Clojurians Log v2

I don't think anyone has spearheaded regular meet ups, but I believe folks would probably be interested if someone planned something.

I think several people who used to organize SF meetups (myself included) moved out of the area, or at least out of a Clojure-adjacent tech space. One of the biggest problems for in-person meetups is finding a venue that is willing to host for free, and finding a sponsor for pizza/whatever. I think nearly every space we had used in the past, the company hosting has moved on from Clojure 😞

(and then there's the whole issue of finding folks to talk about their projects on a regular basis, or otherwise organizing content for the meetups—running a meetup group is a lot of work behind the scenes)

Back in the day, we had three regular Clojure meetups in the Bay Area, as well as one or two Scala groups, and at least one Lisp/FP group.

The Los Angeles group meets online and gets attendees from out of the area. They've been going strong for years, even tho' they stayed online-only after the pandemic. They pick a library each month and go through the readme/tutorial as a group, which can be fun. I often attend that group.

https://www.meetup.com/los-angeles-clojure-users-group/ but mostly organized in #C30SDJ58R

I've been working on an Ohio area online meetup for a while but it's a pretty small group and the handful of Clojurians here are scattered all over the state so in-person is out of the question. We don't have an agenda, just a regular day/time. There used to be a Provo/Utah online group that was pretty good but I think they stopped meeting. https://clojure.org/community/user_groups is a comprehensive list but I think quite a few have stopped now.

Indeed. Keeping a meetup running takes regular effort, even if it is purely online: you need to make sure a Zoom meeting is scheduled (or whatever) and you can't just post the link publicly and reuse the same meeting every month because unpleasant people like to Zoom bomb (that used to happen to the LA group when they posted the URL on http://meetup.com). And you have to regularly remind people because they forget, instead of putting it in their calendar. And it has to be interesting enough to keep people coming back every month, so you have to think about structure as well as schedule. I have run quite a few in-person user groups over the decades. When I worked at Macromedia in SF, I ran the largest ColdFusion user group in the country, with up to 100 in-person attendees. It helped that Macromedia both hosted the meetup and paid for food, and often provided speakers. Over time that dwindled and then Adobe bought Macromedia and they didn't really value user groups the same way. When I ran the SF Clojure group, we met for a while in Climate Corp's offices, as I recall, and at CircleCI. I think both companies moved on from Clojure, at least to some extent. There was a company in San Mateo hosting for a while—Amit Rathore's company—but they went dark for a while (I think he's back with a new company now?). There was also Zach Tellman's company (Factual) hosting, and for a while we had a pairing dojo (can't remember who hosted that). Zach left Factual in 2015 tho'... And that's part of the problem: whoever champions a meetup at a company might change jobs and then the company loses interest in the meetup. I think the last few in-person SF meetups have been social rather than tech-focused. I remember we met at a bar or restaurant at least one time (shortly before I moved to Ohio I think?). Those can be fun but they don't draw people regularly enough to sustain them.

I moved to SF this year and would love to attend a meetup. But I agree that finding space is hard.

It might require renting a conference room or something from a coworking space.

I wonder if a library meeting room might be suitable.

Ah! maybe. I also know that Sports Basement allows groups to reserve community rooms.