I have an idea

Why not tap into the vast resource of talks already out there, and so instead of giving talks (which not everyone is comfortable doing) but why not get one member to pick an existing talk per meet-up, watch it and research the topic beforehand, and then the whole group watches it at the next meet up on a big screen ..and then you discuss it afterwards?

We’ve started a meetup in Malmö and we’re in a similar position. We’re trying to solve it by focusing on member generated content. At the end of the last meetup, a bunch of us mentioned things that we were interested in, and that we were willing to explore and then talk about at the next one. So not proper talks, but more like “show and tell”. People volunteered to talk about stuff like Nerves and LiveView. I hope this will work!

We’re also trying to make sure that there’s at least one thing on the agenda aimed at people with little to no Elixir experience. I don’t believe we can afford to do too much advanced stuff, there’s just not enough people working on Elixir here. Not that I’d want to scare away curious people even if there were. I think you could probably do 30 minutes per meetup just going through the Elixir Getting Started guide, chapter by chapter, using live code examples.

But we’re still also very much figuring this out. We should share ideas for talks and projects in the future!

Awesome, thanks for sharing!

That’s a great idea—To solicit ideas from the group members themselves. I will try that at the end of our next meetup and let you know how it goes.

I wrote up my experiences running the Berlin Ruby User Group + some other thoughts and ideas a while ago which should be helpful: Meetups – Journeys of a not so young anymore Software Engineer

Also thanks for running meetups both of you!

@jola I’m actually contemplating when to go to Malmö this year maybe I’ll be able to swing by

Thanks for taking the time to write up those posts! They will be very useful.