Guide · organising
How to Organize a Skill Swap Event: Venue, Participants, Checklist
To organize a skill swap event you need a room, two people willing to talk about their work, and a date in public. That is genuinely the whole list. Everything else on this page is about making the second one happen again next month, which is the part that defeats most people.
Skill swapping has spread for the same reason clothes swaps and tool libraries have: it turns something people already have into something a group can use. Where those exchange objects, this exchanges what people know how to do.
Everything below is measured against a run that can be checked. Between 2008 and 2013 a free evening ran 19 times at the same Brighton venue, and the full archive of it is on this site with dates, speakers and subjects. Where general event advice and that record disagree, the record wins here.
Why Not Organize Your Own Skill Swap Event
Projects like this exist all over the place and almost all of them started from somebody’s own initiative rather than from an organisation. Some that are now traditions began very small indeed. The epic Skill Swap in Vermont started with a dozen people in a field belonging to one organiser’s grandfather.
So the first thing to accept is that the opportunity is almost certainly already in front of you: a neighbourhood, a workplace, a school hall, a pub function room, a community centre. The Brighton run used an arts venue, but the version of this that gets going is the version that uses whatever room you can actually book twice.
Set the Time, and Choose a Venue You Can Book Again
Pick the time first and then defend it. The Brighton evenings ran at seven o’clock, doors open, and never moved — which meant that after a year nobody had to check. A recurring evening people can hold in their head beats a better slot found by polling everybody.
For the venue, the only requirement that actually matters is that you can have it again. A merely adequate venue you can book monthly beats an excellent one you can book once. Every group in this archive used a single venue for its entire run: Lighthouse in Brighton, Waterside 1 in Bristol, the BBC building for the earliest sessions. None of them shopped around.
Practical minimums for the room: somewhere to project, chairs you can rearrange, and a door that does not open directly onto the speaker.
Decide How Many Participants a Skill Swap Event Needs
Set the number below which you will postpone, and set it while you are calm. Eight to a dozen participants is enough for a room to feel like an event rather than a meeting. Above about thirty the format changes character: participants stop asking questions and start behaving like an audience, which is the thing this format exists to avoid.
The Brighton evenings began with a dozen or so and grew slowly. They never became a conference, and that is why they kept working for a decade.
The minimum matters more than the maximum, and for an unintuitive reason. A thin room is not embarrassing for you, it is discouraging for the speaker — and the speaker is the resource you cannot replace. Somebody who prepared for a fortnight and talked to five people is markedly less likely to do it again, and markedly less likely to recommend it to the next person you ask. Postponing costs you one month. A discouraged speaker costs you the pipeline.
Counting is also more difficult than it sounds, because attendance at a free event is not the same as interest. A useful rule from any volunteer-run series: expect somewhere between half and two-thirds of the people who said they were coming. If your minimum is ten in the room, you need somewhere near twenty saying yes, and you need to know that before you decide whether the evening is on.
Decide Who to Invite, and Be Narrower Than Feels Comfortable
A skill swap works when the room shares enough context to follow a specific talk. That means inviting a trade, a workplace, an estate or an interest — not a town. The archive here is entirely people who worked on the web, which is why a talk on typographic detail or on scripting the browser could be pitched at practitioners rather than explained from first principles.
The corollary: your first speakers are already on your invite list. Every group in this record grew its speakers out of its audience, so who you invite in month one decides who can speak in month six.
Publish the Ground Rules Before the First Session
Three rules are enough. Nobody pays and nobody is paid. Talks are short — twenty to thirty minutes was the norm across this archive — and they are about something the speaker actually does. Questions are expected, because the argument afterwards is the point.
Write them somewhere people can see them. It saves the awkward conversation where somebody offers to pay a speaker, or a speaker turns up with two hours of material.
One rule deserves stating even though it feels obvious: the talk is about something the speaker does, not something they have read about. This is the difference between a skill swap and a book club, and it is what makes the questions afterwards worth staying for. A speaker describing their own work can answer “what went wrong when you tried that?” A speaker describing a subject cannot, and the room finds out within two questions.
A fourth rule is worth adding if your group is in a trade where people demo work: be explicit that nothing shown has to be finished. The most useful talks in this archive are largely about things that were in progress at the time, and a room that expects polish gets fewer of them.
Sort Out Kit, Refreshments and Clearing Up
The kit list is short and unglamorous: a way to project, an adaptor for whatever laptop turns up, a spare adaptor, and a way to record if you want recordings. Ten of the talks in this archive were recorded, and those recordings are the only reason some of them can still be heard — a strong argument for sorting it out on the first night rather than the tenth.
Refreshments do not need to be catering. Something to drink and something to eat in hand does the actual job, which is keeping people in the room for the twenty minutes after the second talk when the useful conversations happen. Clearing up is the task that quietly exhausts organisers, so name whose job it is in advance.
On recording: the reason to bother is not posterity, it is the speakers. A recording means the person who spent a fortnight preparing has something to point at afterwards, and that is a real part of what they get in exchange for the evening. It also means the talk can be useful to somebody who was not in the room, which is the only way a local series reaches beyond its town.
Two practical notes if you do record. Audio alone is enough — video needs lighting, framing and far more editing, and almost nobody watches it. And ask the speaker on the night rather than assuming; some people will say no, and a recording published without asking is a good way to lose a speaker permanently.
A Skill Swap Event Checklist
This skill swap event checklist is deliberately short, because a longer checklist does not get used. Nine lines, in the order they come up.
Copy the skill swap event checklist into whatever you already keep lists in. The point of writing it down at all is that the second time you organize a skill swap event, none of it should have to be remembered.
| When | Item |
|---|---|
| Four weeks out | Venue booked, and booked again for the following month |
| Four weeks out | Two speakers confirmed with a title each, not just a subject |
| Three weeks out | Date, time, venue and both titles published somewhere permanent |
| Two weeks out | Minimum participants reached, or postpone now rather than later |
| One week out | Projector, adaptors, spare adaptor, recording kit if you want it |
| Day before | Refreshments bought; whose job clearing up is, settled |
| On the night | Doors at the advertised time; talks start within ten minutes of it |
| Afterwards | Publish who spoke and on what, so the record exists |
| Afterwards | Ask one attendee to speak next time, before they leave |
One Format Worth Stealing for a First Event
In October 2008 the Brighton run put 8 speakers on one bill with a few minutes each.It is the only night in the whole archive that broke the two-talk pattern, and it makes an excellent first event for a new group: a short slot is a far smaller thing to ask of somebody who has never spoken before, and one evening can surface half a dozen future speakers.
After that, settle into pairs. The archive is ten years of evidence that two talks an evening is the shape this survives in. If you would rather build a group than a single night, start there.
The Three Ways This Actually Fails
None of them are dramatic, which is why they catch people.
The second event. The first one runs on novelty and goodwill and goes fine. The second has to run on a habit that does not exist yet, and it is the one that gets postponed. The defence is to book the room for both nights at the same time and to ask your second pair of speakers before the first evening happens, not after.
The organiser doing everything. One person can carry the room, the speakers, the announcement, the kit and the clearing up for about four months. After that it becomes a second job and the series ends without anyone deciding to end it. The record here is suggestive: every group that held sessions had a named curator, and the one with two curators is the one that ran three sessions in five months while another with none held nothing at all.
Drifting upward in formality. Each event is slightly better organised than the last, which sounds like success. Then the talks need to be good, so the speakers need to be experienced, so the room stops producing its own speakers, and you are booking a lineup. At that point you are running a small conference with none of a conference’s resources. The Brighton run is instructive here because it did not drift: the last evening in the archive has the same shape as the first.