Tom Morris

Welcome to the London Geek Community!

If you are here, I’m presuming you have recently found your way into the London geek community perhaps by attending some event like Geek Dinner or BarCamp.

Quick Start

A lot of events in the London geek community are announced on Upcoming. You should probably join Upcoming, and the London Geeks community, which lists the vast majority of London events that you may find of interest.

In addition, you’ll probably want to join some other groups on Upcoming including:

• European New Media Meetups
• Flickr London
• Girl Geek Dinners
• London 2.0
• London Creatives
• London Flickr Meet-Ups
• London Geek Dinners
• London Open Coffee Club
• Ruby and Rails:
  
  
  
  • London Ruby on Rails
  • London Ruby User Group
• Web design / development / standards:
  
  
  
  • London Web Developers
  • London Web Standards Group
  • Pub Standards London
• Web Events UK

In London, there tend to be a large number of monthly events worth going to including Geek Dinner, Girl Geek Dinners, Pub Standards and Sub Standards and others. There are also one-off events, and less regular events like the overnight BarCamp and Hack Day events, where people sleep overnight and code stuff. There are so many events in London that it’s very easy to be selective and go specificially to events that are of interest to you.

Some events aren’t listed on Upcoming, including:

• Creative Coffee Club
• Mobile Mondays
• Social Media Cafe
• Wiki Wednesday

Social networking

As you attend events, you will most likely meet lots of interesting and nice people (and the occasional IRL Ricktroll). Being geeks, they are also quite likely to be addicted to a number of social networks that normal people have never heard of. Twitter is one of these. Twitter lets you post SMS-length updates to your friends, which is actually surprisingly useful. A large number of events are announced early on Twitter, and, in the case of events like BarCamp, you may want to build a network of friends on Twitter in order to keep up with when tickets are available (and because chatting with friends is fun). There is a lot of descriptions of what Twitter is and how to use it over on the Twitter fan wiki.

There is a certain social network etiquette that operates on Twitter, Flickr, Upcoming and so on – if you get a friend request, you are not expected to reciprocate unless you know them. Spamming and mass adding is generally considered tacky on Twitter – occasionally mentioning your projects, products, blog posts and so on is okay, but auto-posting everything to Twitter is really tacky. Mass adding people just makes the people who’ve been added feel irrelevant, and quite likely to block you for the social media whore that you are. Read Twitter Etiquette.

The other social network that’s quite widely used is Facebook. It’s a bit annoying though, so I’ll leave you to explore it for yourself.

Networking

One of the reasons for attending events that some people have is to build a network of professionals who may be able to give you employment or help you find potential collaborators or employees for ventures you are starting on. It tends to be advisable to not approach these events with too much of a hard-nose about finding work or networking, as it’ll make you sound like an arse. Think of it as a nice bonus when it happens. You go along, have fun, eat, drink, be merry, meet interesting people and occasionally those may lead to interesting opportunities.

A lot of folks tend to like giving out Moo Cards, which are funky little mini-business cards made by the folks at Moo – one side contains minimal contact details (e-mail, web, social networks etc.) and the other side contains a picture, usually from Flickr.

Organising an event

If you’ve got a particular interest or favourite topic, why not organise your own event or group? It’s not that tough. If you want to measure interest in running an event, post a Twitter or blog post and read the responses you get. If you want to carry on with it, find a venue, book a time and announce it. For ticketed events, people often use either the built-in place tracking on upcoming or sometimes EventWax.

Remember that about 10-20% who request tickets or say they’ll come probably won’t, so you should probably hand out more places than you can cope with to cover this, or maybe charge a small cover fee to make sure people turn up. Generally £5 to £10 is a good amount, and you can use this to pay the expenses of speakers, or put it behind the bar.

For all-day events, you need to ensure that things like networking are sorted. Either make sure the venue are savvy about providing wi-fi (free, of course) or provide it yourself. If you need help, ask on your blog or Twitter. There are folks out there who can help with this sort of thing – and geek home-brew wi-fi networks tend to work a fair bit better than the wi-fi provided at commercial conferences. Nobody is quite sure why.

If you need help organising an event, just ask. There will be people who can help.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading. Hope you found it useful. There are also plenty of other geek communities around Britain, including in Brighton, Oxford, Bristol, Newcastle, Manchester and others. Be sure to go to their events too!

Tom

With help on irc.freenode.net #geekdinner from kevinprince, abscond, carlonicora and markng.