"Rostov IT community" or 5 steps to create a party in your city

Friday evening is a great time to go to some interesting event. But what if you do not live in Moscow or St. Petersburg, where parties often take place for geeks, developers, and IT-specialists in general?
Your city does not have an active community, there are no places where programmers gather, there is no culture of business acquaintances at events among IT professionals, and people do not understand the difference between the word “mitap” and “startup”. We start a tractor and
you really want to somehow change the situation? We managed to do this, under the cut experience and source code.

Hello everyone, my name is Trofim Zhugastrov and it so happened that I’ve been doing the “Rostov IT community” for a little over a year now. In the photo above, our first mitap is July 27, 2013. Following my post on the Infrastructure BlogHe began to meet people who do the same in other cities. A certain general outline appeared in my head, along which you can create communities where they do not exist yet. I will give here 5 simple steps in the style of Captain Obviousness, to how to start brewing a party in your city.

1. Find a place.
It should be free (you do a non-profit story).
It should accommodate more than 50 people freely. We had 130 meetings at the JS meeting, people didn’t fit and left :(
It should be in the very center of the city.
There should be a projector, wi-fi, sockets, audio equipment (microphone and speakers).
It should be cozy (ideally loft space ).
You can drink beer there. Otherwise, why all this ??!

2. Find thematic communities.Surely you already have a bunch of iOS developers, rubists, or hardcore java guys in your city. You need to create some kind of add-in in order to bring all these people together. They won’t fight, don’t worry, they have more common interests than holistic disagreements.

3. Find people on social networks. Create VK and FB groups, you can still twitter, but with us it is somehow not very popular. Invite all familiar programmers and everyone who is in thematic publics. Create an event page in social networks for each meeting and invite people from the main page. Keep the headhunters out of the group.

4. Stay independent.In our city there were corporate attempts to create communities, but they all slipped into frantic hunting. A sensitive issue is sponsorship and donations. It is very important to understand the difference: with sponsorship, a person pays money and receives something in return (advertising, PR, installation of a banner or stand, the possibility of email distribution to participants, etc.), and donations come free of charge, often anonymously, help maintain independence and party appeal. I advise you to opt for the second.

5. Find the heroes. They are everywhere. These are people famous outside your city. They need to be invited first. They have something to share and they are happy to do it (some of them regularly). Be sure to listen to their opinion about how a party should be, without them it would be dull.

Previously, there was a section of events on the habr, it was possible to cover your events there, now it was removed, and we filmed our engine. Rate it at work here .
Sources, as expected, on github .
Of course there is still a lot of work, but it can already be used as a basis for creating your own communities.

Thanks for attention!
To take a closer look at our party, come to our South Fest Beach Conference . This is the final event of the year with which I summarize my organizational activities. I will be glad to answer questions in the comments. Report errors in PM.