Meetup hosts are the lifeblood of Handmade Cities, and we depend on them to grow decentralized offline meetups all over the world. In this guide we discuss their responsibilities before deciding to volunteer.

Meetup Principles

We require every meetup host to abide by two principles:

  1. You care about software quality
  2. Your love for the craft extends beyond a paycheck

We don’t want our coding meetups to devolve into a generic networking club, padding GitHub stars and sharing resumes. We’ve met too many people perfectly content with stitching together black boxes or calling magic functions, without an ounce of technical curiosity. Those programmers don’t belong with us.

As the host it’s your burden to call out uncaring programmers in a civil manner, one-on-one, and if they don’t change their ways removing them from the group. In our experience folks will come around or simply leave after talking to them respectfully.

Mentoring Services

Handmade Cities offers free mentoring to all potential hosts. We realize organizing a meetup is a nerve-wracking ordeal and our ultimate goal is getting you comfortable with this. The more social butterflies among us programmers the better!

We are 100% indie and very vocal about having zero sponsors. If we discover your in-person event is financially backed by some entity, the ban is immediate and publicly disclosed to the community.

Notice we’re not against making profits: your meetup group may occasionally promote commercial projects during a demo or presentation, as long as people dive into the juicy technical details.

Feeling undeterred? Reach out and let’s get to work!