Interview with Emily Rosengren on User Groups and ThoughtWorks at GOTO Chicago 2014

Hi, it’s Mike with UGtastic. I’m here at GOTO Conf 2014 sitting here with Emily, who’s with ThoughtWorks, and she helps with some of their interactions with local technical community here in Chicago. Thank you very much for taking the time to speak with me. So, Emily, what is it, how do you work with the user groups and what are some of the technical communities that you work with here in Chicago? So, I help to organize the Chicago Ruby Meetup. With Ray Hightower? Yeah, with Ray Hightower that’s hosted in the Chicago office, the Chicago ThoughtWorks office. Ray does most of the work, but I think it’s great to host it at ThoughtWorks every month. And I help encourage ThoughtWorks to attend and present. Okay, so you have like a proxy and through into ThoughtWorks so that we can actually help promote the community in ThoughtWorks, as well as give a place for the meetings to happen, right? Yeah, yeah. I think Thought Works is lucky to have a large space in the AM Center and it’s a great way to give back to the tech community to be able to host events like that and give people a platform to talk about what they’re doing . There’s a lot of cool stuff going on in the Chicago tech community. Yeah, Chicago is pretty active and it’s growing. What are some of the other groups that you work with? So I’ve been pretty actively involved with OpenGov back in 1871 for the last year. ThoughtWorks occasionally sponsors that as well. So I’ve been helping evangelize the group inside ThoughtWorks and get people to attend and get involved in different projects. And that’s the Open Government with Paul Baker and all the movers and shakers here in Chicago’s tech community. So when you’re working with these people, how does that work? Does ThoughtWorks approach user groups that it sees as being really active and special in the community? Or is there a way to apply? Like, hey, I have a user group. How can I work with ThoughtWorks? I think it depends on the user group. How we got into the arrangement we’re in. I think in most cases, ThoughtWorks has been approached. I think we’ve been hosting Chicago really for years. I think originally, maybe , I don’t even know the full story. I’ll have to ask Ray next time we talk to him. It’s been so long. It’s lost the history. But I think it’s nice to have that consistency of having it be in one location. And then for OpenGov back in 1871, some of us had gotten involved pretty early on. And they were like, oh, we’re going to do this. And then we were like, oh, we’re going to do this. And then we were like, oh, we’re going to do this. And then we were like, oh , we’re going to do this. And then we were like, oh, we’re going to do this. And then we were like, oh, we’re going to do this. So we’re looking for some sponsors so that people don’t have to pay for their own pizza every week. So that just happened to work out for us that time. And those are two very different styles of groups. And obviously, one is on-site, one is off-site. Does that change how you interact with those communities? I do think we sponsor. It’s easier to sponsor things inside the office. And we have this great space in the Aon Center that’s something that we can contribute. If people want to host events, we were able to host a really cool event leading up to PyCon this year where people would give practice talks. And it’s not a, at least not yet, it’s not a recurring event. But it was really cool. And they needed a space and they wanted to invite a lot of people. And we were able to provide that and help with the organizational details. So I think that’s a way we can help out with people that want to get people together in the tech industry to talk about something or share what they’re doing. So yeah, I think that’s easier in some ways. Right, right. So when you’re, like if I’m a user group and I’m like, well, I would love to be able to be associated with ThoughtWorks, do they, is there a specific place they should go to maybe try to reach me or should I give them your email address? That’s a good question. It’s usually just approach someone from ThoughtWorks. It doesn’t really matter who. There’s not a designated person. So if you can get an insider, then it’s usually, yeah. See if the date that you’re looking at is available and see if it’s something that is aligned with what ThoughtWorks is trying to do. I think definitely we want to be actively engaged with the Chicago tech community. There’s a lot of cool stuff going on and ThoughtWorks is doing a lot of cool stuff internally and we want to make sure we share as much as we can between us two. Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt. No, no, go on. If I’m a user group organizer, so you’ve been working with these communities for a while and I, you know, or maybe I’m somebody who’s looking to, you know, I’m a user group organizer, so you’ve been working with these communities for a while and I, you know, or maybe I’m somebody who’s looking to, you know, I’m a user group organizer, so you’ve been working with these communities for a while and I, you know, or maybe I’m somebody who’s looking to, start a user group. What are some of the activities that you do that are, maybe somebody might not realize that they ‘re going to have to do when they’re running a user group? Like when you talk about the logistics of food and things like that, what are some tricks that you maybe have learned about how to manage those kinds of little details? I think just looking at how each event goes and make sure you use what went well and what didn’t go well to feed in for the next one. That’s really the best way to do it. That’s really the best advice I can give. I think we noticed at Chicago Ruby pretty recently that there was some time before the talks would start where people weren’t really interacting and we were getting a lot of cool people together, but then they didn’t know each other and they didn’t know what to do. So I talked with some of the organizers and we actually decided to, hey, what if we like rearrange the chairs and put them all in like different cl umps so that when people are sitting there, when they arrive , they sit with a group of people and they’re not just like sitting auditorium style. waiting for the presentation, let’s see how it goes. So we tried it for the next time and it actually worked pretty well. We asked people what they thought and we did find that people were interacting more. So I think looking at each group is different. So they’re not like set rules that are going to work for everyone. It’s going to really depend on your group size and what type of community you’re attracting. But I think just looking at what’s working for you. So just pay attention to what is and don’t be afraid to experiment. Yeah. Well, thank you very much for taking the time to speak to me. I appreciate it. No problem. Thank you.