We greatly appreciate anyone offering their office/location for a meetup! It's a great way to get some visibility in the Go community, and it allows us to organize these events.
We typically try to organize an event every 5-7 weeks. We skip holiday seasons: December, and July or August. The most common days for events are: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Monday works as well.
Each event has one organizer as the first contact person (the "MC", master of ceremony). The MC will do the opening/closing of the event, and stay in contact with you and the speakers leading up to the event. The rest of the organizing team will help out if needed. You'll usually be in contact with a few organizers leading up to the event.
We've been having about 60 to 70 attendees at each event. But more people register. The show rate is max 70% historically. So if your location has space for 75 people, we would set the maximum number of attendees at meetup.com to 100. We've never had more people than fit in a location. If more people register, they'll be put on the waitlist. A few days before the event we send out an email to all participants asking they update their RSVP status if they cannot make it. This moves people off the waitlist. This happens a lot especially on the day of the event itself, though not everyone on the waitlist can still adjust their plans to come to the event.
Factors like bad weather (rain), traffic jams/public transport issues typically make the show rate go down.
If your location requires registration of attendees, we will mention that on the meetup event page, telling users to register with their full names. Because of people (un)registering on the last day, and cycling from the waitlist, we can usually only provide a final participants list in the afternoon of the day of the event. If you need the list earlier, please let us know.
We always use a projector to display slides. It helps to know in advance which types of connectors will do, so we can bring dongles or cables if needed and so we can with speakers and their equipment.
Please let us know about any parking options. Public (paid) parking is fine. If your building offers parking, and does not have (complicated) registration, we can put instructions on the meetup event page.
A typical schedule:
- 18.00, Doors open, with drinks/snacks (hopefully provided by you, see below).
- 18.30, Start with talks, (this is what we announce, though we often start just a little later).
- 18.40-18.50, Introduction: Welcome people, optional talk by hosting organization (eg about the company), request for participation, showing schedule of the day.
- 18.50-19.30, "What's new in Go", lightning talks or full talk.
- 19.30-20.00, Break.
- 20.00-20.45, Lightning talk, full talk.
- 20.45-21.00, Closing.
- 21.00-..., Drinks, often at a nearby bar, but at location is great too.
Depending on the number of (lightning) talks, we may compact/stretch the talks or break sections.
If anyone from your organization is interested in doing a short talk about the company, that's great. Doesn't have to be complicated or grand. If you're looking to hire developers, this is a good moment to mention it.
It's also appreciated if you ask any developers in your organization if they're interested giving a talk.
If you know a bar nearby that we can go to after the event, please let us know and we'll put it in the schedule/event page.
Companies are often happy to offer drinks and snacks before/during the meetup. This is often soda/beer and pizza, but can be anything that keeps the attendees from going too hungry/thirsty. Don't get too much, it's great if the snacks are finished before the end of the event.
Please fill up the form I want to be a host and we will reach out to you as soon as possible.