At the end of 2018, I announced that I was setting a 6 month deadline for LeedsJS to move away from Meetup. At the time they charged $90 for 6 months as an organiser, which I was paying out of my own pocket. At the time of writing, this has been raised to $98.94.
I first got involved in LeedsJS
in 2015, and then took over as the main organiser in 2016. Since then, we've grown from around 15 people per event to about 60 per event.
When we were looking for a new venue for LeedsJS a few years ago, one of the criteria I set was "not a pub". Initially this seems like an arbitrary decision, but I had a number of reasons for doing so.
The day before April's LeedsJS meetup, I decided to try not having Q&A after the talks in favour of encouraging people to come and chat to the speakers directly. There were a variety of reasons as to why I felt that this would be the best route, and it seems to have been a success!
At LeedsJS we've been lucky enough to have sponsors willing to offer up prizes for us to give away to our attendees. We've tried a couple of ways to give them away and I thought I'd write up a post to discuss them.