How to organise a meetup.
Table of Contents generated with DocToc
- Abstract
- Organization process
- Communication with speakers
- Communication with venues
- Communication with attendees
This repo contains guidlines on how to orgranize a MoscowJS meetup.
These are the main things, you'll have to manage as an organizer:
-
Communication with speakers
- Selecting proposals
- Requesting information about the speaker and the talk
- Scheduling and conducting rehearsals
-
Communication with venues
- Scheduling a meetup and final on-site rehersal
- Arranging live video stream and filming talks
- Food/drinks
-
Communication with attendees
- Announcing the meetup via social media/mailing list/web site
- Answering questions from attendees via any channel
- Live-tweeting at the day of an event
- Gathering feedback online after the meetup
- Sharing videos from the meetup when those are done
-
On-site event management
- Announcing talks and breaks
- Moderating questions from the audience
- Helping audience to feel comfortable
- Helping sponsors to share information about their products/offers or simply welcome guests
Each meetup has four talks, 20 minutes each (15 for presentation + 5 for q&a). Three of them are selected from our waiting list and one can be suggested by the venue (main sponsor). If the venue doesn't have a speaker, we select all four from the waiting list.
Our waiting list is here (you need to be an organizer to access the document). Applications there are sorted by submition date. Those, that have not yet being scheduled, are highlighted in red. Authors of those proposals you'll need to contact, starting from the oldest submitions.
Please contact 3-4 persons from the waiting list and suggest to give a talk at the next event. In this letter please provide date and venue of the meetup. Make sure to include a link to our Speaker's Manual.
Some will accept, some will decline, some will not reply at all. Please don't wait for replies for more than 3-4 days, instead, get in touch with the next batch of speakers from the waiting list. Repeat the process until you have all four speakers ready to go.
Once a speaker has agreed to participate, please request all the information necessary to announce his or her talk. All the information required is listed in Speaker's Manual.
// work in progressTwo options:
-
Find a person who works there and is interested in a meetup you're organizing. Ask this person to talk to people responsible for internal and external events (usually HR).
-
If a recruiter from the target company reaches out to you, write him back and suggest hosting a meetup. This worked really well for us.
It depends on a company. Most can provide:
- Venue
- Snacks
- Video recording of the talks
- Extra PR
- Help on site
Some can also do:
- Swag (t-shirts, cups)
- Cover travel expences for speakers
- Recruiting possibilities:
- Recognition amongst your audience
- One slot booked for the speakers from the hosting company
Start negotiating with the potential hosting company as early as possible, but no latter than one month before the event.
This is our proposal to potential hosts (in russian). Feel free to use it.
You'll find the list of venues we've used for MJS below. Please contact us at [email protected] if you want to get in touch with any of those.
| Venue | Approx. Capacity |
|---|---|
| Yandex | 400 |
| Mail.ru | 450 |
| Rambler&Co | 120 |
| Badoo | 100 |
| tceh | 250 |
| Dream Industries | 300 |
| QIWI | 250 |
| Artec3D | 100 |
| Ostrovok | 100 |
We use these means of communication with the audience on the web:
We've recently started the initiative to support free IT meetups in Russia. If you would like to share your event with our audience, let us know.
Please copy and send this form to everyone registered for the event. Please make sure to change the names of the talks.
After a couple of days this form was live, please share the results of the questionnaire with everyone in MoscowJS Speakers Group.