I've been helping to run a meetup in Christchurch, New Zealand: https://christchurch.ruby.nz/ for about 10 years (maybe longer, I've lost track!). I _completed_ agree with the article that the best thing you can do to avoid burnout is to organise it with someone else (or better still, two or more others like we do).
The other thing which really worked for us: We were getting fed up trying to badger people to help give talks etc (or just doing it ourselves). Completely exhausting. Ended up saying to the community: "this is your meetup, we just help run it. If we don't get 11 speakers for the year we're going to shut it down". We asked in January, got 11 speakers for the year (Dec is social), and we've been doing it like that ever since. Works an absolute treat. You do need to be prepared for no one to step up, in which case, it's sad, but, shut it down. You're not the community, the community is the community!
I've been helping to run a meetup in Christchurch, New Zealand: https://christchurch.ruby.nz/ for about 10 years (maybe longer, I've lost track!). I _completed_ agree with the article that the best thing you can do to avoid burnout is to organise it with someone else (or better still, two or more others like we do).
The other thing which really worked for us: We were getting fed up trying to badger people to help give talks etc (or just doing it ourselves). Completely exhausting. Ended up saying to the community: "this is your meetup, we just help run it. If we don't get 11 speakers for the year we're going to shut it down". We asked in January, got 11 speakers for the year (Dec is social), and we've been doing it like that ever since. Works an absolute treat. You do need to be prepared for no one to step up, in which case, it's sad, but, shut it down. You're not the community, the community is the community!
I started one 15 years ago in Silicon Valley. Just what this article calls a hangout.
I wrote up some related thoughts on wrangling speakers: https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/3283
If you're in the Salt Lake County/Utah County area, we're having Ruby meetups: https://www.meetup.com/utah-ruby-users-group/