Surely Christchurch Can Afford Some Spare Change To Enable Real Change

Earlier this week Canterbury Tech took the initiative to get as many of the grassroots community event meetup organisers together in one room to talk about the up-and-coming Tech Week and also talk about the changes that most of the event organisers are having, big thanks to Louisa for organising it.

In the room were about a dozen organisers of events that were made up of mostly tech events but there were some startup and some business-related organisers. From the event, we created a spreadsheet that now has over 50 Christchurch-based events and 37 of those are currently active.

What is impressive is there are at least 15x technology-related meetups happening monthly and with a bit of reshuffling it would be possible to make sure there is something in tech happening every night. What’s not so impressive is there is only 1x startup-related event happening monthly and it is targeted to a select age group.

Of the meetup groups, there were 3x common issues that the organisers raised as issues: Venues, Funding & Attendees.

Venues

Many of the organisers listed venues as a challenge, because many of these meetings are held outside of normal business hours they struggle to find venues willing to host them on a regular occasion. Some of the organisers are lucky and have access to venues due to their employers and the positions that they hold in their company but many struggle.

Even if a place like Tūranga public library were to allow access every night from 5:30pm-7:45pm in their Activity Room or Spark Room the events for tech-related events would fill their calendar for the entire year blocking the opportunity for any other type of meeting. Most other public venues in Christchurch close after normal business hours or the fees are so high it would be prohibitively too expensive.

Ideally, all venues should be confirmed at least 1 month in advance to allow all attendees to know where and when the next event is

Funding

Cost of venue aside many events are held after hours and it is commonplace to have nibbles and drinks at these types of events. The small cost to allow for things like wine & cheese or beer & pizza helps to increase the networking efforts, increase user turnout, and improve repeat patronage. Depending on the event sometimes sponsors can be found but it isn’t always guaranteed meaning sometimes hosts have to dig into their own pocket to cover the costs.

Attendees

Sometimes turnout is quite low because of the amount of meetups that are only able to issue short notice because of the unknown venue locations. If you only confirm a venue the week before the event this limits your outreach. Also, it isn’t uncommon for similar events to clash and be on at the same time reducing your turnout because of the lack of forward planning.

The solution

What would be great would be 1 dedicated venue that is designed to host events every night of the week and able to host 2x meetings at a time. Ideally, it would have room to host 2x rooms of 40 people per room but also be able to open up to be one large venue to allow up to 150 for larger Canterbury Tech events. There are plenty of empty buildings in town and it shouldn’t be too difficult to have access to a venue large enough, even if it had to change every 3 months that would work well.

If we had a venue we could then get sponsors to pay for the snacks and drinks and the leftover drinks of the night can go towards the next event.