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

Hey Jesper, Welcome to the mailing list, always great to see that you've decided to step up and bring people together to share knowledge and experiences. Thank you for your commitment. To answer your main question and underlying sub-questions I will share my experiences and ideas that have worked for us (PHPBenelux) in the past. Just keep in mind these steps worked for us and might not be applicable for your situation. When you're starting a community, the two main challenges are finding speakers and finding locations. The location challenge is often solved by reaching out to companies in the region that are using PHP or are heavily involved in (web) application development, this can include educational institutes and recruitment agencies. To find speakers that are willing to come to your user group meetup is often a bigger hill to climb, but not impossible. Let's look at different categories we can classify speakers in. Grow your local developers into public speaking When you have a bunch of developers together for a meetup, but no speaker you can start of with "open spaces" or "round table" discussions where everyone can introduce themselves and let them talk about their latest project or a cool feature they worked on. Create a "Bar Camp" type of meetup where people can come to the meetup and give a short talk about a subject (5 to 10 minutes) If you want to make it a bit more formalised, announce "lightning talks", short talks of 15 to 20 minutes) upfront and have people submit their ideas so you can create a schedule for the meetup. Invite speakers from other areas Once you have something going, it's interesting to invite speakers from areas further away from your own location. You mention that Copenhagen is a 3-hour drive away from you and they have come already to speak at your events, so that's already something you experimented with. You also state you cannot do this all the time, but I believe that's something you need to work out yourself. What I see is that there are many speakers that are willing to enter the conference level of speaking engagements. To practice their skills in public speaking they need to rehearse a lot and user group meetups are perfect for it. This is also true for speakers that are already engaged with multiple conferences as they want to try out a new talk or practice a workshop they want to give at the next conference. So there are plenty of people out there looking for opportunities to speak in front of your meetup audience. Invite speakers from outside the country Lastly you can invite speakers from other countries as well. This might require some work on your part as well as often they have to stay overnight, and can often be coupled with a training or consulting gig at one or more companies in your area. What I often do is to check your local audience and figure out the challenges they face. Then look at the known speakers that are experts in that field and offer the company you can bring in a "specialist" to help them solve their problems. These companies pay the expenses of travel and lodging and you plan your meetup during the stay of this expert. Reach out to this mailing list to find the experts for the problems your developers face in companies within your area. And you also have crazy folks, like myself, that don't mind traveling and speak in front of your audience. I know of others that do the same, but I don't want to speak for them so they will chime in after I send this e-mail out. Don't be discouraged! Organising events is a true effort and not always accredited as such by your peers. Your events have highs and lows, but be consistent and don't be discouraged. In the long run it will pay off. Good luck and let me know if you would like me to come over and speak at your meetup. Michelangelo Michelangelo van Dam Sr. Web Application Architect, Test Automator & Microsoft Azure MVP Mobile/WhatsApp: +32479922951 - Telegram/Twitter: @DragonBe - Skype: michelangelovandam GPG Fingerprint: 5732  D8FE  EDE8  D59F  E59F 1597  70DF  8F88  2024  203C > On 17 May 2018, at 01:22, Jesper Østertoft Jacobsen <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

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