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The DC Tech Scene Calendar Is Solidifying

By DC Piazza - Posted on August 21st, 2008

How To Do The Dance Of DC Event Organizing

As an event organizer, and also as attendee, I've seen over the last year a coalescing of calendars for events in the tech & new media community. It's not perfect, but it's a start.

For those not familiar with the scene (which we attempt to have a sort of "Entertainment Tonight" show in our DC Piazza video episodes), it consists of a few thousand people who are actively involved in socializing, sharing, teaching, networking, and otherwise doing activities together.


The scene at the "Twin Tech" event in July 2008

There are currently dozens and dozens of places where event schedules are maintained, due to the wonderful distributed data model of the world wide web. Besides individual organizations' web sites, there are central directories such as:

DC-area local tech whiz Ross Karchner's DCTechEvents.com site is only about a year old, in terms of having a maintained listing of events, but it has steadily grown to have a following of in-the-know attendees looking for cool stuff to do, and more importantly, the attention of event organizers like myself. We have come to rely on it, perhaps spurring the attention of newcomers.

It's become apparent that people are getting confused, at the same time that they are also getting better-informed. Event listings are replicated on several sites, and sometimes duplicated by their organizers on social networks such as Facebook and Ning (something that sites like ShareMeme are trying to fix).

In most cases, after an event is changed, the original out-dated information is still shown on the places where the copy is located, especially on the event-aggregator sites. People then hear about events from people who read about them from an assumed "authoritative source" that has out-dated content.

Usually, I suppose, the attendees figure it out if the event has a registration page. But what's an organizer to do? (see below). And are there any rules to joining this scene as an organizer? (maybe).

The How-to section of this post attempts to give an objective of a lay-of-the-land viewpoint of the calender. Maybe it will help solidify the calendar, which is both positive and negative as it may start to limit the development of more options as it also strengthens the ability of a growing community to find each other and connect. Yet a sort of land grab may evolve as people notice which mid-week nights have no regular event slotted there.

A How-to Primer on Event Schedules

First, there is no one place to go to as an event organizer, although it is hoped that this post will serve as a reference point.

Second, there is a growing number of large events which pop up and pretty much soak up all of the attendees when they occur. These are listed further down in this post, and others are likely to arrive as people come up with new ways to rally around a cause, event, or other facet of life.

Third, some events have predictable patterns, which are useful for organizers to know about. Meetup.com offers the ability to have monthly events automatically replicate at the same time each month. This feature has caused some of the solidification of events worldwide, including local events here.

Other groups have a similar same-day-of-the-Nth-week concept which they use to schedule... except when they have to break it due to speaker availability, etc.

Some helpful tips, for each week of the month:

Other groups with varied schedules:

Large events which warrant planning around - these are usually posted over a month in advance:

  • TechCocktail DC - Frank Gruber's events are large, fun, and great for networking. DC events have all been happy hour mixers, but other cities have had all-day speaker events.
  • Social Matchbox - quarterly job-related event
  • BlogPotomac - an all-day event, with potential after-party
  • Twin Tech DC - a large meeting-of-two-planets (new tech and old tech) happy hour networking event, with hundreds of attendees
  • barcamp DC - an unconference that happens once a year
  • podcamp - once a year
  • SocialMediaDevCampEast - happened this spring, and may repeat.

Venues?

A future post will cover some tips on venues for holding gatherings, and resources such as DC Concierge in finding a place to hold an event.

Please add a comment if this has been helpful, or if you have updates (which also can be sent to registration [at] 1piazza [dot] com)

* This post will be updated if needed, or a pointer placed here for an updated post *