I noticed on Twitter this morning that I’d missed a recent meeting of a group called Tech Wednesday, at Birmingham Science Park, Aston:
“Free coffee and talking tech… Free coworking too!” sounded right up my street, so I kicked myself for having missed it and decided to investgate future meetings, with a view to attending. I clicked through to the @techwednesday Twitter profile, and saw the bio:
3rd Wed of each month 10:00am gathering of Dev’s, UI, UX, Web geeks to chat, network and learn from each other
Yes; definitely my kind of thing — I’m very interested in “UI” (user interface) an “UX” (user experience) issues and it’s certainly fair to call me a web geek.
Another click took me from the Twitter profile to Tech Wednesday‘s web page. Oh dear. Splashed across the page is a strapline ending “…must know their C++ from their SQL”.
As I’ve said before, though I know HTML markup, microformats and metadata, I’m no coder. I don’t know C++ and, while I know what SQL is, I couldn’t do anything with it to save my life.
It’s quite unlikely that someone with my background (I’ve made contributions to microformat, HTML5 and vCard specifications), skills and interests — and SQL/C++ ignorance — would be out of place at the event, so why make it seem so? Is this a case of something being written by a geek, without thinking about how it appears to others? Perhaps a little copy editing TLC, from someone with knowledge of marketing, is needed?
But that wasn’t the first thing I saw on the Tech Wednesday home page. It was this comment, from Jane Fisher:
Tech Wednesday home page, 25 May 2011
Right there, in the middle of the home page. Immediately below the important “Check out Our Sponsors and Perks” link. Since October 2010. With no response. For over half a year.
Clicking through again, we see Jane’s full comment:
This was only my second visit and after having spent half an hour being totally ignored by all other attendees I gave up and left. It appeared all other attendees already knew each other and so stayed in cliquey groups where the topic of conversation varied between those that wanted to discuss tech and business and those who where just along for the free coffee, i.e. “oh we are supposed to talk tech aren’t we”.
There is no sign that anyone from Tech Wednesday (who are, no doubt, all volunteers with busy lives elsewhere) has done any of the following things, all of which I would have done in the circumstances:
- Check regularly for comments
- Answer any requiring a response, especially those which are critical, publicly
- Apologise to Jane
- Invite Jane to attend a subsequent event, and ensure that she is made to feel welcome
- Once Jane had — hopefully — enjoyed a follow-up event, and been won-over, ask her to post a comment saying so
- Make sure that there is a ‘meeter and greeter’ at subsequent events, to ensure that newcomers are welcomed, feel included and are introduced to established participants with similar interests (I’ve often performed this role at Birmingham Social Media Cafe)
- Solicit genuinely positive comments from other participants, to bump Jane’s critical one from the home page, in order not to deter potential attendees or likely sponsors.
Of course, TechWednesday don’t have to do any of the above; but if they don’t want to embrace newcomers, why promote the event publicly?
I’m stil not sure whether Tech Wednesday is for me. I’ll see how they respond to this post — which is intended as constructive criticism — and whether I’m still welcome!
Andy – interesting blog post, and some fair comments made.
Having been a part of a number of organised IT Communities for a while, I know from experience that it’s no mean feat. Whilst there are strategies that new attendees can take to help themselves to meet new people, having one or two “regulars” take responsibility for meeting and greeting newcomers, and introducing them to people within the group can help enormously.
Having attended Tech Wednesday before myself (although I’m not a regular attendee) I’d encourage you to go along and get involved – there are some very friendly people there, and I’m sure they’d benefit from talking to you about your thoughts.
Richard – thanks for the response, and as one of the organisers of Tech Wednesday, we would definitely like to encourage new faces and assure you all that they would receive a friendly welcome.
The group was set up with developers in mind and was designed to be a technical meet up. That said, we welcome everyone who is interested in attending and getting involved, and the conversation isn’t normally limited to this sort of thing.
Andy – We did reply to Jane privately when the comment was made some time ago. I will definitely take some of your comments on board to improve Tech Wednesday – perhaps you could come along to the next meetup? At present, it is a mixture of people involved with Science Park, people from startups and developers, and we usually see around 15 people. Of course, we also want to build on this and make continual improvements so it becomes a geuninely useful and far-reaching group.
The next meet will be on the 15h June from 10am, and we are going to be adding a ‘show and tell’ aspect to the event, so that attendees can showcase what they are working on, gain feedback etc. This will make the meetup a little more structured and will certainly mean that everyone will be involved.
Thanks both for the comments.
Katherine.