I recently got an email asking how does one set up an OSS group/tech meet up, I guess there are a few ways  to do it, but I’m go to go by what I did and my experience.

…After college I moved back to Athlone and since then a few of us “Techies” in the surrounding areas have been having (ir)regular meetings to just discuss anything and everything on various geek/tech related topics (along with having a few pints). We’re now looking at setting up something a little more formal or rather something more organised and publicised etc.

I’m pretty much just looking for any pointers you may have for starting and building up such a group and getting the word out and getting people interested. Initially we’d like to launch a website and maybe have a couple of events but seen as we’d be pretty small and have pretty much zero resources to begin with we’d probably be looking at arranging transportation for people to get to larger events in Dublin and other places.

Right, well firstly I got into OSS at college, I got ropped in as treasurer for our  computer society, and realised soon enough we had money to spend. So decided to get speaker in and down to us to give talks.  Face to face meetings and being able to ask a question to a person who is working on a project is very worthwhile.  You can maybe see a demo of what they are talking about, ask more questions or even get to try what people are working on.

You don’t need any resources to do any of the following, initially I’d say get a website up, and possibly use IRC depending on the people, you can create your own channel on freenode and invite people to it and get discussion going.  I also find getting colleges and staff at colleges involved really helpful, they’ll help with a venue, use a lecture room and get someone to give a talk or demo something they like to use or are working on.

So I would always say if and when possible have a face to face meet up, IRC, mailing list and forums are all great but you’ll get more outta the meet up. How best to organise the meet up is the next task.  If it’s just a regular want to catch up and find out the newest version of an OS to play with or what gadget is out now that everyone wants (Yes I want the N97).  We use a PotD – a Pint of the Day meet up on the 1st Thursday of the month, you can always find us in the Longstone pub from 7pm onwards.  It’s a given and we fire an email off letting folks know about it.  You can call impromptu ones, name a pub, pick a day and fire off a mail to folks saying you’ll be there and if folks want to turn up.

For more formal meet ups, some folks pick a venue where they can have presentations, so in these recession times, hotels may let you use a small room for free if you tell them you have 15 -20 people coming along and will happily go for  a few pints(during)  afterwards.  That way you can have people give talks on their projects and have a discussion group.

For getting the word out, I find mailing lists very useful, but that only works if people suscribe and you can miss stuff if you’ve a weekly or daily digest and don’t get around to it. Make use of social networks, Twitter, Identi.ca, Facebook and blogs, the latter mean you can get more feedback, and others can see who’s going so that can be sometimes an incentive to go to an event.

For larger events, if you can get in touch with people doing IT related podcasts, or get other people to blog about it, I tend to contact people I’ve been very lucky to make contact in the past with who write for national and local newspapers and IT sites so they have been very good and helped me publicise these events.

Also coming to events that are run locally and taking part is a great way to meet people, I’m running another Ossbarcamp in September so keep that in mind and see if your group wants to come along. Drop us a line to the Ubuntu-ie channel on freenode and come along to any of our events or take part in the discussions. Would be great to meet more people.

Anyways as I said, this is just what I’ve found has worked, there are many ways, and I’m sure others have some more ideas.