We strongly recommend that you attend a dev house in the bay area or any other of our sister events LINK before starting your own. Come an meet us, fly out and experience first hand the energy and awesomeness of the event. Also, you could bring a friend or two and have a cool road trip!
Starting a dev house is a great way to energize or create a community of hackers in your area. It has worked in different places of the world and it could work in your country or city. Also, it is easy to do it!
Hosting your first dev house is just a matter of getting a handful of hackers and thinkers who want to spend an awesome day coding, talking, sharing, brainstorming and having tons of fun. To do this you will probably need to find a good place to do it, any house with internet and enough space for 10 people will do.
Once you have that, set the date, create a simple wiki (we usually use PBWorks) where people can RSVP and collaborate on organizing the event.
In your first dev house, remember that its a community effort, and don’t overstress on planning. Getting food for everyone or having everything needed can be solved with some community effort, the idea is to have fun in a productive and sharing enviroment, just remember the 3 key principles: Open, Fun and productive.
A great way to make everyone feel at home is by greeting everyone at the door and introducing them to everyone. Also, you should explain them what event is about and invite them to participate in a lighting talk. Since your first dev house will probably be small, try to get everyone to give a lighting talk about what they did or any project they collaborate in. If they are shy, maybe a simple introduction is enough to get everyone talking and part of the community!
After the lighting talks or at the end, you should query the assistance on when and where should the next dev house be! You can also get some volunteers to help plan that. Trying to make the dev house every 4 weeks makes it easier for people to save the date, but do whatever that works!
Another interesting thing to do is to invite people from other dev houses. So far we’ve had awesome interaction between some cities and countries in something we call the Hackspedition[LINK], but it can be as informal as you want, especially at the begining.
