tldr: Create a reoccurring online meetup for Bitovi's community.
- Make Bitovi seem like the "cool" place it already is.
- Meet other developers, get QSLs.
- We have a lot of community outside just Chicago and LA
- We do a lot of stuff outside DoneJS like:
- design
- project management / soft skills
- React
- Basic JavaScript stuff (training new folks)
- Advanced JavaScript stuff
- Building cool apps
Lets have a reoccurring meetup that appeals to Bitovi's community!
I think it should:
- be every 6 weeks
- personally engage our community (this is the hard part)
- be entertaining and professional (aka practice our talks a few times)
By personally engage our community, I mean we should figure out how to connect with people
in a way that a meetup would. I don't think this should be a podcast. I am unsure how to best do
this. A few ideas:
- Have a very diverse set of people talking.
- Everyone at Bitovi shoudl participate. It should not be Justin talking all the time.
- We should invite non-bitovi community members and clients to present.
- Have slack / forums where people can engage offline, suggest topics, etc.
- Have "breakout" sessions where people can talk about different things and engage in small groups.
:00- Introduction, latest news, hint at breakout rooms.:05- Beginner dev talk.:15- Designer talk.:25- Project management, agile, soft-skills talk:35- Advanced talk 1:45- Advanced talk 2:55- Breakout rooms open. Rooms: Beginner JavaScript, Design, React, DoneJS, Architecture. We meet and great, ask how people are doing, what they are working on. Anything they want to learn.
- When to have it? Lunchtime, at night, weekends?
- How often to have it? Monthly, epochly, quarterly.
- How long should it be? 1 hr, 2 hrs?
- Can zoom handle this?
- Meetup.com doesn't like virtual meetups. We can probably get away with this for a bit. However, we will need some type of event page. Can hubspot handle this?
Here are some rough notes after only thinking about this for a little bit. I want to talk more about this tomorrow. :)
I read this as “cool” brand awareness, am I thinking about this correctly?
I also think of these as potential goals:
I think we lose out on some “momentum” by not having this at least monthly. I think something shorter but more frequent might hit a sweet spot. Maybe even don’t have a thing be an hour long, but do 15 minute talks/sessions weekly, plus the “breakout rooms” every time?
I agree with you that this is the most difficult part. When I go to meetups, the thing I find most valuable is meeting other people—not the talks, not the free pizza :P, but making connections.
I don’t think the meetup itself would really help us connect with people…
…I think this might though. So maybe the “connecting people” isn’t really about the meetup at all, it’s about building an audience and then having a place for them to chat. Ironically, if this grew to be successful, I think this would spawn in-person meetups.
I really like this idea.
Another idea that’s unrelated: can we move some stuff that is happening in Bitovi’s monthly meetings to this public format? I’m thinking of the demos Bitovians give on what they’re working on—can ask our clients and pitch to them that it’s free marketing for what they’re doing if they let us talk about our work with them?
Another thing I wonder about: is there anyone doing something similar to this right now?
The more I think about this, the more I want us to consolidate all our YouTube channels into one “Bitovi” channel and publish everything there. The trainings/streams we do would just be part of the content for this. We aren’t just DoneJS anymore—this opens us up to being the experts on different tech and showing our expertise all through the Bitovi brand.