--- title: "Tips For Better User Group Meetings" url: "https://osherove.com/blog/2007/6/4/tips-for-better-user-group-meetings.md" canonical: "https://osherove.com/blog/2007/6/4/tips-for-better-user-group-meetings.html" published: "2007-06-04T06:50:14" updated: "2007-06-04T06:50:14" tags: [] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "Yesterday I went to a User Group Leaders meeting at Microsoft HQ in Ra'anana. Some of the things we talked about were how to make the groups more interactive, what should be better etc. here's a short list of important…" usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # Tips For Better User Group Meetings By Roy Osherove June 4, 2007 **Historical article** · Originally published June 4, 2007; technical details may be outdated. Yesterday I went to a User Group Leaders meeting at Microsoft HQ in Ra'anana. Some of the things we talked about were how to make the groups more interactive, what should be better etc. here's a short list of important topics you might want to consider for your user groups as well: - Have a site that contains a **speaker roster** where you could search for and sign up for speakers and speaking engagements. It's very hard to find speakers on a monthly basis. In Israel I usually find that here are about 10 speakers who appear in almost all the MS user groups.. - Have **a competition** (Speaker Idol or something like that) where you can detect and fins=d new speakers. They can then be speaking at user group events and larger events such as teched. - A speaker at a user group **might start their talk with saying why they are speaking there**, and what benefits they get out of this. A lot of people would talk if they knew the benefits: more experience, recognition, speaking at bigger events.. - **Have a good feedback form** that can tell you a little bit about the attendee background and what future talks they would like to see. - Use interesting stories presented by attendees as **case studies** for the company (MS in this case) - Have a [unified RSS feed and site that holds all the data](https://osherove.com/blog/2007/6/4/blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/usergroups) about all the user groups including categories. [There is a usergroup blog for the groups in Israel](https://osherove.com/blog/2007/6/4/blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/usergroups) that has started not long ago which you should register to. It's a great idea! - **Record your sessions!** Use Camtasia and lapel microphones to record it. The problem is you still need to sync up the audio with the video, but if you do a lot of people will find value in this. --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: https://x.com/royosherove - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/ ### Contact - Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7 ### License Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/