dotplus is a group of mobile/web/hardware developers that come together once a month to talk about software development. The goals are:
- Everyone learns something.
- Everyone has fun.
- Everyone meets somebody new.
A typical night will look like the following:
- 7:00 - Registration/mingling
- 7:15 - Short presentation on a beginner topic (preferably by a beginner)
- 7:30 - More advanced presentation. Could be a deep code-dive into Rails, story about an open-source project, or demo of a raspberry pi setup.
- 8:15 - Hacking. We encourage attendees to bring any coding problems, or interesting code to look at. We'll break the group up into smaller groups for hacking or just chatting.
- 9:00 - End of official meetup, but small group heads down to the bar.
We will constantly be searching to find the right formula. That will vary by group and location, but we want to reflect on our past sessions to find out what is working well and what is it. We will have regular meeting with the organizers in different cities to find that formula.
Just a quick one to start the night off. This is to give new people experience giving presentations, and so beginners and advanced folk alike will gain something from the meetup.
Presentations are what get people to come to a meetup and what give people topics to chat about. Pairing on problems is an incredibly powerful way to meet new people. Developers are not only comfortable around programming, but they really enjoy it as well. It's also yet another way to get people to learn something new.
This isn't a place to get a job, it's a place to make friends and learn new things.
The real power of rubyragers comes from the app that tags along with it. Meetup.com is the status quo today, but it has many problems that I won't get into, but I will get into what dotplus will do differently.
Probably solely. Using this not only greatly simplifies registering for the event, but also allows us to print nametags out with everyone's name and handle. This doubles as the check-in process and allows the organizer to know who showed up and who didn't simply by people taking their nametags. Also, after the event, we can send out a page that allows people to see a list of the attendees to the event along with follow buttons so they can easily reconnect with their new friends.
Let people show off attending 3 meetups in a row. Let people show off speaking at events.
Let them link their slides to the site. Edit their bio. Edit the abstract. Also, meetup.com shows the organizer as the top person at an event, we show the speaker.
Spreading organically. The fact the group is not on meetup.com will result in a lower attendance rate, worse SEO, and make the group difficult to find for those new to the area/software. I actually see these as advantages. Meetups can often be a group of strangers. If everyone that comes has someone else in the group they know, they will be more inclined to socialize and feel more comfortable overall having mutual friends. It will probably result in a smaller group, but a closer one.
Doesn't notify me via github notification light in the top left. I guess I need to explicitly turn on gist comment mentions email notifications...