A year of the Helsinki Python meetup
The Netscapes of AI
When I moved to Finland in late 2023 I noticed that the local Python meetup was not running. Me and a few other organisers have restarted it. The first meetup we ran was in April 2024 and they're still happening each month, so we've been going well over a year now since the restart.
With the aim of sharing experiences, here are my views on how we've done, structured in the classic "agile retrospective" format:
What's gone well
Taking over the old meetup group
One of the very big wins was that we were able to take over the old meetup group. That instantly gave us the ability to email over a thousand people who'd signed up to be notified about new meetups.
Format
I'd been to a fair number of other meetups (back in London) prior to getting into HelPy but what I wasn't really aware of is that there are multiple different formats of meetup. For example, Stockholm Python User Group always runs in the same physical space (I think somewhere in Stockholm University) and while the meetup is in-person the speaker is remote. That probably allows them to minimise the organisation and still have really good speakers who don't have to be in Stockholm.
We have a different format, and not because I had thought really hard about it. Just because I felt it was the default: we move around each month, usually in some local company's office. Everything is in-person. We have a a talk, a break, some food, then a second talk and then we go to the pub afterwards (more on that later).
This format works well.
Python
Overbooking
I think every meetup has deals with people who said they would attend but do not turn up. Somewhere between one third and half of people on meetup.com who say they will come do not, in fact, attend.
No-shows are annoying because (typical example) you are in a physical space which holds 60 people but have had 150 people sign up to attend. So the people who just don't turn up are blocking someone who would have turned up from actually being there.
What to do? Well, the first thing is that we overbook. If the max capacity for an event is 100 people we open at least 130 slots. That still means we have empty spaces but the ratio is far better. We can't be too aggressive about this (if more than 100 people actually turn up we would be in trouble) but we have a handle on our own turnout now and feel we can safely use this up to a certain point.
I would recommend this policy to any meetup struggling with a waitlist plus low turnout.
Discord
Overbooking is not our only strategy to maximise turnout. We initially used a private Discord server to organise the meetup and later turned this into an open commmunity (but organisation is still in private channels). This has actually been great and while I know and understand that there are a lot of mixed feelings about Discord it has been really great for us.
We suspect that people on our Discord server are significantly more likely to attend than people who are just on Meetup.com and so we announce our events a day or so early on Discord to allow people more likely to attend to sign up early without having to sit on the waitlist.
Checking the venue beforehand
Finland is a country where buildings, even office buildings, generally do not have receptionists or doorbells (or letterboxes for that matter). One frequent issue is how to allow 60-80 meetup participants to gain access to a space they both have not been to before and are also not usually allowed into.
We:
- Try to post clear instructions on the original meetup announcement
- Be responsive on Discord on the day
- often someone else is faster though (another good reason to have a Discord)
- Have people holding the doors open
- or in winter (can be -20c), waiting to open the door for people as they arrive
But we still typically need to attend each new venue briefly to just consider how we're going to allow people to gain access. We also tend to check the AV system at this time as well.
Wide organisation committee
"A word from our sponsor"
Pub afterwards
What gone badly
Meetup.com
Meetup.com is a pretty vexed social media site. On one hand, I think it is still the place where people go to find local meetups. As such it is a great "lead generation" tool. It also does ticketing and has a few key features (like running waitlist).
However Meetup.com has changed hands a few times and feels like it's being run by a skeleton crew tasked with getting the
American tech charities
Ostensibly "Global" (but invariably America-based) technology charities. We've dealt with a couple of them, which will both remain nameless to allow me to "Praise by name, criticize by category" via this anonymised - but highly representative - quote from another organiser:
My experience with [certain 501(c)(3) organisation] so far is that they go silent for a long time and then answer some question other than what I asked.
We have yet to have one of these do anything cool for us - despite us submitting to quite a lot of up-front compliance demands.