[aaronchall]

I hear you.

There are good meetups and there are bad meetups.

If you want "helping each other" style meetups, you need to look for ones that are office-hours style, where they have tables and conference rooms and people sitting next to each other trying to help each other.

If you have organizers that want to make a regular commitment to running them (and basically being the on-hand experts) then you should be able to get space from firms that would like to host Python programmers (and we do have members get hired out of our group by our hosts sometimes, but that is certainly not a guarantee).

If your area can economically support these things, but they aren't there, then you just need a catalyst to get them started. I would think a lot of areas in Europe should be able to start these kinds of things.

[contenttypegeek]

I'm currently in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria for a longer period. I have moved here because LPdGC was dubbed as a digital nomad heaven, said to be the 'Chiang Mai of Europe' etc. It has an incredible amount of Co-working spaces relative to it's size etc. so one would think it's a perfect place for things you are describing above.

tl;dr: it's not.

Snippet from an email conversation with a local guy (author of GrapheneDB):

"Nomads apart, this is a small city, and while there are some active developer meetups, it's hard to get enough momentum, people willing to do talks, etc. I did run a Rails/Ruby meetup years ago, but it ended up being mostly people from our team + some curious guys. Eventually, I ended up not wanting to push it any further and focusing more on the business side of things."

So even though a lot of parameters are OK, the size of the city (400k in this case) seems to be enough to hamper things...