Takeaways From Hosting my First Virtual Meetup

Last night I hosted my first virtual meetup for my local chapter of Womxn in Machine Learning and Data Science. We were lucky to have Andrea Suozzo who is the Data Editor at Seven Days and she presented on her experience building the Vermont Eldercare Navigator. It was amazing to learn about the important work of protecting our elders with access to better data about the quality of their care and what it takes to build a database out of public data. You can see the story about this on Seven Days as well as at VPR.org.

A screenshot taken by Jane Adams during the meetup.

I had an interesting experience context switching from hosting in-person meetups to a virtual setting so I decided to jot down my notes about my experience for myself and for my co-organizers to reference later. I realized this might also be helpful to others as we adjust our communities to be able to continue to connect virtually in these unprecedented times.

Here some notes on what you should consider and plan for when hosting your meetups virtually:

I’d love to hear your advice about how to host fun virtual meetups! Feel free to message me or share them here in the comments.

--

--

OSS DevRel at @IBM . board @vtTechAlliance . my words don’t represent my employer. (http://pronoun.is/she/:or/they)

Get the Medium app

A button that says 'Download on the App Store', and if clicked it will lead you to the iOS App store
A button that says 'Get it on, Google Play', and if clicked it will lead you to the Google Play store
Maureen McElaney

OSS DevRel at @IBM . board @vtTechAlliance . my words don’t represent my employer. (http://pronoun.is/she/:or/they)