I recently came across an interesting blog post by Zach Tellman in which he explains a new approach that he’s been trialling at The Bay Area Clojure User Group.

Zach explains that a lecture based approach isn’t necessarily the most effective way for people to learn and that half of the people attending the meetup are likely to be novices and would struggle to follow more advanced content.

He then goes on to explain an alternative approach:

While running Neo4j meetups we’ve had similar observations and my colleagues Stefan and Cedric actually ran a meetup in Paris a few months ago which sounds very similar to Zach’s 'office hours' style one.

However, we’ve also been experimenting with the idea that one size doesn’t need to fit all by running different styles of meetups aimed at different people.

For example, we have:

I’m also thinking of running something similar to the Clojure Dojo but focused on data and graphs where groups of people could work together and build an app.

I noticed that Nick Manning has been doing a similar thing with the New York City Neo4j meetup as well, which is cool.

I’d be interested in hearing about different / better approaches that other people have come across so if you know of any let me know in the comments.