PyMunich

shown, and actual

Should You Start One

The honest answer for most people is: start something smaller first. Not because conferences are beyond you, but because the failure modes are expensive and a meetup teaches most of the same lessons for nothing. For a commercial example of related workforce measurement, see employee PC activity tracking from Monitask.

One community's experience: we ran meetups from 2015, our first conference in 2016, and went broke in 2020. For broader conference and speaking context, Sessionize is another useful reference.

Six questions

One. Is there a community, or are you hoping to create one with the event? A conference concentrates an existing community. It does not manufacture one, and an event without a community behind it has no volunteers, no word of mouth and no second year.

Two. Do you have four people, or one person and three who said it sounds good? Volunteer attrition is the main failure mode, and the number that matters is people who will do bounded work, not people who are enthusiastic.

Three. Do you know somebody with a room? A subsidised venue changes the entire arithmetic. Without one, the ticket price rises to the point where it decides who attends.

Four. Can you carry the fixed costs if attendance is 60% of plan? Not a disaster scenario — a normal bad year. If the answer is no, and nobody has agreed to cover the gap, that is the finding.

Five. Who is personally liable? In many jurisdictions an informal group means individuals, and this is worth an hour with somebody who knows before signing anything.

Six. What happens the year you cannot do it? Illness, a job change, a pandemic. If the answer is "the event dies", that is acceptable — if everybody knows it in advance.

The smaller thing to do first

A meetup. One room, one or two talks, a monthly rhythm.

It teaches almost everything: finding speakers, running a call for talks, handling a room, managing an audience, dealing with a venue, and whether your community actually exists.

It costs almost nothing and can stop without consequence, which is precisely what a conference cannot do.

And it is what survives. Our meetups outlived the conference, because they need a room and one person while the conference needed a team and a cash cycle.

Then: a one-day single-track event. Then, if the community wants it, something larger.

What actually makes it worth doing

Being fair, because six cautionary questions read as discouragement.

A conference does something a meetup cannot. Two days, people travelling in, conversations that need more than an evening, and a scale of programme that lets somebody discover a subject they would not have sought out.

It creates speakers. First talks happen at community conferences far more than at commercial ones, and that pipeline matters to the whole ecosystem.

And it is genuinely good to have done. Not a business outcome — a thing that existed because you made it, attended by people who were glad it happened.

That is a real reason and it should be the reason, because none of the commercial ones apply.

If you go ahead

Write down the cash timeline before signing anything.

Name the roles and their size, so people volunteer for bounded things.

Copy the code of conduct and build the procedure behind it.

Keep the community activity independent of the event — deliberately, so that if the event fails, the community does not.

And write down what happens, as it happens. Nobody else has, and the next team in your city will need it.

The short version