Zoom has the power to anti-scale. We can bring the best, most intimate peer support to ever-more-specialized interest groups. Best practices emulate the smallest meetups to build trust and connection at a distance. The communities that drive the most outstanding value will stay small and focused on their axis of interest. The metric will be value-per-participant.
Small groups of like-interested individuals previously had to be geographically co-located to meet for a coffee clatch, lunch club, or the like to exchange notes. In a big enough city, you could find a compatible group that has specific, common interests. These meetups were my favorite: everyone participates, and voice volume remains at a conversational level. We can be both kind and incisive: the ability to look in the eyes of your interlocutor blunts the sharpness of words.
When I attended tech and business meetups in Boston, they would attract scores of technologists. Organizers learned to set a more general interest area, like “react native,” tech startups, and the like. The meetup would have two parts: people gathering to get some food and making quick intros in a noisy room. Business meetups were much louder than tech, as marketers are wont to be, leading to a lot of shouting and a bit of a college-party vibe. Then everyone settled into chairs. The speakers would do their thing, take a few questions (sometimes of the “I have more of a comment than a question” monologue variety), and people would go home. The investment was a couple of hours, the food and drink were paid for by sponsors, and everyone learned something new.
Smaller conferences were an infrequent retreat to meet with one’s tribe. The hallway track was necessary for this retreat aspect. The lectures helped give a frame for conversation, but that peer-to-peer aspect is where it shined. Investments would compound with multiple attendances.
Larger conferences were far less valuable from a community point of view. The opportunity was much more about selling and perhaps pulling people together from far-flung locations to learn from experts.
Put this spectrum together, and the community value seems to be highest in the lunch club and small conferences. At the same time, the sales opportunity is more in the meetups and larger confabs.
What I find remarkable about this is how remote meeting tools drive down the cost and increase the opportunity of the smaller end of this spectrum, diminishing the competitive advantage of the larger end. The pandemic taught us all to use tools like Zoom and Meet - and some new ones which were ready for the moment. Now we need not be geographically co-located for our group experience. People with similar interests can meet and interact over longer distances with greater frequency - all at less time cost since there is no travel requirement.
Now that I have attended some online meetups, I find the value is in their intimacy and frequency. The vibe is much more lunch club than after-work sponsored pizza. That is the feeling I look for in the meetings I participate in now. I try to create this feeling in the recurring series I have started to schedule.
One final note: being intimate doesn’t necessarily mean being private. Focused areas of interest can be open and findable by newcomers. Allow this to fail: when organizing Barcamps a decade ago, I learned the “vote with your feet” rule. The content might not be for them! The low cost of dropping out (as opposed to the social norm-breaking of leaving in the middle of lunch) can change the way we experiment with participation.
These opportunities combine. Small meetups allow more people to try new venues, gain new perspectives - and form friendships that can last.
Photo by Nolan Issac on Unsplash