Running a user group
Rabea Gransberger: Yes! It's also great because I'm not good at motivating people. I'm good at teaching people who are already motivated, but I'm not good at motivating people.
We initially had very low attendance at the Java User Group, but I think that was more due to the platform that we chose. In the beginning, we chose to create all the notifications for the meetings on the German XING platform, which is like the LinkedIn platform, and XING is just not good at sending out a meeting invitation.
You only get an email that you have a new message. Then you have to log in to actually be able to read it. I, myself, would never read a message sent via XING, unless the topic was very interesting.
We had 200 people who were registered to that group, but only five people were showing up for the meetings. Due to the low attendance, it was hard to convince speakers to come to Bremen. Peter Neubauer, a founder of Neo4j, for example, came down from Sweden...
