Post Sydney Tweetup Thoughts
The first Sydney Twitter Meetup was held last Wednesday at Pier 26 Bar. Thanks to Cathy Edwards from the Telstra Chief Technology Office for co-organising the Sydney event with me. She had organised a couple of tweetups in Melbourne previously, so it was good to have her encouragement to help this one happen.
It was a good turnout of about 30 people at Pier 26, and I think the Sydney twitterati had a good time. We also had a few people from out of town which was great. Jared Madden and Adam Purcell, who are organising the first PodCamp Australia attended, and Dave King from St Edmonds Lab in Melbourne came along as well. Thanks to those guys for making the effort.
From my point of view, it was really great to finally meet some of my local Twitter friends in the flesh. I also met some people who weren't yet my Twitter friends but are now. I had fun contacting people through Twitter and Facebook beforehand to encourage them to attend. It was all an interesting social media experiment, which seemed to work out pretty well.
If I had one negative comment to make, it would be that there weren't enough women there. As I've mentioned before, this seems to be a fairly common occurrence in interactive, especially on the development and creative sides, and in senior roles. Personally, I really would like to see that change. I wouldn't like to see that continue into this new area of social media either, should it develop into a growth industry in itself (which it already seems to be).
A big thanks to Happener for sponsoring the drinks on the night, and to Nick Hodge from Microsoft for supplying a copy of Windows Vista for the 'best tweet on the night' prize.
Thanks to Tim Buesing and Dave King from Netx and St Edmonds Lab at Netx for recording and podcasting a few interviews on the night. The interviews can be found on the St Edmonds Lab blog here.
Quite a few photos were also taken. In true social media style, a lot of them (including mine) can be found on flickr, here
7 comments:
Yea, it was definitely a good night for the first STUB. Apparently there were more twitter-ers at STUB than at MTUB (Melbourne) which impresses me.
Walking down to the venue, I was actually thinking about the ratio of male and female twitter's and i wasn't really surprised the men were tipping the scales. However, I was really surprised that out of 30 twitter peepz, only 2 were female. That's a huge difference. I know there are more female twitter-ers and we need to expand the social networking.
I've wanted to do this for the Web Standards Group, but it would be awesome to do a poll (or a survey) to see what would get women to turn up to these "social networking"/educational events.
Looking forward to setting up the next STUB. w00t!!
In our Boston Tweetup, there's just almost 50%. I've no notion of how this happened. It just is. In our case, one brings another and another comes, and then the place is just crawling with women. : ) Of course we make sure that people feel comfortable and we pick the establishment based on that. But otherwise, no special sauce.
Sounds like a great time.
Well there's only 2 other twitters I know of in Canberra, and if they all came the f/m ratio would be 33%!
It was a great night, although like yourself Ajay, I was surprised by how very few women there were.
Perhaps we're all kind of scary, perhaps its that the sheer power of so many male Adonisess (Adoni?) in one place was too overwhelming, I just don't know.
My only negative comment to add is more seating would have been nice. All in all though I enjoyed myself and will try to bring less nerdy friends next time. :)
Well I could have boosted the numbers of females! I was really sorry not to be able to attend, but a trip out of town for work intervened. I missed the opportunity to meet you all - pity! Next time perhaps the female/male ratio will be better.
Thanks for the comments. It's great that you had about a 50/50 split in Boston Chris. Maybe our first tweetup was a bit of an anomaly. I do know of a few women who wanted to come along but couldn't make it on the night (like Judy), or planned to come but ended up not being able to make it.
Could possibly have been due to the fact that maybe more men are comfortable with turning up to a bar alone to meet people they haven't met before? I don't know, maybe it's worth thinking about for the next one :)
J
Hi John!
Love the free drink card! I take it as an inspiration for when we will organize a Twitter Meetup here in Finland!
Andrea
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