I started the AWS User Group Munich back in 2014. At the time, the whole idea of an AWS-specific user group barely existed - Munich was, together with Berlin, among the first in the German-speaking area, and worldwide you only really found them in the big tech hubs. It wasn’t a plan I’d been sitting on. It came out of a conversation with my AWS account manager at the time, together with an AWS solution architect. Their point was simple: customers meeting and exchanging ideas with other customers is incredibly valuable - for the customers, and for AWS too.

What hooked me wasn’t the AWS angle. It was that win-win. There was no “us versus them.” Everyone was rowing in the same direction: people wanted to network, to exchange, to share what they’d learned. I’d always valued exactly that kind of conversation myself. Creating a room for it, and pushing it forward together with others, felt like an obviously good thing to do.

More than twelve years later, I’m still doing it. Ten years in already felt like a milestone; I’m well past it now. And that’s the part worth writing about - not the founding, but the staying. Because the honest truth is that the rose-tinted glasses come off. What starts as pure excitement becomes, to some degree, routine. And routine starts to feel like work. So the real question isn’t “how do you start a community?” It’s “what keeps a volunteer-run community alive once the initial thrill is gone?”

Here’s what I’ve learned.

Consistency, and the weight that comes with it

Consistency comes first. Show up every month. No exceptions. People come back because they can rely on the baseline being there - the group will meet, it will happen. That reliability is the single most important thing I offer, and everything else is built on top of it.

But I want to be honest about what consistency costs, because most write-ups skip this part. I’m the sole organizer of the AWS User Group Munich. We actually started as three people, but my co-organizers stepped away within the first few months - both very busy, professionally and privately, and I completely understand it. It’s not a small amount of work. If you’re starting out, or you don’t have much experience organizing yet, I’d genuinely recommend building a team. I grew into doing it solo; I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it.

I’ll be honest about the tension here, because I’ve never fully resolved it. Being solo has real advantages: there are no handovers, no “wait, who’s doing the venue this month?”, no knowledge scattered across a group chat. I always know everything, because there’s only me. That makes the machine run smoothly.

The flip side is the obvious one: I’m the single point of failure. Whether an event happens - whether the group keeps going at all - comes down to whether I’m healthy, whether I can find the time, and whether I still want to spend it. That’s a heavy thing to carry, and some months it genuinely weighs on me. So would a team make it better? I go back and forth. A team is more resilient. But part of why this has survived twelve years might be exactly that undiluted ownership - the fact that it lives or dies with me. I’m honestly not sure those two things can fully coexist.

That same ownership is also what drives me - though I’ll be honest, it’s not always a positive kind of drive. Some days it tips into real pressure: the thought of letting all these people down, the ones who set aside their evening because they trust the group will be there. But it’s balanced by the other side - the gratitude. When people come up after an event and genuinely, explicitly thank me for organizing it, that refuels the tank. That combination - the weight I carry and the appreciation I get back - is what has kept me going every single month, for more than twelve years.

None of this happens without the sponsors

And while I’m talking about what keeps this alive, I have to be clear about something: none of it happens without the sponsors. I can carry the organizing, but I can’t carry the room, the food, the drinks, or the roof over our heads. Over the years, so many people inside companies here in Munich have invested money and time, and opened the doors to their offices so we have somewhere to actually meet. Without them, there is no event. Full stop.

I’m genuinely grateful for that, and I don’t say it often enough. It’s easy, as an attendee, to see the sponsor’s part of the evening as the “ad break.” But that’s the reason the evening exists at all - it’s what makes this free, recurring gathering possible for everyone in the room.

Quality over quantity

For me this isn’t about chasing the “best” events. It’s about protecting the baseline. The event will always happen - but that solid foundation also has to hold a certain quality, at every level. Those two things can pull against each other, and the way I resolve it is by making the trade-offs somewhere other than “do we meet or not.”

Take an evening’s agenda. If we can’t find good speakers with good talks, I’d rather drop a talk slot and reshape the usual agenda than desperately cram in a weak one. The event still happens - it just looks a little different that month. Accepting a compromise like that is fine; what I won’t do is let the overall bar quietly slide just to fill every slot. Better a leaner, honest evening than a padded, hollow one. That’s what “quality over quantity” means to me in practice.

This is the part where being an organizer gets genuinely creative - and, over time, where you get to shine. Holding the quality bar without dropping the event forces you to get resourceful: build a real network, keep a mental (or actual) backup list for everything - speakers who can step in, sponsors who might host on short notice, a talk you can pull forward if another falls through. The years of showing up pay off here, because that network is what gives you options when a slot falls apart two weeks before the event. And the better your backups, the easier your own life gets - you stop scrambling and start choosing. That’s the craft: turning a web of relationships into a buffer that protects the quality bar for you.

It’s not always fully in my control, of course - sponsors are part of the picture, and rightly so. Part of the craft is holding the quality bar while giving them the space they’ve earned.

Be opinionated - but listen first

I’ve watched user groups struggle, not because they did too little, but because they wanted too much. So being opinionated matters. Having a clear sense of what the group is - and what it isn’t.

The meetups of the AWS User Group Munich are not mini-conferences. I’m not trying to organize a conference with a flawless lineup and hard agenda. Not every event is perfect. Not every talk is perfect. Sometimes a talk repeats things you heard in a similar talk some months ago - and honestly, that’s okay. That’s part of the charm.

Because the point isn’t the monologue-from-a-stage, university-lecture format. That’s the part that’s easy to do virtually. The point is people choosing, after a long workday, to say: “I’ll head to this thing tonight, because it’s nice. I can talk to people. Maybe I’ll learn something new - and if I don’t, that’s fine too, because it’s a nice group of people and it’s good to see them now and then.” A bit like being out with friends. You don’t need a brand-new topic every time. It’s just nice to spend time together.

Being opinionated doesn’t mean not listening - the opposite. I always listen, and I’m genuinely glad when people give feedback or show up with new ideas. But my ownership means it’s my responsibility to weigh what’s actually right for the group. One person’s idea isn’t automatically good for the group. And to make that call well, I have to know what’s good for the group - which means I have to keep listening. Curate, don’t just aggregate.

The real test: COVID

Everything I’ve described so far - the consistency, the ownership, knowing what the group is for - sounds tidy on paper. COVID is where all of it got tested at once for me. If you want to know what tests a community, it’s not the good years.

In early 2020 I’d planned something special with several other German AWS user groups: flying in an Amazonian from the US and aligning our meetups so this person could speak in a different city each evening - Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, same week. Getting a top speaker in front of a small, intimate room like that is exactly what makes a meetup special, and it took real coordination across multiple cities to line up.

Then - right as the speaker was about to book travel - the call came: AWS corporate travel ban, COVID. All of that planning fell through.

But losing the tour, as painful as it was, turned out to be the easy part. The genuinely hard decision came next: choosing to stop entirely. As an organizer, I saw it as my duty to protect the health of the people who come to my meetup. And early on, let’s be honest, none of us could really judge how dangerous this was. I’m a “better safe than sorry” type, so I paused everything and decided to wait and see - and to follow the official rules we had in Germany. So we ran no meetups in 2020. The winter of 2020/2021 was another peak, and 2021 kept bringing new COVID waves, new variants, constantly shifting rules about whether meeting in person was okay.

This is where being opinionated stopped being an abstract principle and became a real decision. Here’s where the “what is the group for” question got real. In that time I never seriously considered going virtual. The special thing about an AWS user group for me is the in-person part - actually coming together in one place. And the Munich group runs entirely in English. A virtual English-language AWS meetup would just make me one more English AWS content source on the internet, and there are plenty of those. The thing that makes the group special is the direct exchange - the famous hallway track: talking in small groups, sometimes one-to-one. That’s the part that’s genuinely hard to reproduce virtually.

Group size mattered here too. For a smaller group, I think you can map those small-group dynamics into a virtual format. But Munich draws around 100 people a month. Recreating that with breakout rooms - in a way where people feel free but don’t just quietly disappear - is extraordinarily hard. So I chose not to.

I only felt ready to run a real in-person event again in mid-2022. Event organization takes a lot of effort from a lot of people - sponsors, speakers, me - and I didn’t want to pour all that in only to cancel again because the rules changed. So we waited and came back in June 2022.

And I had real doubts. Before COVID we had 100-120 people at every meetup. But the world had moved on. People had shifted to working from home, to doing everything virtually. I genuinely didn’t know how many would come back.

It turned out to be one of the largest events we’ve ever had. That was the moment it clicked: people want these events. They want to be there in person, flesh and blood, to network, to get back out into the room. That was a particularly beautiful moment - and, in its own way, the strongest proof of why the group (still) exists at all.

Looking back, COVID didn’t teach me new principles so much as it stress-tested the ones I already had. Consistency meant knowing when not to force the baseline - pausing was the responsible form of showing up. Being opinionated meant refusing the easy virtual substitute even when it would have kept the numbers ticking. And the ownership I carry is exactly what let me wait, hold the line, and bring it back when the time was right. The pause didn’t break the group. If anything, it proved how much the in-person version mattered.

More than twelve years in

Twelve years is a lot of evenings. Some of them I’ve walked into tired, unsure I had the energy for it - and walked out, every single time, glad I did. That’s the honest summary: it’s hard, and it’s absolutely worth it - for me. More than 6,000 people are part of the AWS User Group Munich, and the ones who keep showing up, month after month, are the reason. They’re the reason I’m genuinely proud of it, not just tired by it.

If any of this gave you a look at what running a community actually feels like from the inside - the thoughts, the doubts, the quiet pressure, and the reasons it’s worth carrying anyway - then it did its job. And if you run a group yourself, I hope some of it resonated.

And if you’re thinking about starting a group yourself - I hope this gave you something useful, and I hope it was honest about the reality. Don’t take it lightly. It’s real, ongoing work, and the excitement that gets you started won’t be what carries you through year three or year ten. Go in with your eyes open, ideally with a team beside you, and it can be one of the most rewarding things you do.

The one thing I’ll say: reach out. Whether you’re part of the AWS User Group Munich, an attendee somewhere else, or someone running your own group - AWS or not - I’d genuinely love to talk about this. Not as a formality. This is how I learn, how I get better at it, and how I keep making the group worth showing up for.

And yes, this post was written with the help of AI - as a sparring partner to shape and sharpen the thoughts. The stories and the opinions are entirely mine.