There definitely is interesting enough tech behind crypto, but a lot of these talks end up kind of devolving into why their product is amazing and better than all the other coins and why you should invest in their ICO.
most celebrated talks are from people well employed for life so they can talk shit at some system or protocol. from upnp to the persistent compiler worm talks.
those folks didn't expect to depend on their resume padding every 3 to 8 months to live.
likewise the people organizing the talks didn't depends on the status sending devRel people to expect sponsors.
this is exactly what doctorow is yapping about lately. but everyone only accept small points of the big picture.
In a perfect world, a great sponsor would provide a free space for everyone to meet and great community members would spend hours preparing amazing content to teach the community something without gaining much for themselves. But, that combination is pretty rare these days unfortunately.
1. (Apart from the first few meetings, for bootstrapping) presenters must have attended a few meetings before they get a chance to present.
2. No mentions of one's employer / product beyond the intro slide.
There's nothing special about these two suggestions; the general idea is that the organizers ought to be sensitive to what is happening, and responsive in trying to maintain a healthy atmosphere.
Someone trying to organize a meetup might find some helpful ideas in the following book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49766350-get-together
We're pretty picky with speakers we invite but also quite flexible once we've invited someone we think will be good. I think it's worked out pretty well for the audience and speakers. At least, that is what they all tell me.
A talk that is mostly substance but contains a quick plug here and there has always been reasonable to me. It’s also a lot more effective for marketing than just giving a blatant product pitch, so it should be a win-win.
They'd talk about the tech used, the difficulties (tech, business, legal, market) encountered and how they worked around those.
It was definitely more than just a sales pitch even when there was some of that at times. A mix of business stories, engineering, R&D stories, law, finance and general company and even country history.
I found it fascinating and overal great. To the point where it felt like a night out to enjoy entertainment. Not just the talks but the social meetup part of it as well. Maybe its a cultural thing, but I found companies there refreshingly open and honest about the way things had gone.
> more than just a sales pitch
I guess the easiest way to stop that would be to ask everyone who wants to present to come to at least one meetup before they do so. Would filter these folks out real quick.
HN does this too - you'll see the ads occasionally for startups, and we're all glad for the 'who is hiring' and 'who wants to be hired' threads. Those are likely containment as much as anything else.
My favorite local meetups fell to problems like this.
It was easy to filter out the DevRel people trying to advertise. The hard problem was filtering out people who were only interested in presenting something so they could show another presentation on their resume or personal brand website, with no interest in engaging with the meetup.
These people would want to only show up for the one meetup where they got to present. They’d present some simple content designed to make them look good, with little regard to educating or discussing things. They’d often have some excuse for needing to leave quickly after presenting, some times before any QA time.
And they always needed a video recording of themselves speaking. For a while we had these to stream to remote viewers, but if the camera gear wasn’t available they’d panic and spend a lot of time improvising a way to record it with their phone even if delayed the presentation. Getting the recording of themselves speaking was the primary goal, not actually speaking to the group.
After this happens enough times, the core members realize they’re being used as audience props for someone’s career advancement and they stop coming. The meetup collapses.
I hope my local meetup groups can have a little resurgence like this where people are primarily interested in the meetup, not the self promotion opportunity.