Hello! I like technology and people, but it feels there are few activities in my area where people with similar interests can meet. Nerdy stuff in my area is all just trading card game meetups and the only tech-specific thing in my area appears to be for professional networking for people in the tech industry. (And despite it being "local," the meetings are conducted online... what?)

I've searched event finding websites and Facebook, but I don't see a whole lot going on in these realms near me. My city is smaller, somewhere around a million? But we have colleges with plenty of tech courses, plenty of tech businesses and even a few computers shops (some of them local/small!), so I feel like there are probably people around me who might be interested in joining such a group, it's just that I may have to be the one to start it.

Does anyone have experience in helping with local computer-y tech-y meetups in your cities? I'd have to come up with some specifics if I wanted to get this off the ground I imagine, like focuses, topics, times, venue, etc., but if you have any advice whatsoever in these matters I'd appreciate hearing it. I think it would be cool to have a group that focuses on projects and maybe collecting, though I wouldn't want it to just turn into some swap meet - it'd be fun to maybe have different kinds of programming challenges, retro PC LAN parties, perhaps people could present on different topics they're passionate about, repair/project get-togethers... Any thoughts on running it? Advertising it? Venue ideas?

And of course all of this is to facilitate building community, getting people to meet each other and seeing where things go from there. It'd be sick if down the line a group like this could help the wider community in other ways, who knows.

Thanks for any help! And this is my first post here so thanks for letting me on here! (PowerPC 4ever btw)

I think there was a talk about spawning your own event, maybe at VCF, not sure...

I'd start by looking at related places/events locally: