Running community meetups in 2025

I had a great call with Ankesh Bharti. He's based in Bangalore now, and we had two things to discuss. One, is his interest in potentially organizing a Causal Islands Bangalore event this fall. And two, his new User & Agents community.

This made me reflect on community meetups. I've been booting up DWebYVR for the past two years, and generally like to figure out cadence.

Days, Evenings, and Weekends

For events, if you make them during the day, then only people who have the topic as their "day job" can go, or don't work / are students are likely to come.

Weekday evenings is good for both people with day jobs that are aligned as well as enthusiasts. Note that Friday evenings are typically bad for older people with families.

Weekends you will get more enthusiasts, and less family / day job professionals.

Weekly Cadence

A weekly cadence is a lot. It needs to be low effort and basically drop in. A good fit for things like co-working.

If you put it at the same time every week – both time of day and day of week – then there will be some people who can never come. Consider rotating a bit, especially when you're experiment.

You may want multiple hosts, or a host per time slot, eg. Alice every Thursday evening, and Bob ever Tuesday morning.

Monthly Cadence

You need to be "on" for 2 weeks every month, and it can be a lot if you need a unique speaker, different venues, etc. Planning in quarterly chunks can help, where you figure out venue, hosts, speakers in one chunk, and then just need to push out marketing / registration attendance closer to each one.

Quarterly

Appropriate for bigger events where you want to have higher attendance, polished talks, and similar styles. You get 4-6 weeks "off" between events, and then push for 4-6 weeks to fill the event.