Ray Hightower — ChicagoRuby

Hi, I’m here with Ray Hightower from Chicago Ruby, also the lead organizer for Windy City Rails Conference, but we’re going to be talking about Chicago Ruby right now. Ray, can you tell us a little bit about Chicago Ruby and what kind of meetings you have? Sure, oh, about Chicago Ruby? Well, Chicago Ruby is a user group. Our motto is when smart people challenge each other to grow, great things happen. So we get together and we share ideas. We have three events every month, three meetings each month. One downtown that ThoughtWorks sponsors every month. A second one, a hat night downtown that is typically sponsored by Enova Financial. And in the western suburbs in Elmhurst, the Forest Group gives us a space there where we meet on the third Saturday of every month. So we have three meetings every month. What kind of numbers do you usually see? What kind of audience do you usually bring to you? Like how many? Do you bring in designers, developers, more people working with Rails, more people working with other groups? Yeah, we’ve done surveys to determine who comes out to our meetings. We’ve got really four groups, developers, designers, entrepreneurs, and investors. Roughly 90% self-selected developers, 40% designers. You see there’s some overlap if you draw a Venn diagram. Yeah. And then… So there’s devs and designers. Yeah, devs and designers. And then entrepreneurs and investors together make up about 5% of the people who identify in one of those four groups. Now, that’s really interesting that you have people coming out that identify themselves as entrepreneurs and investors. Now, do you mean like actual people that aren’t doing Ruby devs that are coming out to meet Ruby devs at the group? Yeah, there are a handful of people. You know, at every meeting, we get a few people who come out and say, hey, I’m looking for devs or designers. I’ve got this idea, and I want to build a team to do this. So we get a few people coming out who want to meet some people to do that, but mostly because of the content of our meetings, the lion’s share of the people at our meetings are developers or designers. Right. Because that’s who we want to please. You know, when we say when smart people… That’s your audience. That’s our audience. That’s our primary audience, yeah. And so the other people are there because they’re attracted by the primary audience, as you say. Yeah, that’s interesting. That’s an interesting dynamic. Now, a typical meeting, is it usually a presentation format, or do you do hands-on labs, or is it a mix? It depends. It depends. Meetings are always, there’s a presentation, followed by a Q&A, followed by a visit to a bar afterwards, where we engage in adult beverages and brainstorming. So that’s what we do downtown. That’s on the first Tuesday of every month. We max out at 100 on the RSVPs there. Holy cow. So we typically get about 50. Sometimes we’ll get 70, 80 in there, depending on the topic. Have you ever had a meeting where, if you’re maxed out 100, have you ever exceeded that? Have you ever… Yeah. What we find is… We’ve gone beyond the 100 in RSVPs, but if it’s a really nice day outside, you might get 120 RSVPs, but a bunch of people go to the beach. Because we’re at the Aon building, which isn’t too far from the lake. So some people on the way to the meeting, I imagine some people just hop on their bikes and go to the lake. Yeah, they’re like, you never know. Yeah, yeah. But you know, it’s cool. You know, we have to live balanced lives and all that stuff. So it’s funny. But you know, we find that when we get 100… 100 RSVPs, typically we’ll have about 70 or 80 at the meeting. Right. But our average at the downtown meetings is probably about 50. Our hat nights, well, just recently we had a hat night last week that did 50 plus. I don’t know what the exact number was there, but I know it was more than 50. Out in these suburbs, we’ll get anywhere from 5 to 20, somewhere in there. Because that’s a Saturday morning. Right. Yeah, yeah. That’s what I wanted to ask you about is your schedule. Because you have a unique… You’re dynamic. You’re not just doing one group. It’s like a chain of groups. Yes. A system of groups that you have the hat nights. Yes. You have the downtown meetings. Yes. And you also have the Elmhurst meetings. Right, right. How do you coordinate those? Do you have a team of people that you work with? Oh, yes. We absolutely have a team. If you go to our GitHub repo at github.com slash chicagoruby, you’ll see a repo within our repo, a directory within our repo called How Chicago Ruby Works. Oh, okay. And in there is… It’s the organization of how we build it. All right. I’m going to definitely link to that. Yeah, yeah. So I would take a look at that. And that evolved over time. We actually started off in Elmhurst. We started off in Franklin Park. We were five guys meeting in a library in Franklin Park when I became the organizer. And when I became organizer, I said, I’m not going to do it by myself. I want other people to work with me. One of the other guys in that room was Matt Polito, whom you know. Yes. So Matt became an organizer then. Victor Hong, Will Chung. If you go to Chicago… At Ruby.org, we maintain a list of organizer and alums, people who’ve been part of the organizer team over time. Oh, wow. And so the way we managed the three groups is… Well, the half-night, for example. Ginny Hendry came up to me at one meeting and said, hey, Ray, we should do half-nights. And I said, yeah, Ginny, you should organize. So that’s how Ginny became an organizer. Right. You know, part of our organization. So when people came to work with you, you gave them, like, some support and help to… Oh, yeah, yeah. All the support in the world. And we… Yeah, because they had great ideas. Ginny had a great idea. They had great ideas for doing half-nights. Dave Junta came to us one day and said, hey, we should do coding donors. I said, okay, Dave, you can run them. Dave Junta was an organizer of Chicago Ruby for a couple of years, and he brought a lot of good ideas to us, you know, and to Windy City Rails as well. Yeah. So, you know, having… You’re kind of a veteran in the field of running user groups. If somebody is looking to start up a user group now, is there any kind of sage wisdom you might want to… Sage wisdom? Yeah. I thought some just random stuff off the top of my head. Sage wisdom, whatever. You know what has worked well for us? One of the first things that we did when I first became an organizer was… First thing I wanted to do is make sure we had consistency. Because we want people to know that they can put on their calendar a Chicago Ruby meeting a year in advance. They won’t necessarily know the topic. We won’t know the topic, but we’ll know the date, the time, and the place. So with that consistency, everybody can plan around it. And then once you have that, then you want to get good speed. And then once you have that, then you want to get good speed. And then once you have that, then you want to get good speed. And then once you have that, then you want to get good speed. And then once you have that, then you want to get good speed. And then once you have that, then you want to get good speed. And then once you have that, then you want to get good speed. And then once you have that, then you want to get good speed. And then once you have that, then you want to get good speed. And then once you have that, then you want to get good speed. And then once you have that, then you want to get good speed. And then once you have that, then you want to get good speed. And then once you have that, then you want to get good speed. And then once you have that, then you want to get good speed. And then once you have that, then you want to get good speed. And then once you have that, then you want to get good speed. And then once you have that, then you want to get good speed. And then once you have that, then you want to get good speed. And then once you have that, then you want to get good speed. And then once you have that, then you want to get good speed. And then once you have that, then you want to get good speed. And then once you have that, then you want to get good speed. And then once you have that, then you want to get good speed. And then once you have that, then you want to get good speed. And then once you have that, then you want to get good speed. Thank you very much, Ray. This is Ray from Chicago Ruby. Thank you very much. for talking with us. Thank you Mike, thank you for having me.