The Hard Work Behind Running a Successful Community Event

There was a mixup with the ticketing process for this week’s NSLondon event which has caused some complaints and discussion on its event page.

I ran the London iOS Developer Group (LiDG) for five years, putting on two 30 minute talks at the Apple Store, Regent Street almost every month. I never delegated out to anyone else and eventually I got really tired of chasing for presenters, chasing for slides, discussing date conflicts with the Apple Store, promoting the event via Lanyrd and twitter and still getting complaints.

If anyone thinks that organising a large meetup with informative and entertaining talks is easy, I would encourage you to try to do so yourself.

I have seen NSLondon rise up in the London iOS community from just before its inception. Daniel Haight has put in an extended team over the last year which, as far as I can tell, has only recently become fully self functioning allowing him to take some likely much needed breaks from the hell that is organising an event.

From my own experience, I can say that without this team, NSLondon just couldn’t be sustained by any one, no matter how much they loved and cared about their event.

To me looking in, it seems like the ticketing mistake this week was possibly caused by this new extended team.

I am sure the much underpressured NSLondon team will want to prevent this happening again more than any one commenting on the event page. This team is evolving, improving and learning. That’s the price we pay for continued events, because it sure hasn’t been with money over the years.

If anyone thinks that organising a large meetup with informative and entertaining talks is easy, I would encourage you to try to do so yourself. Because it’s fun, invigorating, empowering, charitable, scary, frustrating, depressing, annoying and stressful.