I got an interesting email today from someone who wanted to start their own meetup looking for some advice. There's actually a lot of things you have to think about when you're trying to build a community.
- How often do you want to meet? How long do you stay?
- Do you want to have a soft starting or soft ending time (to give people time to chat)? Or should it be very focused?
- How many users will we expect? How many developers? Can we have one without the other?
- What style of presentations do we want? Round table? Lectures? Tutorials? Presentations? Panel?
There's a million questions that you have to figure out if you really want to build a community. Having helped out at the local Web920, running my own Appleton WordPress, and speaking at a couple meetups in California I have definitely learned a few lessons.