What's up with meetups in Philly?
Alex Hillman
This essay was originally published in the Indy Hall newsletter. If you’re not already subscribed, you can sign up here.
Every night of the week, you can find countless events happening across the city of Philadelphia.
Professional groups, creative activities, socials and mixers, panel discussions and more.
Among these events, I’ve always thought of “meetups” as something special.
A great meetup can be:
- the best of a networking event, without the forced transactional vibes
- the best of an educational event, but centering the knowledge in the community instead of outsider expertise
- the best of a social or mixer, without the “we’re here to party” energy
A great meetup is designed similarly to Indy Hall itself: for building relationships with people long before you need anything from each other.
So when meetups started coming back after the pandemic, I was watching closely to see which groups would return, and what forms they would take.
The Meetups Are Back, They’re Just Unevenly Distributed
At Indy Hall, we’ve watched the Philly meetup ecosystem recover up close.
It started very slowly. Philly JavaScript Club. A Drink & Draw. Music industry gatherings. Civic engagement groups & discussions.
Most of them made it back. Some didn’t.
Every time we connected with one of these groups, it was the same story.
They were either trying to bring back an event they ran before quarantine, or more often, it was someone trying to fill the void left by a group that had gone away completely.
So we started asking ourselves…what role does Indy Hall play in this chapter of Philly’s meetup ecosystem?
What do we do beyond sharing space?
Sharing our space and resources is often the most obvious way, but I’d argue, the least interesting.
Right now we’re focused on helping meetup organizers experiment with new formats that break the mold of “talks or panels + networking.”
More interactive community discussions, and hands-on collaborative challenges. Even “think, pair, share” type models borrowed from grade school classrooms have helped many of the meetups we work with level up.
We’re encouraging the meetup organizers we work with to collaborate too, like with crossover meetups and the recent 20-meetup Good Neighbors Hackathon back in March.
And finally, we’re exploring how we can think about these events less as individual dates and more as a “season-long” arc of gatherings and collaborations.
We’re still learning, and I’m glad we’re not alone.
What started slow has grown into something I’m excited to call an ecosystem.
What’s different now isn’t just the number of meetups. It’s what they’re becoming to the people in them. For many people, they’re how they stay connected to their field, find collaborators, and discover what’s actually happening in this city.
That’s why I was glad to hear someone is finally documenting all of this. Sarah Huffman at Technical.ly is working on a story about the state of Philadelphia’s meetup ecosystem, and she needs your help to tell it right.
She’s put together a short survey about your meetup habits: why you go, what keeps you coming back, what gets in the way. The deadline is May 9th, during Philly Tech Week.
Take the Philly Meetup Survey →
If you attend community meetups of any kind, please take the survey. If you organize or help run a meetup, please share it with your community.
I’m very interested to see what Sarah reports from this data 👀
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