This post is about my experience of organizing Tester’s meeting. It is true as well for any other meeting, be it Software Developers, Social workers or a meeting of Puppeteers.
The 3rd meeting of JeST –
the Jerusalem workshop on SW Testing is just over. Such a meeting is a great
opportunity to meet fellow testers, and share experiences and ideas.
I am the proud founder of JeST, together with Shmuel Gershon, Asher
Samuels and Alon Waisbard (look in Twitter for @sgershon, @absamuels and @awaisbard
). I am telling you that because less than a year ago, organizing such a
meeting, looked to me as a distant vision, something that will happen in the
far future when I will develop the complex skills necessary to organize such an
event.
But it doesn’t.
 |
| A moment during JeST2 |
Organizing a meeting is so easy, that I must share how easy it is, with
you. The main issue to overcome is the mental block and just do it. To
help you overcome this block, I prepared a list of the things that you don’t
need, in order to hold such a meeting:
1)
A budget
You will be able to find a place to host a
short meeting. You don’t need to rent a conference hall. It can be the room in
the company of one of the meeting participants, or one’s home living room.
Refreshments can be brought by the host or by the participants. If it works for you and the potential
participants, you can schedule a meeting in a quiet restaurant and address the
need for both the location and refreshments.
2)
Sponsors
Since you don’t need a heavy budget, you
don’t need an organization to support your meeting. Although I welcome
cooperation and networking, which naturally happens in such meetings, I prefer
to remain independent and stay away from organizations that try to use the
meeting for their own promotion.
A thank you note should be enough as a return
of the hosts good will.
3)
Heavy logistics
You don’t need a full-time administrator to
organize such a meeting. Split the tasks between a few friends and it will not
consume too much time. Use social networks to spread the word. Meetup service can simplify the process even
more, in return for a payment of a few bucks.
(Late note: there are many Meetup groups which are allready dedicated to promote events like yours. See for example: ILTechTalks group. All you need is to suggest your event in such group, free of charge)
(Late note: there are many Meetup groups which are allready dedicated to promote events like yours. See for example: ILTechTalks group. All you need is to suggest your event in such group, free of charge)
4)
Professional presenters and
presentations
Not everyone who has interesting things to
say is a professional presenter and the length of a
presentation does not make
it better (most times it’s the opposite). For our meetings, we chose a format
of lightning talks
followed by a discussion. One time, we
had a “regular” presentation, which was great too, but the most significant
part for most of the participants was the discussions that we held.
 |
| JeST3 agenda |
5)
A large number of participants
Rating is overrated. While it is nice to see
many people come to “your” meeting, a large audience has its drawbacks too – the
atmosphere is less intimate, it’s harder to facilitate the discussion, and not
every participant feels free to express his opinion. When I started to organize
the first JeST meeting, I was worried that the meeting would not draw a “respectful” number of participants. I did the “Worst case scenario” drill and came
to conclusion that if only me and the other 3 folks that shared the idea of organizing
the meeting would come, it would not be a waste of time. At the end the meeting turned out to be a
success, also by the number of participants.
All the above are not a “must have” in order
to organize your testers meeting. All you need is Testers and a love of testing.
