events

My personal rant against GeekWeekWro

Last year the first edition of the GeekWeekWro (http://geekweekwro.pl) iniative has taken place in Wroclaw. I wasn’t really bought by it, and the same is this year - I don’t understand what is the point of having it (having GeekWeekWro).

I have couple of doubts, qestsions regarding this idea:

  1. What is the purpose? What is the aim of it?
  2. What extra value does that bring? What does it improve within local tech-communites?

The answer for the 1st question is… “I don’t know”. Even worse, you won’t find any goals of it on its own website (date: 3rd of March, 2016). The only thing you can find is as follows (translation from Polish by me):

GeekWeekWro #2 to tydzień pełen wiedzy, technologii i przede wszystkim zabawy!
Od 11 do 16 kwietnia 2016 po raz drugi będziecie mogli wziąć udział w spotkaniach grup, które działają we Wrocławiu!

Translation:

GeekWeekWro #2 - a week full of knowledge, technology, and more importantly - fun!
During the week of 11 - 16 of April 2016, you will have the chance to take part in tech group meetings in Wroclaw!

Well… that’s all true, but… can’t we take part in the tech group meetings in other months? When no GeekWeekWro is on schedule? Well… sure you can! Most of active group participants are doing it thorough all the year!
So… there is nothig that GeekWeekWro improves. There is no gain for the community. There is nothing ‘extra’ that happens during this ‘special’ week.

Unfortunately, there is one thing that GeekWeekWro makes worse: it introduces clashes between events.

(Sidenote):
When I settled down in Wroclaw in 2012, there were not many actively functioning tech groups. I was complainig a bit about it, but someone told me to put some effort and improve the situation. Since then I have been active member (and co-organizer) of the .Net group (I have given several talks), together with my friend Adam I have started AngularJS group (I am still main organizer), I am founder and leader of the functional programming group and I co-organize local Go Language group. I am not putting all these things in here to show you how awesome I am - I just want to point that in the area of how local tech communities work - I know what I am talking about.

Let’s get back to the problem of clashing events. As an organizer I tried hard to avoid situation when the newly started group will clash with another one (that is probably more established already). I know that others (organizers) are thinking alike. Why would we put people in a position of choosing between attending meeting of group A vs attending meeting of group B if this is not necessary? I would like everyone to have opportunity to show up on as many events as possible. It should all be only personal limit, not something that myself (other organizers) are doing on purpose.

So, if you think about cramming many events during a single week - it is obvious that there will be no choice, but to choose which event to give up from. Is that the goal of the GeekWeekWro? To limit, to restrict people from attending many events during the month that GeekWeekWro takes place? If so - well… job well done!

I don’t see any way as how to improve this situation. In my opinion the whole idea is flawed. I don’t see any benefits of GeekWeekWro, but I can easily see disadvantages of having it. I clearly see how it negatively affects local community, and makes things worse than usual. I hope it will not get very popular (and I hope for it only because I want to be able to attend as many events as I usually do). The groups I am the main organizer of will definitely NOT join this initiative. And I am more than certain, that some others share my views and will thank me for that (for not introducing even more clashes between events).

I have discussed ‘the problem of GeekWeekWro’ briefly during the last meeting of the local Python group. My friend Paweł suggested that it could have been much better idea to have several groups meeting in one place, each group giving 1 talk only. That could help integrate local community much better than what GeekWeekWro is currently doing.
Unfortunately, I still can see couple of problems:

  • how to create ‘packs’ of groups? Matching JS/front-end focused with Go/.Net/Java - will that work for everyone?
  • when to meet? For some people some days are simply ‘no-go’ days. In case there are many groups having a meeting on this particular ‘no-go’ day - such a person will not be able to attend a single event out of x they ususally attend
  • can we prepare such ‘joined’ events in such a way so that these are interesting for many people?
  • some groups are quite popular, and you may easily expect 50+ people attending - what if there are 4 groups meeting at the same place, same time? How do we find venue(s) for such meetings? It seems to mee that mostly due to this fact, this is not something we may organize.

Besides - do we really need this kind of event to ‘integrate local tech groups’? Most of the groups are easy to find on meetup. If someone thinks some particular group could be of her/his interest - there is no other option as to go and check for yourself. That’s it. You don’t need GeekWeekWro for that. You don’t need GeekWeekWro, so that people unaware of existence of such groups will read about ‘how many tech oriented groups we have in Wrocław’. That is a pure nonsense. Anyone from the IT industry must have heard about local communities - either from work mates, colleagues, or via electronic channels. Those who are unaware - are probably not the target anyway.
And hearing in the ‘news’ or reading about tech groups on websites that have nothing to do with tech community - is this of any value? For the community?

events