Getting back to deeper offline conversations
Notes on designing a meetup that has no structure and still high satisfaction.
The BeerUX meet up story on building a community of people driven by passion.
Slowdown. Sip a drink. Strike a conversation. The meet up where there is no agenda, just amazing conversations!
A few years ago, me and Aram were sitting across geographies in North and South India: Why did all conferences we were attending become uninteresting after a while. As tech and design consultants, we had done a fair bit of work to get a better understanding of the technology and design world. In the process we attended quite a few conferences, meetups and events across India. We observed that we no longer went for talks only, or the food. What seemed missing was the conversations that we went away with after the event. Many of the conversations were superficial.
In a typical conference setup, networking is a big agenda for most attendees. So you are constantly trying to meet up as many people as possible. And a lot more people are trying to do the same. However in the age of social media, where there is already a lot of information available about a person, these short superficial meets do not add much value, for you do end up getting nothing more than what is already there on either a Facebook or LinkedIn or many other platforms.
What this results in usually either a lot of business cards with you, or faint memories of whom you met. And then because one is constantly consuming so much information on a daily basis, the recall of whom one met at the conference is low. As a result we hardly follow up with them, and that meeting with them remains a distant memory after some time. After a certain point of time, it gets too much of cards and less of substance.
I have personally also felt that there is a lack of diversity in many of the conferences. Which means that we end up meeting a lot of people with similar profiles. We miss out on the conversations that truly makes one realise, that one has learnt something new, or admired someone for the passion they have exhibited for their work. And there are many people out there, who do not end up doing public speaking, and still have something interesting to share or a story to tell. In a conference crowd its just impossible to engage in deep conversations.
So we decided to slow it down. Put together a smaller meetup. We were very careful to not make it large as it defeats the purpose. What could be the ideal size? We feel that a group of 15 to 20 people at the max.
I personally have always grappled with this question, on whether I would you prefer to get to a small (un)conference and return with knowing 20 people with deeper conversations, or a large conference where you meet 50 people with very shallow conversations.
The idea of the BeerUX meetup is that everyone talks to, engages with everyone else. The event is a closed invite meetup and the invite is curated depending on the profile of the people we feel will add value to the meetup and can engage in deeper conversations.
We have been able to gather a few regulars, who really contribute to the meetup.
What do you bring to the event?
In the age of information overload, almost everyone has something interesting to share. There are the the news feeds, the timelines, the travel experiences, the dared to do something interesting and worthwhile. We love interesting stories and the experiences from someone anyday! We love travel stories and startup experiences amongst the few. At the end of the day, we set forth to build a community driven by passion. So that is the only thing we are looking for!
Being Social
In the earlier days, a social person was someone who connected with the society. So even if someone is not so active on the social media channels of today, I still think the person is very social if they are able to engage with people. The peer pressure driven economy has given a lot of us on the false understanding about what the society means. We feel that there is a need to get back to really questioning what social means. We need to think beyond the followers and connections on social media and come out of this bubble and get back to facing the real world. We do not want to continue to live a different life online and online. I think the world today appreciates genuine person more.
The agenda
Interestingly there is no agenda to this meetup. There are certain themes that the team thinks about, but that too is not compulsory. We use the combined intellectual capacity of the audience to allow the discussions to be very organic. The meetup decides on the flow. Sometimes there are rants, sometimes some constructive criticism, sometimes just catching up on whats happening in the world as seen from the eyes of a few passionate people.
Why Invite only?
We feel that in order to maintain the quality of discussions, we need to curate who is attending. This is just to ensure that we have more meaningful conversations. There are two criterias to get an invite. The first is that you could have attended a previous meetup, or the second is that you have something really interesting to share. We request people to send in a request through the form on the website.
The discussions are deliberately kept open ended and everyone tries to, or rather has to participate. The beauty of having no structure is that there is no pressure of a presentation. There are no takeaways to be concsious of. Everyone just tries to be their conscious self. We do not promise a lot of takeaways and neither put forward claims of meeting the next best UX designer.
People are people here and you respect them for that. We let them talk through their successes and failures. We try our level best not to be judgemental about things.
We have done 6 editions of this event in Bangalore, and it often happens once a quarter. We are starting with a new city this quarter and that is Delhi. Look forward to seeing you! Request an invite!
