Creating a Digital(ish) Community
Being involved in your community, surrounded by like-minded (or similarly-purposed) people is important. It not only adds value to your mental and physical health but also allows you to give back to the area in which you live. In the age of COVID — full of zoom meetings, slack messages, and too many emails to come up with snarky replies to — it’s essential to spend time with people and build friendships. Maybe you live in an area where that community hasn’t been built yet…or perhaps it has but you have bigger ideas! Here are some tips I’ve learned while creating the Nashville Codecademy chapter meetup in my local tech community.
Partner with a larger organization
It can be difficult to start anything from scratch — be it a meetup in your area or a successful sourdough starter (put that on the list of things we didn’t know we’d learn in 2020). Sometimes it makes sense to partner with a larger organization, or another group that already exists. When I wanted to start a beginner-friendly tech meetup in the Nashville area, I searched for groups that were already started in other areas. It can be helpful to search for large organizations that already have meetups in other cities. I had used the Codecademy platform in the past to start teaching myself Javascript and knew they were starting a local meetup initiative, so I checked to see if…
