The Design Systems Coalition is a new niche meetup for people enthusiastic about design systems. This includes professionals, freelancers, designers and developers, brand designers, managers and directors, and product managers, and anyone else interested in learning more or sharing their own experiences with building design systems.
The format of the meetup is to have 3, 10 minute lightning talks on the same topic area. After all 3 talks have finished we open questions to the floor, of which any speakers can respond to. We want to stimulate discussion with these talks, but keep the majority of the time for networking and meeting other design systems enthusiasts.
The meetup is organized by Diana Mounter, who leads design systems at GitHub, Tom Takigayama, design lead at Justworks, and Brent Jackson, front-end developer and author of Basscss and Rebass. The meetup was born out of the Design Systems slack community started by Jina Bolton who is a design lead on the Salesforce Lightning Design System, and runs a style guide conference called Clarity.
- The venue should be able to accommodate minimum 75 people so that we can offer enough spaces for the event. More is better, though to start with we're keeping the meetups small, up to about 100 attendees.
- AV equipement will be needed for projecting presenter slides.
- Not required, but if you are able to record the talks so that they can be shared online after the event that would be appreciated. Please let us know before hand if you are able to do this so we can notify presenters and attendees that talks will be recorded.
- Ideally we'd like hosts to provide some drinks and snacks for attendees since the event will be in the evening. Snacks should include vegan and gluten-free options, and if providing alcohol, non-alcoholic options should also be available. If the host is not able to provide food and drink please let us know and we'll see if we can find a sponsor for this.
- We'd like meetups to begin at 6.30, with talks beginning around 7, and the event ending around 9pm. We can be bit flexible on this though so please let us know if you have constraints around timing.
- We'd like organizers to be able to have access to the venue about 30 minutes before hand to help set up and make sure everything runs smoothly.
- Tickets: the event is not ticketed but we will have an rsvp list which we will check on the door. We won't turn un-registered people away unless space is limited or the venue has other access restrictions. Usually there will be a number of no-shows that balance out occasional extras that turn up. We will take the name and email of un-registered attendees.
- Registration: if the venue requires a security check with ID before entering the event, please let us know so we can notify attendees. Organizers will need a small table near the entry to the event room for checking off RSVP's as people arrive.
We would love someone from the hosting company to present on their design system, or a related topic. Each event will be focussed around a niche topic and we'll work with you to find a topic that works for you and is someone the design systems community is interested in.
As part of hosting, we'd like to offer the following:
- Logos on event materials (the meetup page, slides loop during event, youtube video if the event is recorded)
- If you have jobs advertized that you'd like to share at the meetup we'll add the details to the slides loop, and you can give a shoutout at the event, we'll post on our twitter too if you like.
- If there's something else you'd like to do that would make it worthwhile you hosting please let us know and we can discuss ideas.