Hey Look, I Started a Meetup Group

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I think in most cases, I am pretty detail oriented, and when I plan to do something, I usually put a lot of thought into it. Not this time. Last week I was looking through technical meetup groups to see if there were any new ones that were doing anything interesting. As I was browsing the groups, a box appeared in the list that said: "Ypsilanti Software Development" with a 50+ in the bottom right-hand corner. When I clicked on the box I found it wasn't a group, but a suggestion for a group that 50+ people had shown interest in. The suggestion was that I could start this group if I wanted. Of course, there is a $14.99 a month fee, so this is all marketing on Meetups end, but I was intrigued. 

I sent off an email to my friend Fritz and mentioned the group and asked if he would be interested in running the group with me. He said he would, and I proceeded on registering the group. My thought was that I would register the group, and we might get a couple of people interested over a week or two and then we could have an introductory meeting and come up with a format. Fritz and I get together almost weekly, and the majority of our conversation revolves around programming. One of the things I really enjoy about talking to Fritz is when I am having an issue with the code I am working on or a new technology I am trying to learn, just the act of explaining it to him often helps me come up with a solution to my issue. So when I created the group, Fritz suggested making a rubber duck our logo (I will explain the significance of the rubber duck in another post).

After only a couple of days, we had 40 people signed up to our group. I was a little shocked that many people signed up so quickly. I know that having 40 people in the group doesn't mean you will have 40 people show up to an even, but it does mean, I should probably have something planned that can handle some reasonable capacity. Originally I was thinking we would have people meet at my office in Downtown Ypsilanti, but then I thought maybe one of the local breweries might work out better. Fritz and I are still working out the details for the first meeting, but we have some ideas. 

I really like the idea of a collaboration style meetup. I attend a number of users groups that provide speakers on various topics, and I really enjoy those, but I want our group to be more personal. I really like the idea of having a meetup where people come and bring questions about work or learning issues, career development, business or product ideas. Fritz made the comment that if we did have a large group show up, it would be very hard to have a discussion like this. I said if that happens we can split into smaller groups, and we could have people grab a table and put up a sign letting people know what they want the topic of that table to be. Then people could move between tables and participate in discussions that interest them.  

The big question is how to organize this and create a structured starting point so we don't have 5, 10, 20 people just sitting around waiting for someone to kick things off. Fritz and I still have a lot of brainstorming to do and hopefully, we can find others in the group who will help us make this group a success.

Here is a link to the new meetup group: https://www.meetup.com/Ypsilanti-Software-Development/

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