RSVP Rant

Apologies in advance, but this post is a little bit of a rant...

As most of you may know, I co-organise a couple of user groups - .NET Oxford and Azure Oxford.

We have prize draws at each meetup where our prizedraw app draws from the RSVP list from that night's Meetup.com event. If the winner hasn't turned up, then we redraw. Unfortunately, it's very rare where we get an event where there are no "no-shows" drawn by the prizedraw app. At last week's event, during the intro-talk, I lost count of how many times I had to re-draw due to no-shows. It was pretty embarrassing to be honest.

And these are just the prize draw winners! It doesn't begin to show the real number of no-shows.

So this blog post is a plea to anyone who attends user-groups or conferences...

• If you're planning on attending, then RSVP.
• If after RSVPing, you find you can no longer make it, then please update your RSVP to reflect this.

It takes seconds, it's really easy!

I'm not just talking about the user-groups that I run - but any user group or conference. I know this is a frustration of many user-group organisers. The prize-draw app scenario I mentioned above is just one example, but there's plenty of other reasons why organisers needs to have an idea of numbers. Most user groups (ours included) provide food and drinks. Knowing the numbers for this is very helpful. Food and drinks might be free to attendees, but they still need purchasing!

A lot of work goes into these events, and just because they're free to attend, doesn't mean that it's okay to say you're coming when you're not. As I mentioned above, using the Meetup.com app, it literally takes seconds to update your RSVP status. Please do the right thing.

</rant>