Part 1 : If I never see another pizza again, it’ll be too soon.
The year is 2022, I am a know-nothing twenty-something cloud consultant. ChatGPT has just been launched and the company I work for has created a brand-new practice with the business to focus on AI, and a colleague approaches me to see if I would be interested in helping to host the AI meetup the company has just adopted.
Now three years later I’m still a know-nothing twenty-something, but now with a little more experience under my belt. I’ve organised 22 AI and Deep Learning for Enterprise events, been a committee member for three conferences, and had a hand in helping to host and organise several other tech focused events in the capital. Participation in these communities has led me to all kinds of interesting places like speaking at events, learning new skills, running AV, and doing video editing, it’s even got me a job or two. Community organising has also left me more burnt out than I’ve ever been in my life.
Organising and hosting community events (particularly solo as I have done on occasion) is exhausting work. If you are putting on an event once a month, which for a while is what we were doing at AIDLE, the work is essentially unending. As soon as we finish hosting one event we immediately move on to planning the next (if we hadn’t started already). Hosting can also be very physically demanding: moving furniture, running to grab stacks of beer and soft drinks, and lugging an AV kit on the tube on top of the late nights can leave you physically exhausted - particularly whilst also having to put on a friendly face and look after attendees and speakers.
Needless to say, I would not still be involved in organising events without a lot of support. Support from other organisers who’ve given advice, promoted and collaborated on events, from friends who have come along to help out running AV and taking pictures, and from sponsors and hosts who provide funding and venues. Co-organisers are perhaps the greatest source of support, as the difference in the feeling of doing something alone versus being part of a team cannot be overstated. Something I wish I had starting out was a way to find other organisers to collaborate with and share resources, I’ve met some great organisers over the last three years, but it took a long time.
Part 2: It was never about the Pizza (sorry)
After the last three years of being in technical communities both as an organiser and as a regular member, I’ve eaten a LOT of pizza. I used to really like Pizza, but now not so much, and I know I’m not alone in this. Not Another Pizza is a fun little name for a group for community organisers, but (and you’ll have to forgive me for this) the pizza isn’t pizza, it’s an analogy.
Pizza is a stand in for all the bare minimum requirements of hosting an event: the food yes, but also venues, AV, community event platforms (on which I have thoughts), and so on. Of course community organisers need these things, but often as an organiser you’ll find yourself reaching for something more.
As an organiser I’ve benefited greatly from meeting collaborators, being given advice on tracking community growth and retention, tools to help automate away the drudgery of managing guest lists, resources on managing codes of conduct and code of conduct violations, and maybe a sympathetic ear from someone from time to time. Think soul food, not cold pizza.
Some of the biggest challenges I ran into early on in organising were burnout, managing relationships with sponsors, and finding speakers.
I helped beat my organiser burn out by both cutting down on the frequency of events I was organising and attending, but also by avoiding solo efforts where possible. It’s not about shifting the work on to other people but about working together as part of a team - helping other people tackle their obstacles as much as they help you tackle yours. For Developer advocates this may be a familiar feeling, being the glue between different people helps make you a very useful colleague but also means people are more willing to help you on when you need help.
Finding speakers was made easier by emulating the best practices of other groups and organisers, for example: opening a call for papers so that speakers could apply to speak at AIDLE rather than having to constantly go out chasing them. This was a lesson I only learned because I was attending other peoples events, asking for advice, and shifting my perspective by becoming a speaker myself.
So, the vision for Not Another Pizza is a support network for dev advocates, community managers, and event organisers that can help provide some of these things. There are some great communities and resources out there already doing this like the Developer Marketing Alliance, but I’ve found that resources and collaboration opportunities can be very dependent on geography, so I wanted to set something up more focused on organising technical communities in London and the UK in general.
The London community landscape is highly concentrated around the City, with many smaller communities relying on access to free or subsidised event spaces rather than paying through the nose for renting event spaces. It feels like we are also rapidly approaching “peak meetup” with several events on the same topic on any given night, with 4 different AI and data meetups on the same night as the last AIDLE meetup alone. I don’t see the large number of organisers in London as a problem though - we as organisers don’t need to compete for limited resources and venues if instead organisers and groups collaborate to pool resources, shouldering the work of organising events together. London then is the perfect environment for building this kind of meta-community of community organisers.
My hope is that Not Another Pizza can foster genuine connections between organisers and serve to facilitate meaningful collaboration beyond being just another networking event.
Part 3: Something better than another pizza
It’s very early days yet, but some friends and I are working on building out our community by inviting other dev rel professionals and organisers to the Discord community and building out the website. We’ve also been building out a catalogue of projects on the site that members of the group have been working on, including tools made by community members designed to help make managing communities easier.
One project we’ve recently started working on is bridge, an API written in Python which will eventually enable the publishing and updating of events across multiple platforms simultaneously. I’ve previously spoken about how I think applying the POSSE (Post Own Site Syndicate Everywhere) content management strategy to community events could potentially help tackle the degradation of platforms like Meetup, and I hope bridge will help enable more organisers to experiment with that.
Going forward I’d love for us to create spaces for authentic collaboration by enabling organisers to share success stories of collaborations born through Not Another Pizza, providing match-making for mentorship opportunities, hosting a library of useful resources and content, and to become a really great place to get help with community organising. Perhaps in future we could even have some in person events, who knows. For now our focus will be on growing the community and continuing development on projects like bridge. I think we’ll know if this community has been successful if we can see concrete examples of members meeting collaborators through Not Another Pizza and going on to run events.
If Not Another Pizza sounds like a useful resource you can join the discord community over at discord.notanother.pizza to meet other organisers who can help your community thrive. Don’t worry if you aren’t based in London either, there are members in the group all over the world and some community organiser experiences really do feel universal at times, like wanting nothing less than another slice of cold pizza.