In reply to Miroslav Glavić.

There’s several issues at play, but the two most important ones in my opinion are:
1. Existing organisers are unlikely to hand over reigns willingly to others. Meetup organisers often feel that others can’t do it, and it’s partially enforced by…
2. Many people who attend meetups and WordCamps have zero insight into the real levels of work that are needed behind the scenes to make these events happen, and when an organiser expects them to put in the same effort they did.. well.. everyone ends up disappointed. In other words, many volunteers don’t realise what they’re getting into

Handing over reigns isn’t as easy as many make it out to be, and not only that, there isn’t enough support to back up these new organisers so when they suddenly realise just how much there is to do.. or they expect you to keep doing the “super easy organising a speaker job” (the hardest part!) and things quickly fall over.

Event organisers have to pull in willing volunteers into working underneath them months before burnout sets in, if they don’t, they burn out and then there’s no one to give direction to the new generation of organisers.

I spent several months being “the boss” and getting others to organise everything for the event, guiding them, but I was still the fallback for them when they didn’t feel like they could achieve something – and often did things last minute for them as a result. Being a team leader isn’t everyones skillset, being an event organiser AND a team leader is even rarer.

The moral of this story? Meetup organisers like myself are control freaks, but we have to force one another to bring more volunteers in earlier.

I’m commenting this anonymously, as I don’t want to reflect badly upon those who I passed the reigns to when I moved areas and could no longer continue being the main organiser. Then covid set in. The meetup is starting to recover, but I think it’ll be at least a year until the new organisers feel confident and build it back to what it was, they’re still new at this event organising thing and have much more complicated social issues to deal with than I ever did.