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I hosted the very first
Windsor-Essex .NET Developers meetup back in June 2016. It’s been a full calendar year and we’ve since had 12 meetups. I figured now would be a good time for some reflection on how the year went and where we want to go.
Speakers
In my
previous update, I mentioned how getting speakers hadn’t been that difficult. Although the pool of speakers I had in mind when I started the group has shrunk, as time goes on enables us to have them speak again.
One change has been my connection with other Microsoft MVPs. Getting these new connections has open the doors for having MVPs come to our area to provide a talk. This proving again how much connections matter.
Attendance
Our attendance jumps up and down. Promotion and getting the word out has been the lacking on my part. I definitely need to put more effort towards increasing attendance. I’m always really curious of what other user group leaders do if anything to spread the word. Of it’s just a organic growth from word of mouth? If you are a user group leader, I’d love to year your comments below or on Twitter.
Facility & Remote
Almost all of our meetups are hosted at
Hackforge in downtown Windsor. It has been a great venue and location. We did have two sessions which were at a different venue because we needed a better internet connection. One of those remote sessions was done remotely by Reid Evans on
Getting Started with Functional Programming in F#. The second session was myself doing a remote talk for his user group Functional Knox.
I want to continue to do a couple remote session/speakers per year. It allows us to broaden our reach for speakers and get different content.
Sponsors
We’ve had wonderful sponsors over the first year. Microsoft, Telerik, DevExpress, OzCode, Elmah.io
Comments
If have you run a user group and have suggestions I’d love to hear from you. Please leave comment or let me know on twitter.
