Ryan Gerry on Community Building and User-group Organizing | GOTO 2014
Hi, it's Mike with UGtastic . I'm here again at GOTO Conference 2014, and well, this interview is a little different than most of them, where I 've talked with people that maybe are in the community. Hi, it's Mike with UGtastic . I'm here again at GOTO Conference 2014, and well, this interview is a little different than most of them, where I 've talked with people that maybe are in the community. Ryan Gerry, a friend of Mike Hall, discusses how they met at a conference and how they've been running a user group together for over a decade. They talk about the challenges of maintaining a user group, the importance of corporate sponsorship, and the impact of using Meetup.com for discoverability.
The Interviewer
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
The Guest
Ryan Gerry
community building and user-group organizing
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Hi, it's Mike with UGtastic . I'm here again at GOTO Conference 2014, and well, this interview is a little different than most of them, where I 've talked with people that maybe are in the community that I don't necessarily know, but Ryan Gerry here is a friend of mine who's been, we've co-organ ized user groups together, we've known each other, we've been to each other's houses, and you know, our kids have played together, but we met at a conference, much like GOTO Conference. You're at SCNA 2009, Software Craftsmanship North America. I can remember you were sitting at the table, and I walked up to him like, "Hi, I'm Mike. Where are you from?
Ryan Gerry
community building and user-group organizing
▶ Speaking
" Because I just wanted to engage with somebody, and it turned out we live in the same neck of the woods. Yeah, which is fairly uncommon.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Yeah.
Ryan Gerry
community building and user-group organizing
▶ Speaking
Usually it's someone who either lives in like the city, which is far from us, or they live in another state, so it's like , "What?
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
You live like 15 minutes from my house?
Ryan Gerry
community building and user-group organizing
▶ Speaking
" But it was just that chance, you know, that when you open yourself up at a conference, and that's kind of what I 'm getting at, is when you open yourself up to these opportunities, you never know what's going to come out of them, but at one moment, we didn't know each other, and then now we're you know, here years later, having run a user group together, and you know, been friends for a while.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
So I would normally say, "Thank you for taking the time to speak with me," but I don't have to thank you, but no, thank you for taking the time to be on the camera, though. So Ryan, right now you're the one that's leading up SCMC. SCMC is a group we started together. It's Software Craftsmanship McHenry County, but for the last year or plus, you've been kind of running it solo. How's it going?
Ryan Gerry
community building and user-group organizing
▶ Speaking
Good, good! I'm not completely running it solo, so Mike Ros selli is helping me as well. I need to bring in more people, so user groups are great. It's been going well. What I find is that I will have a backlog of like three topics lined up, and then we'll get to that backlog, and then I'll have a month where it's like, "Oh boy, I don't have anything. " So yeah, like I need to pull something out and just make something up, which has worked before. You can have really good discussions, and we had one of those back in November, and it went really well, but it's kind of like feast or famine, and you have to constantly be keeping that backlog going. So having a bigger leadership team helps with that problem. Yeah, because you can split the net a little bit. Yeah, exactly. And that's one of the things is that the SCMC is a far suburban group. It is, yeah. Yeah, so we live in the Chicago metropolitan area, and there's a ton of user groups in downtown Chicago. There are some user groups spread around the suburbs, but Mike and I live pretty far northwest of the city. About 50-60 miles off the city. Yeah, and there were no technical user groups out there, but there are a decent amount of developers out there, because people move there because it's affordable housing, whatever reason. You know, the whole point for me of the group was really to foster that local development community, because I think it so easily gets overshadowed with what's happening in downtown Chicago, and it's really about, you know, establishing those relationships between the people in that area. Yeah, yeah, there was, I mean, there's Foll ett that is out there, which is a very large library services company. In education. In education, and then before there was TicketsNow, which is now being consumed by Ticketmaster, moved away, but there's still a lot of developers that live out that way then, that are, they commute in, or they work, and then there's no real community around technical. Yeah, so originally Mike and I started the group . Mike did the most of the initial setup, and it was originally, the topic was cloud development, cloud computing, and yeah, we did that for what, about a year and a half? Yeah, and then just, we ran out of topics, and we're like, yeah, let's do something different, and so we kind of have that. And that was like 2009, Yeah, yeah, yeah, 2010 is when we first had our first SCMC meeting, and then we brought Jim in from 8th Light. Yeah, Jim Suchy from 8th Light. And that was the first time we actually had like a corporate sponsor, so that's what Follett sponsored our location, and that helped out a lot. Yeah, yeah. And you know, Follett would also sponsor food, 8th Light would sponsor food, you were working at Groupon at the time, they would sponsor food, so having like that, that corporate support was a really, really big help. The other thing that really increased our attendance at meetings was when we switched to meetup. com. Right, yeah. Which was surprising, because you know, we wouldn't expect that that would have that dramatic impact, it really did, I want to say like a 50% increase. Well, discoverability. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, and they do some help with, if you're already a member for one group, they send you alerts. They'll suggest, yeah. For areas, stuff that might be near you or in your interests. And meet up. com auto-nags people to come to your user group when it gets closer to the date, so that 's helpful too.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Yeah.
Ryan Gerry
community building and user-group organizing
▶ Speaking
So, yeah, so and that actually, even though we didn't have a corporate sponsor for the cloud developers group, we met at a Panera, we met at a local bar, the first meeting was at a library, but you know, but that was okay. Yeah, yeah. You know, that was, we had to power through that. We did. You know, it wasn't always easy, it was sometimes quite painful, but you know, it goes into something that I've been talking about, about building community in 24 months. And one of those things is it doesn't really matter where you meet, because when you're trying to build a community, it's not necessarily that you're at a Follett or at a Groupon or at an A-Flight. Yeah . It's like you're just somewhere where people get together and talk shop, talk about whatever, talk about whatever is on their mind with, with, with a community and can speak a similar language and feel some empathy toward each other because we share common interests and industry. But now you're, you're kind of expanding and you're doing another new informal meetup. So you're, you've got the bug for, for organizing. What is this little, you've been doing a coffee, kind of like a Coden coffee kind of thing.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Yeah.
Ryan Gerry
community building and user-group organizing
▶ Speaking
So I, let me tell you the history of that. So I started working from home about three years ago, full-time and I was working with people also like in, in our area and we would just get together to work at coffee shops. And since then, like that group that I was working with has spread apart and you know, we're working for different companies, but it 's still really nice to get to that group together still to this day and like hang out at a coffee shop, see how we're doing, you know, even, even like we'll collaborate on, on technology things. So so yeah, I have become the social director of a coffee shop.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Yeah.
Ryan Gerry
community building and user-group organizing
▶ Speaking
Of the informal McHenry county meetup at a coffee shop group. Great acronym. So just a bunch of letters, just throw it in . I probably should formalize it and even, even put it on meetup. com, but that's kind of what I've done so far. But it goes to show like how you can do community in, in a variety of ways.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Yeah. Yeah.
Ryan Gerry
community building and user-group organizing
▶ Speaking
And, and, and even can just foster those relationships that we have at work. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. And I think a lot of motivation for me behind the coffee shop stuff is I actually heard on a podcast like five years ago that there was this small city, like a hundred miles outside of Paris. And a lot of people worked from home and worked from wherever their company was in a major European city, but they had this coworking space where they would get together for half the day, just so they had that camaraderie. So that's, you know, living in McHenry county, you either have an extreme commute or you work, work locally or you work from home. So like having that, that attachment to the communities is really helpful.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Right.
Ryan Gerry
community building and user-group organizing
▶ Speaking
All right.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Well, Ryan, I'll see you in a few minutes, but thanks for taking the time to chat on camera. It's been too long. Yeah. Thanks. Thank you. All right. Bye. [Music] UGtastic.
Critical Insights
durable
"Building a community doesn't necessarily require fancy locations; it can happen anywhere."
durable
"Corporate sponsorship can significantly impact the success of a user group."
durable
"Using Meetup.com can greatly increase the discoverability and attendance of a user group."