| As somebody that ran a successful meetup which I grew from 0 to 1500+ members (now 2700) on meetup.com the article feels like it misses the point of the meetups. The presenter being late, disorganized, and talking down to the audience is a pretty simple problem to fix. Screen your presenters! Don't let people who you know would give a bad talk speak. With our meetup, we would send some guidelines along with some information on the kind of audience we tend to attract. This along with front-loading the socialization addressed nearly all problems the author had. Our meetup was and continues to be sponsored and we never felt the need to give them a plug. We thanked the companies for hosting us, encouraged people to talk to each other and that's it. None of these problems cost a penny to fix. I have seen other comments here mention that a meetup is not about the talks that it is only networking. While, I agree that is the main benefit for going, I tried pretty hard to have cool talks with topics attendees were unlikely to run into online. I loved to spotlight people who had passion projects previously working in obscurity. I loved introducing academics to an audience of mostly industry people, and vice-versa. People would come up to me afterwards surprised to here that someone in town had solved a problem giving them pain for months! Bringing talks about things they might not see on Twitter or Hacker News. Want to know what I actually worried about? I worried about diversity. Although 50-60% of the speakers booked were women we had trouble boosting that ratio above 10-20% for the audience. I worried about attendees with kids that couldn't make evening meetups. I worried about people who worked somewhere hard to commute from. My co-organizer actually started organizing events that occurred during lunchtime. These had just as good if not better attendance than the evening talks. So do know those can work. I think meetups are a fantastic medium to meeting people who like similar things as you. And if none of the meetups around you are working, you can always just start one that does. |