John & Shay & Tony — Refresh Chicago

Hi, I’m Mike. I’m sitting down here with the guys from Refresh Chicago, John, Shay, and Tony. Hi, guys. Thanks for sitting down with me today. The kind of question that we’re going to get to is, can you tell me a little bit about Refresh Chicago? What are you doing here? What is Refresh? Certainly, yeah. Why is it Refresh? So, Refresh Chicago, we’ve been around for, I think, almost three years now? Two and a half. About that, two and a half? Yeah. And it’s sort of, the Refresh group itself is sort of a loose collection of meetup groups around the country. It’s not just here in Chicago. It’s not just here in Chicago. It’s around the country. They’re not really affiliated with each other. They share a common name. But, I mean, the original goal was to be a way to meet up and sort of talk about these new ideas that were coming into web development, which was like a refresh. So, it was like ten years ago, when web standards were becoming a thing, and CSS was becoming more and more prevalent. So, we realized that there was sort of, there was no Refresh group in Chicago, and it was sort of, we’re trying to fill this gap, which is bringing web designers and web developers together to sort of talk about common topics. Yeah, because we… You see a lot of tech, like hard tech, like there was the Java group, which was huge for all of us, .NET group. But nothing really serving designer, UI guys. Yeah. I mean, when you think about web design, it is technical, and it’s creative, and it’s design, but it’s all of the things sort of together, right? You can’t… And it’s messy, too. Like, there’s not one, every web designer can tell you that they do something different, some do code, some don’t. Some do a lot of UI, some don’t, and then our group kind of fills that void. You know, it’s not just like tech, it’s not just creative, it’s everything. And some weeks it makes more sense to certain people, and some weeks it makes more sense to others. But I think that’s sort of the niche that we fill in Chicago. So, giving that you’re kind of like trying to balance people who have maybe very different ways of defining what they do, do you have like a lot of flux between the… Yeah. So, giving that you’re kind of like trying to balance people who have maybe very different ways of defining what they do, do you have like a lot of flux between the… Yeah. So, giving that you’re kind of like trying to balance people who have maybe very different ways of defining what they do, do you have like a lot of flux between the… Yeah. So, giving that you’re kind of like trying to balance people who have maybe very different ways of defining what they do, do you have like a lot of flux between the… Yeah. So, giving that you’re kind of like trying to balance people who have maybe very different ways of defining what they do, do you have like a lot of flux between the… Yeah. So, giving that you’re kind of like trying to balance people who have maybe very different ways of defining what they do, do you have like a lot of flux between the… I think we’re kind of lucky, I think our membership, I think it’s at like 1,300 people or something now. So, we keep a steady number, but we’re seeing different faces. There’s the people who show up regularly, but we do see a lot of different faces coming. Which I think is actually a benefit to the group, because you’re going to meet new people every time when you come, which is something that’s pretty unique to this group. And also, a lot of it depends on the speaker too, right, like that speaker is development heavy, we tend to get more of like a rails crowd, development heavy, and then when we have like a designer come out, it’s more of like a designer crowd. Yeah. But there’s always quite a bit of overlap too. And our goal, I think our goal overall is to sort of have our members attend talks that they’re not necessarily… comfortable with, or like give them some experience in some area that they don’t necessarily know about. Okay, and I know you guys have done some stuff with some of the start-up, because I had associated the refresh with some of the entrepreneurial start-up movements in Chicago, is that… I think it’s just like a natural side effect of the market that we touch, you know, in Chicago, it’s kind of different than like the Valley, and it’s kind of different than like New York, in terms of like start-up culture or creative culture, and they’re a lot more entwined here, I think, so out of that, we get speakers who are naturally part of start-ups and things of that nature, and it just kind of spawns out of that, so it’s kind of like a natural evolution for us. And so kind of what is your schedule for meetings, is it monthly, or…? Yeah, we meet the fourth Wednesday of every month, right now, yeah. So how do you fund your group? I mean, we’re here in the ITA… Yeah, so Groupon is one of our main sponsors, they basically sponsor food and drinks every month, DevMind helps us out, they’re one of our good sponsors, they sort of kick in and help cover costs for like meetup.com, domains, things like that, just miscellaneous costs, ITA helps us out with the space. Okay, cool. And what are the plans for the future with Refresh? Are you looking forward to… Like Chicago Coke Camp is coming up this month, but, you know, we’ve grown a few conferences out of some group environments, are you guys looking forward, I mean, because I’m 1,300 members, you’ve got a large base, are you looking forward to… Yeah, we’re looking to, we are actively partnering with another company to throw a conference in the fall, like a large web conference that covers the same sort of topics that we want to cover. Yeah, it’s the same general mix of just web craftsmanship, so we’ll be involved with that, I don’t know what we can say about that yet, since we’re not really announcing anything yet. We can say, we can say, it’s a Chicago web comp, it’s a Chicago web comp, so DevMind did it last year, this year we’re teaming up with them to basically both partner on it and do it together. Okay, great, so I’ll make sure and put that link into the show notes. Sounds good. Is there anything else you’d like to say about Refresh? I would say if you haven’t come out yet, come on out, I mean, it’s a pretty welcoming group, it’s not, you know, we don’t focus on one topic, so… Yeah, and I’d say, you know, if you want to talk in front of the group, that’s always an awesome thing, too. So we’ve been a little lucky lately, and we’ve got a great lineup started, but we definitely have room to fit people in in the future, too. So the more ideas, the better that we can share. Great, well thank you very much for sitting down with me. Thank you. I look forward to the meeting. Thanks a lot.