limiting to tech meetups the kind of events to take place in such a public space.
My town has very limited financial resources. You're welcome to compete with all the other demands for one-off library space with all the other uses. Not that a tech meetup would have much demand where I live. We won't agree but a tech meetup seems like exactly the sort of thing private sponsors (whether personal, corporate, or academic) should mostly cover.
If you're really averse to corporate sponsorship and really want to have some specific meetup, paying for it personally seems a pretty reasonable option. No one is asking you to build a bridge.
Small town = less demand for public spaces. And I propose the money to pay for this comes from the state if needed.
> You're welcome to compete with all the other demands for one-off library space with all the other uses.
Uh ok? I will, better to have a space for free every couple months than to have to give up my meetup. I don't see how an additional space for meetings should worsen things?
> If you're really averse to corporate sponsorship and really want to have some specific meetup, paying for it personally seems a pretty reasonable option.
This is clearly not about myself, it's about investing socially in enabling an exchange of ideas, even when no private patron sees fit to sponsor it.
You must be one of those "don't tread on me" types. You've been clutching at straws for a few comments while failing to find any argument. I believe the reality is that you don't like "your" tax money to benefit others, but saying that would make you look bad wouldn't it?
I propose your tax money pays for it, together with mine.
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.
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.)
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.
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'm pretty certain it was discrimination in my case
Well, maybe, and that sucks, but it also doesn't really matter. You're still burdening thousands if not tens of thousands of groups with a significant legislation and cumbersome procedure just because there's this one group in the bible belt that might be a bunch of jerks. You can't really legislate jerks away.
And regardless, I don't think public resources should only be available to "nice people", or "non-toxic groups" (whatever subjective meaning you can give to that). It really doesn't cost a lot of money to provide and manage some venue for public use, and "funded by tax dollars" is more of a hang-up than anything else. Tons of public resources are funded by tax dollars, from pavements to social services to the fire brigade. Jerks and groups that are a bunch of jerks have just as much right to use these resources as anyone else. This line of reasoning becomes pretty absurd fairly quickly.
Well, I get the point you're trying to make but it seems a bit reductionist to compare discrimination against a legally protected status to whether or not "nice" people are using public resources. One instance is actually illegal, the other is not.
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.
> doesn't sound unreasonable [...] if you were using a private companies space
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".
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.
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 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 DevRel people trying to advertise. The hard problem was filtering out people who were only interested in presenting something so they could show another presentation on their resume or personal brand website, with no interest in engaging with the meetup.
These people would want to only show up for the one meetup where they got to present. They’d present some simple content designed to make them look good, with little regard to educating or discussing things. They’d often have some excuse for needing to leave quickly after presenting, some times before any QA time.
And they always needed a video recording of themselves speaking. For a while we had these to stream to remote viewers, but if the camera gear wasn’t available they’d panic and spend a lot of time improvising a way to record it with their phone even if delayed the presentation. Getting the recording of themselves speaking was the primary goal, not actually speaking to the group.
After this happens enough times, the core members realize they’re being used as audience props for someone’s career advancement and they stop coming. The meetup collapses.
I hope my local meetup groups can have a little resurgence like this where people are primarily interested in the meetup, not the self promotion opportunity.
1. (Apart from the first few meetings, for bootstrapping) presenters must have attended a few meetings before they get a chance to present.
2. No mentions of one's employer / product beyond the intro slide.
There's nothing special about these two suggestions; the general idea is that the organizers ought to be sensitive to what is happening, and responsive in trying to maintain a healthy atmosphere.
I get what you, and other commenters here, are going for. But getting speakers is still hard in the first place. And as I mentioned in the post, I see high quality talks as 100% marketing. They're just marketing for your engineering team, rather than for your product. I think we'd have trouble attracting the high quality speakers we do today if we set restrictions some commenters have suggested such as attending the meetup multiple times, not mentioning the company, etc.
We're pretty picky with speakers we invite but also quite flexible once we've invited someone we think will be good. I think it's worked out pretty well for the audience and speakers. At least, that is what they all tell me.
I like your approach and think it sounds very balanced. Creating and preparing for a high quality talk is quite a lot of work, so it’s maybe a bit unfair to expect people with jobs or startups to do them for purely altruistic reasons.
A talk that is mostly substance but contains a quick plug here and there has always been reasonable to me. It’s also a lot more effective for marketing than just giving a blatant product pitch, so it should be a win-win.
Counter point: I've been to Filipino meetups (Raid the fridge) where companies (even traditional/established banks) presented new products and services they'd been trying to launch mixed in with some company history.
They'd talk about the tech used, the difficulties (tech, business, legal, market) encountered and how they worked around those.
It was definitely more than just a sales pitch even when there was some of that at times. A mix of business stories, engineering, R&D stories, law, finance and general company and even country history.
I found it fascinating and overal great. To the point where it felt like a night out to enjoy entertainment. Not just the talks but the social meetup part of it as well. Maybe its a cultural thing, but I found companies there refreshingly open and honest about the way things had gone.
This is a great post. What so many of the developer relations people miss: Don't focus on the sales pitch so much. Focus on a good technical problem that will be relevant to your audience. It's OK to toss your name and product into the mix a bit, but don't beat your audience over the head!
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.
It can be a chicken/egg problem. If you run a meetup, you need to meet regularly to create a community and keep members engaged. If you want to meet relatively regularly then you need something to meet about. Sometimes it's hard to get someone to present, so you have to fallback to people who need more incentive to present.
In a perfect world, a great sponsor would provide a free space for everyone to meet and great community members would spend hours preparing amazing content to teach the community something without gaining much for themselves. But, that combination is pretty rare these days unfortunately.
The solution is simple: vet the talks, vet the presenter, and don't focus on technology that is popular for grifting. Sorry, but I've been to enough JS/TS meetups to know what's happening. But that world is full of marketing and people who want funding. Compare this to a BSD meetup or a 2600 meetup. Nobody's trying to sell you stuff there.
Yeah, it annoys me that a lot of functional programming stuff kind of fell into cryptocurrency startups.
There definitely is interesting enough tech behind crypto, but a lot of these talks end up kind of devolving into why their product is amazing and better than all the other coins and why you should invest in their ICO.
I wonder if a solution is not to try to contain the 'pressure', but to give it a release valve. Instead of trying to detect and push them out, give them a chance to say their piece and make their connections. If they have a reason to out themselves, then they can be contained.
HN does this too - you'll see the ads occasionally for startups, and we're all glad for the 'who is hiring' and 'who wants to be hired' threads. Those are likely containment as much as anything else.
That's super lame. I have been organizing for a meetup for years and don't think I've ever run into this.
I guess the easiest way to stop that would be to ask everyone who wants to present to come to at least one meetup before they do so. Would filter these folks out real quick.
I'm surprised that universities don't open their doors to such events for everyone.
'Systems' is fairly industry-focused. So, academia-industry partnerships on seminars seems like a great idea.
It's a shame (and imo, mind boggling) that SF proper doesn't have a tier 1 university. While Stanford and Berkeley are very close, the lack of a grounding institution makes SF culture feel 'dispersed'.
> I'm surprised that universities don't open their doors to such events for everyone
You have to be very careful about letting people use your facilities to host events.
Unfortunately, grifters will use any opportunity to do something on a university campus as a way to imply they are associated with the university.
Even self-help author Tim Ferriss recommended this trick in his “Four Hour Work Week” book: He advised using university campuses to speak so you could leverage their credibility for your brand (I can’t remember the exact details)
It became such a problem that universities really can’t risk letting random groups come use their facilities. It doesn’t take long before someone abuses it to say they “Lectured at <university>” or “Gave a speech at <university>”
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.
Just to clarify some stuff here (from an actual TUMuchData management team member):
The form is not really relevant for our events, it's just to support us. Since we have made the decision of being a MUNICH BASED IN PERSON club to get the maximum networking and social experience, we also wanted to make sure our actual club members will fulfill these criteria. That's why we have the paper form in person policy.
There will be some member-only events but those are more social events or maybe ones with very limited spots but usually access to events will be public.
Our events are not exclusively on the Garching campus. As you already found out we have two major formats:
1. The weekly paper reading group which is mostly researchers (mostly PhD students, sometimes professors) presenting their research or a single paper. Some weeks we have industry talks instead. These events are in Garching and only during the lecture period because they are mostly targeted towards students (we are a student club after all) so that they can learn more about the very relevant database research that is happening at TUM and how it's applied in industry.
2. Monthy or bi-monthy Munich Database Meetups which are more targeted towards industry and bringing together industry, students and researchers from academia. Those events will usually have more than one talk unlike our weekly events, the talks will mostly have speakers from industry (usually 2). They will usually be somewhere in the city center of Munich to make sure industry people will get there easier. We usually try to get some location at some company. We already had them at CodeCentric, Google and JetBrains.
For both formats we try to make sure we get deep technical talks about mostly database systems internals. For the research talks they are usually very deeply technical anyway and for the industry talks (including meetups) we are working on guidelines to make sure they know what type of talk we expect.
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.
> 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.
I just checked Google Maps. The uni is 2 stops on the metro or a 20 minute walk from the main train station (HBH). "[R]elatively inconvenient to get there" -- uh, no.
This is either one of the other universities or the old TUM campus. The computer science department is located in Garching and this also where many of their events are, as you can see from their events page.
But as others have pointed out they had and have many events in other locations as well. From the events page you can see that Google and JetBrains hostet them among many others.
The mentioned TUMuchdata is held at an university. I think a lot depends on the individuals behind such activities.
I don't know anyone behind TUMuchdata and had no contact to the department for years but the chair is still the same as when I studied there and I think he might be exactly the person that would permit or even foster such activities.
While we get a lot of support from all three database related chairs at TUM we like to highlight that we are an independent non-profit initiated, founded and run exclusively by students (which includes PhD students like me by now). We were founded with the main mission of making sure normal bachelors and masters CS students know about the high quality database research at TUM with projects like HyPer and now Umbra.
More seriously, it does seem like there were a number of interesting systems research and development collaborations in the 1980s: BSD at Berkeley, Athena at MIT, Andrew at CMU, etc.
Currently it seems like the interest, funding, opportunities, and incentives for academic researchers are largely for short-term projects and AI/ML rather than long-term, ongoing systems projects. The modern funding and publishing landscape seems to emphasize speed and quantity over quality and impact.
Moreover, it seems that companies with deep pockets (Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia) may be less likely to collaborate with and/or fund academic projects as IBM and DEC did in the 1980s. It could be that those partnerships weren't hugely beneficial for AT&T, IBM and DEC's businesses.
You can think of Cal as the non-med school portion of UCSF. We think of the East Bay as non-SF, but the perceived distance is mostly water psychology. If you glued Emeryville to the SF waterfront, it'd be way closer to downtown than SF State.
I'm not familiar with LA traffic and transit, but I would not be surprised if it took way longer to get to UCLA from the LA City Hall than to Cal from SF's. It's harder to walk there though, at least until 2030.[1]
It's true that SF culture is dispersed, but that's sort of intentional, a hyper-local city of neighborhoods.
Harvard, MIT, NYU, UW, UPenn, ETH Zurich, ICL, UCL...all are in the center of their respective cities. Even Cornell-Tech went out of its way to find a little island (literally) right by mid-town NYC.
Berkeley is situated similar to Stevens or Wellesley. They are close enough, but no one is going to go for an evening seminar to these locations on a weekday. NYU or MIT on the other hand, feel effortless to add to a commute back gome.
As I understand, UCSF (University of California at San Francisco) is a graduate school only. And, the medical school _is_ Tier 1, as I understand.
Wiki says:
> In 2023, UCSF received the 2nd highest research funding from the National Institutes of Health. In 2021, the university spent $1.71 billion in research and development, the second most among institutions of higher education in the U.S.
Systems have been cleaved in two for who knows what purposes. Systems have always deserved a proper segregation from product, that's been lost in this new paradigm.
Meetup.com was on fire with maker, programming, and tech meetups in Portland in 2010-2014. Some were huge (I recall the auditorium for Puppet Labs wall-to-wall one point). Then ... poof. All gone, even before the pandemic. And it was super diverse topics: everything from NodeJS & Rust, and HTML1.0 to startups, manufacturing, and IoT hacking: heck, there was meetup for RF circuit enthusiasts! I just checked and there's still CTRL-H going strong, but not much else.
From what I heard from two regular organizers is that it is just a LOT of work to run a consistently solid meetup, and eventually exhausting. I can see that: I remember thinking, "I could help but do I really want to use my small amount of free time for this?" So, hats off to people who ran those awesome meetups (Thubten, I'm looking at you!).
> Meetup.com was on fire with maker, programming, and tech meetups in Portland in 2010-2014. Some were huge (I recall the auditorium for Puppet Labs wall-to-wall one point). Then ... poof. All gone, even before the pandemic.
[2017] Acquired by WeWork
[2018] Founder steps down as CEO
[2019] New pricing model
[2020] WeWork sold it to AlleyCorp
[2024] Bending Spoons announced it will acquire Meetup
I also used to go to meetups every week in Portland during that time!
It was great, free beer and pizza definitely helped me when i was struggling to get my career off the ground. Janrain had a great meetup space (old Nike basketball court with risers) with awesome tech topics that exposed the vast world of tech to a noob like me. Puppet Labs, Urban Airship, and New Relic also had top-tier meetups. Intel in Hillsboro was usually worth the MAX trip out there. Tons of swag, food, and opportunities for employment.
The real issue with these meetups is that the money dried up. Most of the meetups had recruiters who were desperate to hire and sponsorship helped fund these meetups. Now that WFH is widely acceptable, there’s little incentive to court talent locally. Zoom meetups feel inorganic and lifeless, although they cost very little. There was a gold rush feel during the 2010’s, but I feel like that time is over. Cost-cutting, outsourcing, and the AI hype are leading to software becoming a less prestigious career than it once was. I don’t see this optimism coming back any time soon.
Exhausting plus everyone has to make a meetup account plus meetup started charging more and more plus why not just use Facebook since I'm the only one without a Facebook account
Maybe a federated alternative will take off soon. It would be nice if email was federated in practice
Calagator has been dead for years, and I don't understand why. Way before the pandemic: agreed. Most of what I see there now is business networking or people selling something.
But there are still things happening, e.g.:
- pdxpug (Postgres)
- Database Reading Group (DBRG) at PSU
- pdx.rb
- pdxruby Slack channel
- pdxstartups Slack channel
- Portland Papers We Love
- Portland Linux Users Group
- Linux Kernel meetup
- Rose City Techies
That's from just a little bit of research. But I miss when Calagator was full of cool stuff. What happened there I wonder?
I've tried hosting things in my home/back yard before. One was just to come hack on your projects together. Another was to work on open source contributions. I'd be up for trying something like that again. Something about systems/databases would be right up my alley. Maybe a reading group. If anyone sees this and is interested, send me an email.
I think the worst part of "meetup culture" is that there's almost always a commercial angle that takes preference over the community angle. No shade to OP, but even though this is what pissed them off about their JS meetup, they're still doing it by having their speakers essentially pitch joining their engineering team.
The other side of the coin is that default advice on the internet for getting a job as a developer used to include "go to local developer meetups", and as a founder/business, it's an obvious idea to see developer meetups as a potential marketing/recruiting channel. So a lot of attendees do actually want jobs, and a lot of speakers want to give people jobs. But will people stick around once they get that job? And is job-oriented content really what you want out of a meetup as a consistent attendee?
I wonder if some combination of reading groups, a process to get regular attendees to present, and hackathons might create a more sustainable programming meetup culture. It can still be corporate funded (eg have it in their building or shout them out or cobrand or whatever) but the content could be a lot more interesting. It might not work for Javascript, but systems programming actually intersects with a lot of published research and has more of a hacker culture, so I think you could pull it off. Incidentally, I just acquired some office space in SF and might be interested in hosting one if I had enough interest and volunteers.
The NYC chapter of Papers We Love looks to be starting back up, after a gap of about a year and then two years before that. I think they're getting Datadog to host the events. They have a convenient office next to Penn Station.
I am in phoenix, it is summer right now so things are double dead but even in fall to spring months, I have tried to find tech meetups (my interests are c++, c99, java, distributed systems, data engineering and non generative AIML/infra) and I can’t find any activity in the 5th largest city in US. I have tried to host things myself but only my friends or coworkers showed up, where are my fellow passionates?
I think there are enough out there with the surge of Covid relocation population.
Godaddy used to host some when I was briefly there for work in the early 2010s but the meetup.com tech community was definitely non-existent. I would have been very active if it wasn’t dead. Just need some catalyst to get it started. :)
- OWASP security meetup: this is great! Hosted at a WeWork or a local company. Great stuff. I'm not sure their funding model, but it's working. https://www.meetup.com/owasp-los-angeles/
- Socal Python: we haven't found good venues that support talks so... the meetings are more social hours. This is fine. https://www.meetup.com/socalpython/
- LA DevOps: only one physical meeting so far. The bar let us show slides in a nice patio in the back, but it was so loud I couldn't hear. I hope they'll find a better venue. https://www.meetup.com/meetup-group-ZZQWJLTm/
I'd love to start giving talks again, on "Fast Development" and organizational topics, but have prioritized my job for the moment. Ah well.
The pandemic killed a fantastic meetup called "Papers We Love" here in San Diego. I miss the many great people (and papers) I met through PWL, and would be thrilled to see something like it again.
If not, we're just going to have to jump-start it ourselves.
> First off, don't pay for anything yourself. Find a company who will host. At the same time, don't feel the need to give in too much to the demands of the company.
Or go the same route as the mentioned TUMuchdata[1] which apparently kicked off the activities in the post.
They are simply meeting at their university. I know at least one Rust Meetup near them, that deliberately decided to meet at the public library (with permission) and forgo any company sponsorships.
[1] The pun here is that TUM is the common abbreviation for Technical University Munich.
We are very lucky to have both the university to host our weekly events and also to have Alex Petrov on our side who is very well connected to all kinds of companies and helps us a lot in finding venues for our Munich Database Meetup which we only organize once every 1-2 months or so.
ACCU London is not very active anymore, I think CppLondon pretty much took over (it was the same guy as the CppOnSea conference, but I think he started asking other people to arrange it now).
I don't know if it's that great these days, but it's a meetup I used to present at in the past, and I remember having fun getting beers with attendees afterwards.
A decade ago meetup.com was the place to look - if you wanted you could have gone to a different meet up every night, from Linux user group, python testing group, London Java community etc.
It seems like some of these are still active on meetup.com, so that might be a good starting point.
I get that the title of the post is wildly overstated. The author mentions a couple of meetups he has organized or heard of. Calling that a "reawakening" is... well, maybe if the author specifically means the NYC tech scene.
That said, damn I wish the meetup scene came back to South Bay, or even just SF, or anywhere at all within driving distance.
I get that grad students organize a lot of mini-conferences, talk series, and forums with other grad students, but I'm not in grad school.
Strange you say this, I just got together with a bunch of people and revived an old user group that I used to run, seems like there's a itch to get out and socialise again
They need to happen again for networking reasons. I feel a lot of businesses are starting to look at tech costs as a burden rather than an investment these programming meetups help keep discussions open. I suggest if a business plans to start a tech front they should come to these and learn.
In London there was Skillsmatter's Code Node. Skillsmatter had trouble getting continued funding, however CodeNode itself is used occasionally for some meeting tech things apparently, but not the continualy hosting 5 days a week of tech meetups it was so loved for.
I go to a Linux User Group meetup at Lowell Makes[0] on the 2nd and 4th Thursday. You don't have to be a member of the makerspace to join, but it is a very nice resource :)
Our meetups have been very casual, just hanging out with some laptops, sometimes with pizza and beer. We tend to just talk about projects we think are cool, and things we're working on or learning.
Just the other day, I was checking to see if there were any active ones in the Boston area. I'd definitely be up for one, and I'd be more than happy to do a talk and/or help organize.
Make it happen! That's how these things work. People will show up. You just have to white-knuckle it through the first couple meetups and then they take on a life of their own.
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.