How hard it is depends on what kind of meetup you’re running, in may case it’s very easy. The Brussels group is more of a social gathering. We start of with a topic for the day but go on wild tangents/play board games and generally just have fun. The only things I ever needed to do as an organizer were: pick a topic for the meetup, post the meetup on the site, arrive on time, make new members feel welcome and manage the mailing list. When I started out I honestly didn’t have any expectations on how hard it would be, I had no idea how they would turn and had decided to just run with whatever happened.
Once the meetup had a core group of regulars some of them offered to help and I could delegate the stuff I’m not very good at (like the meetup posts on LW and coming up with topics) These days the only things I feel I have to do are put in an extra effort to involve new members and keep the atmosphere friendly (which, in two years of meetups, has only once been a problem, LW’ers are generally great people) and those are things I would do anyway.
I know there are other meetups were the organizer has more responsibility. For example, if you have a system where every month another person gives a short presentation you have to manage that as well. For larger groups (Brussels rarely has more then 4 people) an official moderator type person might be handy to make sure quieter people get a chance to speak up. There is no one “right” way to run a meetup, see why people enjoy coming to yours and try and make that part as awesome as you can. Just keep an open mind about trying new things every now and then.
In short, how hard it is to run a meetup depends the type (social, exercise focused, presentations, etc.) In my case, it’s very easy especially since I have other helping me out.
If you’re thinking on starting one yourself don’t worry to much about what type you want it to be, just see how the first few meeting go and it’ll point itself out from there.
How hard it is depends on what kind of meetup you’re running, in may case it’s very easy. The Brussels group is more of a social gathering. We start of with a topic for the day but go on wild tangents/play board games and generally just have fun. The only things I ever needed to do as an organizer were: pick a topic for the meetup, post the meetup on the site, arrive on time, make new members feel welcome and manage the mailing list. When I started out I honestly didn’t have any expectations on how hard it would be, I had no idea how they would turn and had decided to just run with whatever happened.
Once the meetup had a core group of regulars some of them offered to help and I could delegate the stuff I’m not very good at (like the meetup posts on LW and coming up with topics) These days the only things I feel I have to do are put in an extra effort to involve new members and keep the atmosphere friendly (which, in two years of meetups, has only once been a problem, LW’ers are generally great people) and those are things I would do anyway.
I know there are other meetups were the organizer has more responsibility. For example, if you have a system where every month another person gives a short presentation you have to manage that as well. For larger groups (Brussels rarely has more then 4 people) an official moderator type person might be handy to make sure quieter people get a chance to speak up. There is no one “right” way to run a meetup, see why people enjoy coming to yours and try and make that part as awesome as you can. Just keep an open mind about trying new things every now and then.
In short, how hard it is to run a meetup depends the type (social, exercise focused, presentations, etc.) In my case, it’s very easy especially since I have other helping me out. If you’re thinking on starting one yourself don’t worry to much about what type you want it to be, just see how the first few meeting go and it’ll point itself out from there.