August 8, 2016
How To Create A
Successful Technical Meetup
Intro
I co-founded the Cleveland Big Data meetup (http://www.meetup.com/Cleveland-Hadoop)
back in September 2010. As of writing it
has over 1,600 members and meets on average 6 times a year. 2016 is on pace for 8 meetups due to some
bonus speakers. But the meetup certainly
didn’t start that way. Here’s the story…
Origins
I co-founded Explorys, a medical informatics software company,
in the fall of 2009. I had spent years
doing traditional data warehousing with traditional platforms and knew well the
strength and weaknesses of that approach. And I knew that if Explorys wanted to
be Really, Really Big it was going to need a different kind of data
infrastructure. Explorys was conceived
at a fortuitous time, because 2009 was when the Hadoop ecosystem began to
expand past the early implementations at Yahoo and Facebook. I am proud to say I was at the very first
Hadoop World in 2009 put on by Cloudera in the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City among 500 people
for a single day to talk about what was to be come the future of distributed
computing.
But it also was clear that this was a very complex future
because distributed processing isn’t simple.
The remedy to this complexity was an open technical community of a scale
I had not seen before, and I learned that the community around the code is just
as important as the code. I had the
chance to engage the nascent Apache HBase community, attend some Apache HBase
& Apache Hadoop meetups, and I jumped in with both feet. My nights and weekends work was working with
the Apache HBase community and I became a committer in 2011.
But concurrently I also wanted to bring that mindset back home to Cleveland. And this was pre-Cavs Championship Cleveland
- not exactly known as a tech hub, much less a big data hub. So I had to build it from scratch.
Blast Off
2010 - The first meetup was in October 2010 in the 1st
floor conference room of the Global Cardiovascular Innovation Center on the
Cleveland Clinic campus (where Explorys offices were at the time) and consisted
of about 12 people, nearly all of whom I knew and had personally invited and
bribed with the promise of free pizza.
I’m pretty sure I had come up with the agenda the day before, and the
informal round-table discussion was along the lines of “we’re using Hadoop…
it’s pretty cool.”
2011 - I managed to pull off 2 meetups this year. They even had agendas ahead of time, and were
hosted at Explorys. By the end of the year
we had 44 members!
2012 – I have to thank a co-worker Mike Kvintus for nagging
me to re-double my efforts, and the group had 4 meetups this year. First hosted at Cleveland State, then at the
Lerner Research Institute. By the end of
the year we had 178 members. Kudos to Casey Stella for doing a talk on Spark - he was way ahead of the curve on this as Spark didn't take off for at least another year.
2013 – This was the year the meetup settled into it’s
current cadence (January, March, May, etc.) and had 5 meetups. We had a few at the Explorys office, and we
had the first meetup hosted at Progressive (June 2013). I have to thank Mike Onders for encouraging
that. By the end of the year we had 483
members.
2014 – 5 meetups. In
September we had the first Mega Meetup at the Global Center for Health
Innovation. First Mega Meetup at the Great Lakes Science Center with 309 RSVPs!
By the end of the year we had 863 members.
2015 – 6 meetups, plus a bonus. Doug Cutting in May! The Mega Meetup in September at the Great Lakes Science Center had 359 RSVPs. By
the end of the year we had 1,360 members.
2016 – On track for 6 meetups, plus 2 bonus meetups. At time of writing there are over 1,600
members.
Principles
Content is King
Technical meetups live and die by solid content. Content is king. Content is everything. Presentations should have something to share
and intent to teach – even it’s an archetypal hacker’s talk of “hey fellow nerds,
I tried this on my laptop and it’s really cool.”
Sales and marketing talks at technical meetups are content
poison. There is a time for sales talks,
but technical meetups are not the right venue.
Time Is The Most Precious Resource
Everyone who has attended a technical meetup has had the
experience of working all day and then attending an after-hours meetup. Dinner was a few slices of medium temperature
pizza and a cup of Sprite, and you find yourself watching a presenter who will
not Shut The Hell Up. So I borrowed an
idea from TED talks and used a cheap digital kitchen timer and set the default
speaking slots to 20 minutes. 20 minutes has worked well for the meetup. It’s a
longer span of time than you think - long enough for good technical detail, but
short enough to keep the meeting moving. Fixed timeframes also help the speaker
prepare.
If a talk is great, then you savor it. If it’s not your cup of tea, then you know
that in a few minutes there will be a new topic.
I put it to the speaker’s preference on how to address
questions. If they want to address
questions during, it’s their choice. But
when the timer goes off, then it’s onto the next topic.
Like most things in life there are exceptions, when Doug
Cutting came to Cleveland Big Data in 2015 I ceremonially knocked the timer
over and let him talk as long as he wanted, on whatever he wanted. Likewise, we’ve had meetups on core topics like
YARN for the entire session that had general applicability.
Everybody Needs Something
Marketing still matters – it just can’t dominate the presentation
content. So I also provide the guidance
to my speakers to feel free and put your company logo all over the slide
deck. Wear the t-shirt with the biggest
company logo you have. Hand out whatever
you want before and after the talks. As
long as the content is there.
Recruiters are another thorny topic. People go to meetups for a variety of
reasons, and a common reason is networking.
I’ve heard of meetups that “banned recruiters” from attending and I
think that is a terrible mistake. It’s
not likely that I’ll ever put a 20-minute talk from a recruiter into the
lineup, but recruiters need their time too.
So every meetup begins with a Recruiting Shout-Out. Anybody who wants to stand up and say “we’re
hiring and looking for …” is free to do so.
Just keep it brief.
Walk The Line
Neutrality is important to being an effective meetup
organizer. Becoming a shill for a
specific vendor turns a lot of people off and potentially fragments the community, so I try my best to rotate common
vendors so it’s not the same companies over and over
again.
Tactics
Meetup
Meetup.com, that is.
I have found Meetup to be a terrific platform for managing the Cleveland Big Data meetup.
Location, Location, Location
A good facility is a requirement, preferably with a big
screen and auditorium. In the early days
we did quite a few meetups with stand-up screens and portable projectors. Those are a pain to set up and put away, but
it was the best we could do at the time.
Manage Your Speakers
Speakers are busy.
Make it easy for them and send reminders of when you need drafts, and
send multiple reminders.
For 1st time speakers I usually like to see
drafts 2-3 weeks out just to make sure they are on track.
Pizza
A meetup without pizza?
Puh-leeze. Do not underestimate
the importance of pizza at the meetup and the logistics of large-scale pizza
ordering are not to be taken lightly. Calling
up a pizza place at noon and asking pizza delivered for 150 by 5pm is high
risk. The thought of a technical meetup
without food should strike fear into the heart of any meetup organizer.
For a Monday evening meetup I’ll call the pizza order in on the
preceding Friday, then follow up that Monday with some minor changes depending
on how RSVPs roll in. Leave nothing to
chance when it comes to food.
Schtick
Once a speaker performs a successful meetup presentation they are granted the honorific Friend Of The Show, and referred to as such at every subsequent meetup. So to paraphrase Bill Murray in Caddyshack - "so you've got that going for you."
Stories Only An
Organizer Knows
What’s On The Menu
The first Mega Meetup was held in September 2014 at the
Great Lakes Science Center. Most museums
have contract caterers and the GLSC’s caterer was Aramark. So I got a menu and was worried because
everything looked “fancy” – no pizza. I
didn’t have budget for “fancy.” My
family and I are members of the Great Lakes Science Center and I’m quite
familiar with the food options on the 1st floor cafeteria, so I
asked why I could buy pizza on Saturday afternoon but not on a Monday night. The reply was that it wasn’t on the menu
because the 3rd floor alcove where the meet-and-greet was to be held
didn’t have any place to keep it warm.
So I informed her that she had grossly overestimated the sophistication
of my group, and I assured her that even if she put the pizza boxes on the
floor that it would all be consumed. We
both got a big laugh out of this, the meetup got pizza and I stayed in budget.
The Lesson: always
ask.
Variable Pricing
I was surveying locations for a meetup and was speaking to a
location that charged for entry, but unfortunately I could not secure an
fixed-price arrangement for the event.
Per-person fees work fine for events with a defined set of people (e.g.,
private party), but meetups are known for people just showing up, or not. A per-person fee would put me in the in the
position of blowing my budget in a very bad way if too many people showed
up. So I had to abandon plans for that
location.
Thanks
There is a long list of folks to thank.
The Apache Software Foundation, the Apache HBase community,
and the Bay Area and New York HBase and Hadoop Meetups. I tried to model/steal ideas the best I
could.
Co-workers at Explorys who supported the meetup. You’ve been a steadfast audience, and I’ve
been able to turn several co-workers into speakers.
The many many, many guest speakers - especially Cloudera and
Hortonworks both supported the meetup from inception. I couldn't have done it without you!
Thanks to IBM for supporting the meetup post Explorys
acquisition.
Case Western Reserve University (Computer Science
Department, Hacker’s Society), Kent State University (Computer Science
Department, Hacker’s Society, Center for Information Systems), and Cleveland
State University.
Progressive Insurance – Progressive was sending 5 people to
every meetup even before they were using Hadoop. And then got even more involved once they
did, now co-hosting the meetup.
Great Lakes Science Center.
Several great meetups there and a great group of people to work with.
Global Center for Health Innovation (HIMSS Innovation Floor)
– We’ve had several great meetups here too.
Thanks to John Paganini for always taking care of us.
© 2016 – Doug Meil
