Re: [UG-ADMINS] Introduction: PHPJutland in Denmark

Hey Jesper, Congrats for running the user group for more than a year already! I feel your pain. Our group in Varna, Bulgaria suffers from pretty much the same problems. People were really hesitant to even show up at first and most of the “regular” speakers in the country are located in the capitol (Sofia) which is a 5-6 hours drive. My observation is that people started offering talks more after I did a few. And after a year and a half I continue to speak every third meetup. I’ve experimented with other formats like lightning talks with mixed results. Also a personal encouragement and offer to help from the organizers seems to go a long way with prospective speakers. As for reaching out my personal experience is that word of mouth and people bringing their colleagues and friends with them works best. Also having a present on all popular platforms in the country. Currently we still have more people showing up trough the Facebook events than trough meetup.com <http://meetup.com/> because that’s more popular in Bulgaria. On the bright side it’s awesome that you have inspired others to start similar events. As long as people show up you can even grab a drink and talk php without talks and still have a really productive event and a good time for everyone. Keep up the good work and good luck! On Thu, 17 May 2018 at 3:00, Jesper Østertoft Jacobsen <jesper@oestertoft.dk <mailto:jesper@oestertoft.dk>> wrote: Hello UG-Admins I am Jesper Jacobsen, I run the Danish PHPJutland group. We've been up and running for a year and a half now, and are finally starting to gain some real traction. However, developers in Denmark are still very shy, as there has been no precedence for meetups or the likes beforehand. Luckily it's contagious, and companies that has hosted us has started to do similar events. What's your best advice for reaching out to new users, and to potential speakers? It's currently quite the challenge to find speakers as they are shy, and Denmark is quite split. About 50% of the developers we can use as speakers are located in the capitol, Copenhagen, about three hours away. We have had speakers from there before, but I don't think we can do that every time. Aarhus, where we're located has a lot of great companies, but they aren't very keen on speaking, unfortunately. I'd be glad to hear anything you can tell me about running a Meetup, as I still feel very new to the whole process. Thank you very much - Jesper Boyan Yordanov boyan.yordanov.dev@gmail.com Organizer of PHP Varna  <http://phpvarna.com/> Software Engineer @ ShtrakBG Find me on Twitter <https://twitter.com/specter_bg>