by Gerard Sans |  @gerardsans

Creating

High quality

Communities

Creating

High quality

Communities

SANS

GERARD

Developer Advocate AWS

Developer Advocate AWS

International Speaker

Spoken at 118 events in 28 countries

Creating a Community

GraphQL in 2016

GraphQL London

  • Founded November 2016
  • GraphQL Technologies
  • Driven by passion

Goals

  • Meetups every 2 months
  • Recordings available
  • Great speakers and content
  • Great atmosphere and hospitality

150

members

40

attendees

1

organiser

Community back in 2016

food

drinks

recording

top speakers

prizes

top venue

Format

GraphQL Today

1660

members

+100

attendees

3

organisers

Community Today

Secret Formula

Venue

Speaker

Promotion

start

contact

run

Event

book

How a Community is made

Venue

Venue

  • Difficulty: Medium
  • Location, location, location
  • Check-in and security
  • Technical setup: audio, video
  • Catering details
  • Space setup and cleaning

Capacity

300

Hospitality

Location

Booking

easy

150

hard

good

80

100

hard

hard

very good

regular

regular

good

good

Sponsor

recording

food, drinks, recording

regular

food, drinks, recording

regular

no

Hype

no

yes

yes

no

Speakers

Speakers

  • Difficulty: Hard
  • Top speakers
  • Developer Advocates
  • Conference speaker snitcher
  • Network: venue, sponsors

Sashko Stubailo

Lee Byron

Johannes Schickling

Mirela Iclodean

Promotion

Promotion

  • Difficulty: Easy
  • General announcement
  • Speaker update
  • Sponsor update
  • Reminder
  • Day-after message

Event

Event

  • Difficulty: Medium
  • Pre-checks: RSVPs/security, speakers and catering
  • Hosting and schedule keeping
  • Prizes
  • Socialising and Pictures!

Top 3 Ingredients

Ambition

Passion

Have fun!

Creating high quality communities

By Gerard Sans

Creating high quality communities

Running a local community is not an easy challenge. Besides focusing on an awesome technology you need to sort out a series of challenges that you may not be familiar with. First you need a venue, then to contact speakers so you can cover interesting topics, and finally bring some sponsors for catering and event recording so attendees can have a great experience and socialise. Where do you start? In this talk AWS Senior Developer Advocate and GraphQL London founder Gerard Sans will share tips, experiences, and what happens behind the scenes of a large GraphQL meet-up so you can use them in your own dev rel work.

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