Meetup Adventures: Never Ask the Group to Speak

When I took over as the meetup organizer for n-languages, PD mentored me in becoming a great organizer. They provided one of the most important rules for running the meetup:

Never ask the group to speak at the meetup

This rule would make an organizer’s job harder and I followed this rule. Part of me didn’t want to, especially as a first time organizer - who am I to argue with the previous organizer??

One thing this made me do: set the program using speakers outside of the group.

This meant I had to be open to other ideas. In a way, n-languages lend itself perfectly for that. I could have one meeting on Java and the next on Ruby. This would be consistent with the group’s charter.

I took advantage of this rule to the max - whenever I attended another meetup and I learned about someone working on a different programming language, I jumped on it!

Only by following this rule, I saw a competitive advantage the n-languages meetup had over established meetup groups, especially other programming language ones. (i.e. Having a Java speaker at a Ruby meetup and vice-versa would be weird.)

Thank you PD for establishing this rule. Now I see it made me a better organizer for n-languages.