How to become a host
If there isn’t a meetup happening in your area, you can become a meetup host. First, what does that entail?
Hosting monthly meetups - you will need to find a venue, speaker and a sponsor for food and drinks. Often local businesses will host your meetup and sponsor the food and drink. More on this later.
Building your local community. Reach out to local testers and let them know what’s happening.
Ensuring you provide a safe space for all attendees. The meetups should be in a safe area with good public transport.
Guidelines
You’ve decided you wanted to become the meetup organiser. We’re a few guidelines you must abide by:
Being fun, friendly, kind and helpful.
You must get permission from us to use our brand - this includes on other platforms, for example Twitter and LinkedIn.
Working to our Code of Conduct.
Attendees should not have to provide personal details to attend - including phone numbers or email addresses.
Have a similar ethos and focus on helping the software testing community grow
Events should have some real focus on learning something or being social - this could be a specific speaker
No sales pitches - sponsors can have a few minutes at the start of the meetup to share their company message. For example, this might be sharing jobs for testers. They can then stay for the duration of the meetup, providing the opportunity to answer any questions the community might have.
If you decide to have a Twitter account and/or LinkedIn page for your meetup, you must maintain this regularly.
What do you get in return?
We’ll do the following:
Cover all the Meetup.com costs.
Create some location and MoT branded artwork for the meetup.
Advertise the meetup across the vast MoT network - you must tag us on Twitter for us to share. We will include upcoming meetups in our newsletter each week.
Provide a section on The Club so you can continue the discussions post the meetup.
Bring together meetup organisers from around the world to share tips and advice on running a successful meetup.
Provide you with access to Courses, Masterclasses and other pro content. This can be used during your meetups.
Can I switch my meetup to a co-branded meetup?
If you would like to become a full MoT meetup, we will happily help you with that and provide the full support listed previously.
If you’d prefer a co-branded meetup, we will list your meetup only on our meetup page.
Any ideas on what to do for meetups?
Talks. You can have local people give talks on anything testing related - this is a great opportunity for those new to speaking to share their ideas. This could also happen online, meaning remote speakers are able to give a presentation.
Lean coffee - give your testers a place to come and share their ideas and get help with problems.
Rewatch Masterclasses or TestBash talks.
Take a course together as a group, helping each other along the learning path.
Testing circus - have people run a few different testing activities during the meetup and your attendees can switch between each activity.
Please get in touch with hello@ministryoftesting.com if you would like to start your own localised Meetup group.