Organizing events

Getting Started:

Kickoff/Meet & Greet: Present your vision/idea for the meetup, invite others to help organise.
Lightning talks: Short talks of 5 minutes on a range of topics. This format usually also has a low barrier to participate.
Survey: Some chapters have set up an online questionnaire before their first meeting to find out what people were looking for in the meetup.
Making your group/event known: you can reach out to some other meetups in the area which might have overlapping audiences (e.g., data science meetup and R user groups) and universities (e.g., statistics departments).
Finding co-organizers: Some chapters organizers have found people to help them run the chapter at their events, others have included a question on who would be interested in organizing in the initial survey.
Online events: You could also offer online events via Zoom which extends accessibility to a larger group of potential attendees.

Decide on desired/feasible frequency of events (once a month, once every few months?)
Appropriate event formats depending on profile of the local community. More academic, more industry? Talks, tutorials, lightning talks, drop-in sessions, socials? Working through online courses together?
Join the Organizer Slack to talk to other organizers so you can find out:
- How to find venues to host meetups (for free!)
- How to find speakers
- Hot to find material: online courses, material developed by other WiMLDS meetups (should in future go on the GitHub organisation)
- How to find sponsors for refreshments