Article published in January 2016 on the BAIA blog.
BAIA was started in 2006 by a very small group of Italians, my friends Michele Ursino, Matteo Daste, and Giorgio Ghersi. I joined the association only a few weeks after it was founded. The founders’ long-term goal was to build a business community of Italians in San Francisco and Silicon Valley who didn’t identify with the historical group of Italian-Americans or with well-established Italians who had immigrated to California in the 70s and 80s.
At the time, in the Bay Area, we were starting to see several professionally qualified Italians who moved here to take well-paid jobs. I was one of them. The existing local Italian associations, despite being very active at the time, were not targeting this new group of immigrants, and their traditional cultural activities did not catch our attention.
Today, history repeats itself. The San Francisco Bay Area is becoming home to hundreds of young Italian professionals, mostly taking jobs in the tech industry or starting their own companies. BAIA seems to have some difficulty staying relevant by capturing their attention and producing events able to attract young people.
To expand our presence and visibility among young Italians, at the beginning of 2015, the board of BAIA decided to run an experiment and put Michele Ursino and me in charge. We decided to start a series of monthly meetings targeting people with a strong technical background. We selected Meetup.com as the primary platform for the experiment. Meetup.com is a popular website that provides full support for building and running meetings for groups of people with common interests.
With Michele Ursino, we created a new Meetup group that we named BAIA Geeks, based on a set of basic rules, inspired by the traditionally open approach of the BAIA Association and by other popular meetups:
- The meetup is open and fully transparent in every aspect of the organization: money, events, speaker selection, membership, and rules.
- The initial goal is to gradually reach a point where the meetup functions as a fully bottom-up system: it finances itself, selects the speakers, and runs the meetings autonomously.
- Unlike other BAIA events, our meetups are intended to be a gathering of peers coming together for a talk by a peer. Therefore, the Q&A session following the talk is replaced by a discussion in which the group, in a very friendly way, can exchange experiences and technical opinions on the topic of the event.
To date, we have organized over 11 BAIA Geeks events, each featuring a different speaker. The meetup group now includes about 300 members and is constantly growing. Bootstrapping the group required a lot of work from us, but the result is so rewarding that we want to continue and possibly expand the group’s activities with more events, more speakers, and more members.
A few notes from our very positive experience with BAIA Geeks:
- The Meetup.com platform provides great support for the organizers, making everything easy and fast. We really appreciate it.
- After the first few events, we started noticing a very interesting and unplanned side effect: many people were coming to the meetups not only for the speakers but also for the group. The BAIA Geeks meetup provides a great opportunity to meet a group of similarly minded people, and the regular schedule of monthly events allows not only networking but also building stronger, more personal relationships. At the meetings, it is not uncommon to hear people talking about building or starting something together. I don’t know whether those talks are still at the stage of ideas or already becoming something more substantial. From our point of view, as organizers, we consider this the best reward for the time and energy we invested in BAIA Geeks.
If you are a geek and you live in the Bay Area, I have an important recommendation for you: join us!
2015 BAIA Geeks Meetups
- Michele Ursino: RelaxJS, a Node.js framework
- Roberto Pieraccini: Building Machines That Understand Speech
- Antonio Pellizzaro: Scala and the Typesafe stack: experience at Autodesk
- Luca Dellamore: Introduction to the Salesforce Platform
- Cosimo Spera: The evolution of recommendation systems
- Massimo Arrigoni: SCRUM: lessons learned… and learning
- Cristiano Ghersi: The age of reason in Software Programming
- Francesco Lacapra: A distributed file system built for scalability
- Leonardo Zizzamia: Benchpress – An easy way to benchmark your web app
January 2017 Update
In January 2017, the BAIA Geeks group became a spin-off of BAIA, establishing itself as completely independent from the association. Within the framework of this new identity, the Geeks group rebranded as ItaliaGeeks and continues to organize events with the same consistency and attention to detail as always.
