Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Networking Events in Los Angeles and Southern California

I've updated this a few times now. Most recent additions to Los Angeles Networking Events:

  • Open Stack Meetup - cloud computing and storage, discussing OpenStack deployment, coding to further the project, and creating a collaborative local community.
  • LA Ruby Meetup - anyone interested in learning or sharing experiences with "Ruby" or "Ruby on Rails".
  • SoCal Web Designers - Web designers and developers talking about technology and design process.

Additions Fall 2011

  • LeanLA Startup Circle Meetup

    I’ve gone to a couple of these. Often the presentations are pretty basic because of a fair number of newbies in the audience. However, there are some great folks who have lots of experience also attending so the networking and discussion is generally pretty great. Especially if you are looking at early-stage start-up issues.

  • Social media week Los Angeles

    Runs week of Sept 20 - 24. Lots of scattered events around LA on social media.

  • SoCal Kanban/Lean software meetup
  • Coloft

    They have a line up of events there. Doing a good job of helping to make events happen. And for what it's worth, a few folks I know have used their space as a coworking space and say they really like it.

Don’t forget to check out Plancast. I sometimes find some interesting events through that system.

Great post by John Shiple. He talks about a bunch of the different networking events that occur in Los Angeles and other parts of Southern California. In his post, he mentions the following events / event organizers, and you should visit his post for a bit more on each of them.

In addition to these, I'd recommend looking at:

Update: I was just sent a link to Todd Zebert's blog where he has a list of networking events in Los Angeles and Southern California along with some commentary. Here some of those groups:

Update: Just pointed to another great post. It discusses more than just local events, but offers quite a list of organizations and events, so here are some additions to the list:

And here's where you can find more events:

  1. SoCalTech Calendar – A great aggregation of events around Southern California that has been pulled together for years by Ben Kuo.
  2. Mixergy - A great calendar of events.
  3. TechZulu - Another great calendar. I believe that a lot of the events on Mixergy come from TechZulu.
  4. Meetup – My personal experience has been mixed with these.
  5. Southern California Tech Central – Brings together posts from top bloggers around Southern California including John's blog and this blog. You can use keywords like: Events in Los Angeles or Southern California Events or even Santa Monica Events.
  6. You can also use Southern California Tech Central's list of Organizations to find possible events: UCLA, CalTech, Twiistup, USC, AeA, TCVN, OCTANE,
    BarCamp, Enterprise Forum, TCOSC, LAVA, UCI, LINC, UCSD, AWT, Digital Hollywood, WITI, TechBiz, ASP, Stirrers and Shakers, AMA, ACG, Pepperdine, PMI, CTC, LMU, LARTA, AITP, iHollywood, Media Leaders.

Quality of Events

Of course, the bigger issue with events is finding the ones where you will have a really good opportunity to network with interesting people. I guess I should confess that I used to go to a lot more networking events. Now, I'm more likely to only go to a few and to heavily use Prenetworking – see Secret for Networking at Events – Prenetworking and Pre-network with LinkedIn. This is why I say that Local Event Organizers Need to Adopt Social Media.

These days, it might be more effective to just invite a small group of people to get together for an interesting discussion than it is to attend an event.


6 comments:

Unknown said...

I have had some mixed results in attending events as well. Doing some targetted discussions would work better for me. I just hate wasting time travelling and attending a bad session. I am looking for discussions around building IT strategies for small businesses. Have worked on music production and medical practices up to this point.

Tony Karrer said...

Brian - I've used LinkedIn for targeted discussions, but it takes a fair bit of work. I'm wondering if there are better/easier ways to do it.

Any thoughts?

Cliff Allen said...

I recently attended a small strategy and planning dinner for a networking group.

Between the actual strategy planning, the discussions on other topics was as interesting and valuable as any large networking event I've attended recently.

Linda Sherman said...

Thank you for including a link to my post about using in person networking in Los Angeles as part of an overall plan to build a local Social Media network.

I would agree that these event organizations need to pay attention to using social media to stay in touch with potential and continuing attendees. When I looked for links to put in my post I found their home base to range from having a website with events properly included to a Facebook Group sporadically enhanced with Facebook events to worse.

But there is no question that networking events in LA have come a long way just in this past year.

I agree that pre-networking is very valuable and why I want to see a proper event page with an attendee list.

Cecily said...

I am one of hosts for a networking mixer called Launch Mondays, an entertainment mixer in Los Angeles. We have a pretty unique format in comparison to other mixers. I invite you and other curious folks to attend our next mixer in January 11, 2010. You can find out more about our organization at www.launchmondays.com

Tony Karrer said...

Cecily - thanks for the info about Launch Mondays.