Building Thriving Meetups & User Groups: Principles, Prescriptions, Power

Steve: As you've heard name's Steve Chen. I am the executive director of Code and Coffee. I lead DevRel and community at this company called Sift AI, where we're building community AI. And before we hop into this stuff, I want to share with you a bit about my journey. So back in 2016, well yeah, back in 2016, I was complete brand new to Tech. I initially was a business major in college, dropped out of my senior year after working, so part-time jobs, hourly customer service jobs, realised college is expensive. So I decided to drop out and essentially tried to find myself. And during that time period, I saw those ads for these coding bootcamps, those ones that say Make six digit salary just by enrolling in this three month bootcamp.

So I did it and after that entire time period I realised, wow, I need to get involved in community to find my first job. So after doing that entire coding bootcamp for three months, moved back to dc, got involved heavily in the DC tech scene where I went to over three meetups per week, became a developer through references, worked at a nonprofit, unpaid software engineering internship at first at this company called kaboom, and then eventually worked my way up to one of the part-time hourly delivery jobs. I worked at a company called Zoomer. It was basically Uber Eats before Uber Eats actually at Uber Eats, DoorDash, all that stuff. So I can imagine high stress, high velocity stuff. And then at some point I landed at GrubHub after they acquired the company. So in 2017, I essentially started still going to three meetings per week.

Ended up working for this unicorn called Arcadia, I think they should IPO within the next year. And basically on day three, I started DC Code & Coffee with a bunch of friends. It was a meetup where we basically hung out and coffee and chat out good. And from basically still going to three meetups per week. We did that up until 2020. As you can imagine, virtual meetups probably aren't the fun meetups to go to. So in 2020, I decided to basically go on three hikes per week rather than three meetups per week. It was my first time hiking ever in my life. My parents didn't believe in hiking, so I went on 83 hikes in one year. Yeah, just all over the DC area. And then after doing that for a year, I was thinking, wow, I have not met a single person all year long.

So in that time period I was thinking, what can I do to make the most amount of impact possible to the most amount of people possible with the strengths I have? So essentially I started coding coffee in New York and still to this day, I still live in DC So in 2021, I basically started driving up and down from DC to New York every two weeks for entire year, basically 20 to 26 maybe meetups over the course of 2021 through 2022, and this was only for a three hour meetup. So yeah, after just doing that for entire year, that inspired six more chapters across the us, Columbus, Chicago, Austin, some people that came to New York during coffee got their first tech jobs and then were like, how do I start one in my local city? Then in 2023, we expanded to 25 more cities. So basically five x four, six x and then today we have over 35 meetups all across the us.

So basically here's Spotify Wrapped, what happened over the past year and 2023, we basically kept going. We host over 368 events per year, roughly one per day annually. Of those events, 55 of 'em had talks with default to social style. And then we also spend less than $6,000 a year total. Most of it is with software subscriptions. A lot of venues tend to have coffee because tech offices, they have coffee. Yeah, a lot of it was on these things of growth, consistency and community led, volunteer led stuff we all love today can copy. We are essentially the mission is for a group to make friends and grow and 35 cities, 50,000 members, 200 plus volunteers. Of those 240 of 'em are local chapter leaders, and our format is essentially social and then we also host 'em monthly or biweekly. It depends on the chapter. Then over the course of these past three years, we've raised over $200,000 in scholarships, two career changers as well as in this past month got a $25,000 cash grant to end loneliness and long gen z. Woo.

So before we hop into these three principles, let's understand the different types of communities. There's things like fan communities, neighbourhood communities, ways, neighbourhood pool clubs, apartments, just local based learning growth communities as you can imagine, universities, high schools, schools, and then social communities meetups, user groups basically where folks surround themselves with a specific passion that brings them together. So Code & Coffee itself is built on three core principles. These three principles I like to call the BTS framework like behind the scenes or the Kpop group. These are the core principles or these core principles are the framework I use when making decisions, making business deals, vetting sponsors, and basically how we lead at coding copy. In these next three slides, I'm going to go over each principle in one slide while also adding a couple of prescriptions of what we do at Coding Copy. To abide by that, belonging is our first principle.

Belonging is the feeling of being accepted and valued within a community to foster a sense of belonging at Code & Coffee . We set defined boundaries, boundaries, determine who's allowed in and who's allowed out for the safety of the group. I sometimes like to joke that we allow anyone that has ever typed into an IDE. I know that might sound like we're excluding people that just don't type into ID every day, but read those words very much anyone that has typed into id ever. So anyone that's slightly curious about code, typically sales, marketing people, they're not typing into ID ever. But at the same time, designers, product managers, they might. And then another prescription that we have with Code & Coffee is we encourage contributions from our community, whether it's through volunteering, community led talks, developing open source projects like our Discord bot that separates all our cities so you don't get the messages.

And then surprisingly, most of our organisers have also been inbound volunteers who've attended a coding copy in their local city or just heard about us through word of mouth. And then we spend basically $0 on marketing. And then to also facilitate the one we have our core signature of Code & Coffee intro circles. These are essentially a community ritual that we host at every Code & Coffee. It's sort of what makes Code & Coffee unique, but at the same time you probably heard of 'em. They're basically icebreakers breakers. And essentially how it works is at Code & Coffee, it's a three hour meetup. We come in at 2:00 PM 2:30 PM we have an intro circle before. It's basically everyone that has come in to stand in a circle, say their name, what they're working on and what they can help out with. And this way this organically creates a natural interest for one another. It helps people feel seen and feel heard. And that's honestly really big to someone like me who's literally never been in tech, have been going to all these meetups and realise, wow, these people have decades of experience compared to me. And at the same time, probably we're not talking about the same thing.

Our second principle is trust. Trust is defined as building reliability and integrity and relationships through consistency. At Code & Coffee, I set ex organiser expectations of regular frequent events. Typically this means either two weeks or monthly, never quarterly. When people ask when the next meet, they're ecstatic. They already know that we are going to host an event either two weeks or one month from now. And then another way we build trust is we create multiple feedback channels. We listen and implement suggestions. We have multiple channels from meetup.com or Meetup automatically sends out a mailer to or a form to every attendee of the event. This might be new, but I'm not sure, and attendees can basically fill out any feedback that they have. Additionally, we also have organised our office hours. I basically host a 30 minute office hour ever since we started coding coffee every Monday night for 30 minutes.

No one comes usually, but at the same time it is very much to help answer any questions blockers and basically help any struggling and organisers. And then the last way we also help create Feedback Loop is through Discord. We have an online Discord community. I'm on it 24 7. Anyone within our 50,000 developer meetup can basically P me and say, Hey, I at a terrible time at this speedup or at a great time at the Meetup Choices. Here is way we get visibility into what the community wants. Another way we build trust is to ensure consistency on the long-term vision of Code & Coffee or essentially alignment across all Code & Coffee levels. So in 2022, we actually had only six to seven chapters. And of those six to seven chapters, we had the leads hop into these weekly workshops with our learning and development instructor who happens to volunteer at Coding Coffee in Baltimore, who also happens to have a degree in neuroscience at Yale.

So he's just really smart at just facilitating, helping big tech companies align and just did for free for us for entire month. So me and seven chapter leads basically over the course of three weeks came out of those three weeks with three paragraphs, a bulleted list and the values that represent us as a meetup. So you'll get similar quality wherever you are when you attend a coding copy. This was big for us, mainly because sort of writing copy texts or honestly I guess in this room, if you've ever written an email, it takes time. And a lot of times it's not as, you don't get the meaning across. So very much ensuring that consistency really helps build trust. And the last principle safety. Safety is the feeling of being secure in an environment for all members. I'm not talking about physical safety because it is physical safety.

You probably don't want to be involved in a community that is physically hindering you. This is more so psychological and social safety. At Code & Coffee, we enforce a code of conduct with clear guidelines, the contributor covenant that I have over here, fully open source, a great way to establish those guidelines. But at the same time, if you don't enforce those guidelines, what's the point? At Code & Coffee, we have pretty much a no warnings rule with this type of stuff. We very much investigate everything swiftly, but also try to have at least bias out it. There's a sort of former school principal turned product manager counterpart on me that completely different gender, completely different age, race background. So it definitely helps sort of relieve those biases when investigating safety concerns. Another way we help build safety is we choose accessible venues near public transit for obvious reasons, but we also choose venues that encourage interactions.

I like to joke that office spaces, they've sort of gone toward the more open office route, not great for work, but they're amazing for meetups. People naturally want to talk to each other. They see each other interactions take place. And yeah, things work. And then what's unique to Code & Coffee is that we're sort of social style by default. We don't do talk focused events mainly for the fact that you've probably been in talks 30 minutes to 45 minutes long. You sit down, you look at your phone and then you're like, oh wow, what are they talking about? But then you're in the centre of the room, so you want to get up and leave in front of everyone. It's rude, but at the same time, we've all felt that way at some point in our tech.

And then these are basically the three principles. Summarise with all the prescriptions, I think there'll be a recording after this, so don't feel that you need to take a picture. And when I think of meetups, I think of two very distinct buckets of Meetup. There's community led groups and then there's company led groups. Community led groups are focused more so on the group goals or individual local goals. There's typically a lot less structure. No t-shirts that are branded in 'em, the grassroots, very much bottom up, volunteer driven and have a lot less resources. Company led ones, they're focused on business objectives as you can imagine, more structured. Typically a top focused. They usually will have a lot more organisers, people on staff with t-shirts top down and very much a lot more resources. So think in your mind which one is better. But before we do that, you might be asking yourself as a company led Dere, what can I do to make meetups happen?

I mean, sure you can start a meetup on your company dime, but as you can imagine, it is very hard to keep that company led meetup afloat. Executives want return on investment and you might not want to have to find a speaker every time, especially on a monthly basis that's 12 speakers a year. Or if you're doing it biweekly, 24 speakers a year. Again, it's very hard. Chances are we as tech workers will be gone from the company within two years. So not usually meetups for companies don't work out. So the true power of meetups is to build partnerships with your community led groups, whether that's through either providing venues, resources a lot of times couldn't copy. I sit down with our sponsors, chat about their goals and see how we can help align toward those goals. This results in shared goals. Both parties can gain value from and from sponsorships.

Couldn't copy is simply able to have a meetup that meets up every two weeks. That's pretty insane. Of course, we also always look for venues. Venues, I think with meetups are always the hardest thing to find, especially if you run a weekend meetup. A lot of venue offices just aren't open without a fee. And then also no one's using the office on weekends. Then you can also help leverage resources like coffee scholarships or swag. Some things that might cost money to other individuals might not cost as much money to companies. And then many meetups are honestly okay with being a walking billboard at the time, and a lot of times they might be cheaper than you would expect to sponsor a meetup. As a meetup leader, this results in what I call resilience and sustainability. I like to view those two as sort of the pillars of success with meetups, resilience is essentially just adapting to be able to handle setbacks.

As you can imagine, there's always last minute setbacks with any event that you do. And sustainability is essentially the ability to keep the meat up alive. This involves a relentless level of consistency and through partnerships, this equals enhanced collaboration where there's stronger public private partnerships for success of both the company and the localised meetup group. And before we end this talk, I want to sort of quickly bring your attention to this report. This report is by the US Surgeon General back in 2023. Last year, 87 page report on the loneliness epidemic among Americans. It basically said that we're spending less and less time together. Engagement has decreased even within households. And this was only data leading up to 2020, not anything after that. As you can imagine, short form content, algorithms definitely not helping out at all. And you're wondering why I'm showing you this.

Well, social connection also really affects health, mortality rates, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, mental function obviously, and the negative and even increases rates of self-harm. There's also the educational and economic benefits of simply being socially connected. Me personally, I found almost every job I've ever worked in through community. And if I didn't have community, I wouldn't be in dev for Dev. So we need meetups now. We need human connection because we as humans naturally have a psychological desire to feel like we belong in a community and or group. We're spending too much time on our screen of course, and missing out on possibly even connecting with others and community will help us live longer, be better, and be better overall personally and professionally. So remember these key takeaways When building meetups, build on belonging, safety, and trust as the guiding principles start partnerships to go start partnerships locally to go further together and strive for partnerships that focus on the sustainability and resilience. And then last but not least, focus on the true meaning of beat up. Create a space for social connection, create a space for developers to grow and make friends. Thank you.

Do I have some time for questions?.

Audience member 1: You mentioned social default. Can you expand a little bit on how you're working that into year round?

Steve: Yeah, yeah, definitely. So one of the slides I mentioned, the prescription of social by default, I think I might have, there might be a better phrasing for this. Basically you probably have been to tech meetups where they're all talks and not really much in networking. A lot of times typically the networking is either 30 minutes in the beginning or 30 minutes at the end. But in reality, 30 minutes is not a lot of time. There's not enough time to socialise and actually make connections. So coding coffee itself for three hour social upon, I guess it's very social focused, not necessarily talk focused. Some chapters with Code & Coffee, we have these things called optional talks where we have the talks in a completely separate room just so people don't feel like they have to just listen to someone and speak for a couple hours to socialise.

Audience member 2: Hey, that was a great talk and also I just think you're doing really great work because the loneliness and everything is pretty clear after the pandemic. So getting that, I just wanted to ask about venues and how you develop relationships with venues. In my experience in New York, there were a lot of meetups in Manhattan and they're still, maybe some are coming back, but it's not what it used to be. And is there thinking outside the box you can do with finding venues or looking at other kinds of organisations or businesses?

Steve: Yeah, yeah. I have just the data basically. I think the best way to look at venues is to look at struggling industries for-profit coding, boot camps, struggling co-working spaces, also struggling. But then of course there's always tech offices. I think a lot of companies with the return to office maybe just hasn't worked over the past couple of years. Look into those three categories and if yeah, you can't find any from that, just tap into your network. I think usually it is just me, Google Maps a random city and typing in coworking and then just cold emails. I think the shorter, simpler the better. And it is very much that just sort of aligning again those shared goals with whatever goals they're trying to do, whether it's brand awareness or just sales at the time.

Audience member 3: Hey there, I have a question and then I also have a suggestion to put out to the group because I thought it was a really cool way of doing things. But first my question is, so I run a meetup, an outdoor meetup for women in tech Awesome. That we do during the spring and summer in Nashville TN. And then Nashville actually just lost their last women in tech group when girls in tech shut down. And so me and my friend are trying to start up a new Girls in tech. And my question is, my strategy for my little outdoor meetup has been piggybacking off of people who have bigger meetups and partnering with them. But now that we're doing our own Girls in tech group, how do you get the word out to people when you have a new meetup? Is it just like you just put on meetup.com or word of mouth?

Steve: Yeah. Well, for a good coffee uniquely, it has been almost 98 to almost 99% meetup.com. It surprisingly still is unfortunately the best event hosting platform for communities in general because there are 20 millions to hundreds of millions users already on that. But then at the same time, what you mentioned, piggybacking off of other larger audiences like Facebook, Reddit, Instagram, all that stuff, but then also various sort of social groups. You're probably part of a couple that wouldn't even mind cross collaborating, cross promoting. And I was just chatting with Justin who's just taking pictures about this of cross collaborating with other meetup groups as well, where just figure out if you can even host an event at the same time at the same place and just brand it as that. It is a lot of cross-motion. And I know Nashville is also a lower population tech area. We have a surprising amount of engineers there. But yeah, it is kind of like,

Yeah, we have one in Chattanooga, Tennessee, so we're making things happen.

Audience member 3: We might have had a non-affiliated co coffee at one point, so now I'm like, I got to let everybody know that there's an official code of conduct.

Steve: We're actively trying to unite basically all of 'em. There's ones called Coffee and Code, it's the best. But yeah, that's one of the things. Once we stopped growing, I am actively trying to do, we basically in the DC era, never really even, we had maybe eight chapters across dc, Maryland, and Virginia. Three states, none of 'em talked to each other. It was bonkers. It wasn't until 2020, I think, 20 21, 20 22 when we all basically got one discord and were like, alright, we'll share ideas. I guess just developer things.

Audience member 3: Well actually I did want to get a suggestion you all, one of the best meetups that I went to that was kind of a talk was a women in tech meetup that is no longer around in Nashville. But what they did was that they had a couple of speakers and they had tables and you could pick which speaker you wanted to and you could pick two, they would split in half. And so you'd go, so you'd be talking to somebody about their topic and they'd be presenting it to you, but then you'd only be with a small group of people or women and then you got to talk more about it. And then afterwards they'd go to the table and somebody from that table would give a wrap up and tell the rest of the group what they talked about. But then you actually made, you got the information, but you made actual connections. So it was much more meaningful. So just take that if you want. I thought was great. I have a few more hands. We

Audience member 4: Hey, thanks for the talk. It was great. I'm curious, I'm not sure how I'm going to phrase this actually, but if you're a company kind of wanting to leverage that grassroots feel of a community, but you don't yet have a series that has been built by your community, but you also want to hold on to some of that brand control over so slightly. I know that's the eternal challenge. I just wonder, would you recommend more sponsoring existing communities like Coffee and Code or So I got it the wrong way. Oh no, no worries. Sorry. It's been on purpose, right? Or what are your suggestions basically for how Companie can approach that?

Steve: I definitely do think sort of starting off, partnering up with local community led communities is by far the way to go. Simply just having that meetup name, buy your company if they're okay with that. Surprisingly, a lot of meetups very much are okay with it. So very much just have a conversation with 'em, see what they're comfortable with and just go from there. Mind me asking, where are you located or where they're trying to do things? Well,

Audience member 4: That's a great question. I'm in New York, but this company have fought and fostered. But

Steve: Boston Coffee, second biggest, sorry. And I think we have one more question.

Audience member 5: Thank you. So I'm the community manager for HashiCorp. So this talk really sets me off, right? I can't even keep still. So I would say we are company led, but we're very community first. So everything about HashiCorp is really community. So one thing that I wanted to offer this group is we're always a team with at least six developer advocates. We have so many people who travel and who are willing to give talks and who are, we're a remote first company. We have user groups in almost 65 countries, like almost 200 user groups. So if you all are looking for speakers, I would love to network with any of you who are looking for speakers. We can do someone who is within HashiCorp. We have HashiCorp ambassadors, we call us ourselves Hugs, right? HashiCorp User Group. So everyone needs a hug. So we have co-organized and I just wanted to offer that to you all because I love everything community. Yeah.

Steve: Awesome. Thank you. And yeah, definitely feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. Steve Chen, sift coffee, super down to connect with any of you have a coffee chat after this entire conference. And yeah, chat more about, there's nothing I love doing more.

MC: Amazing. Another round of applause.