On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 12:15 PM, Kenneth Gonsalves <law...@gmail.com>wrote:
> On Fri, 2011-08-19 at 12:05 +0530, Noufal Ibrahim wrote: > > > chennaipy meets on the 4th Saturday of every month, this is fixed. > > > Attendance varies from 2 to 15. So the question is not 'shall we > > > meet?' but 'are you attending'. This has been going on since 2006 > > > with some breaks now and then. > > > > A fixed date without attendees does not a user group meeting > > make. ChennaiPy has *some* people attending every month. > > on several occasions we had 2 > I dont call that a user group meeting. That is definitely apathy though better than no meeting any day. I see a few factors that discourage people in actively attending tech forum meetings such as BangPypers. 1. (Lack of) Continuation of thread/topic - Most of the time we end up discussing different topics from one meeting to next. Topic dis-continuation leads to lack of focus and lack of shared goal which finally leads to apathy. 2. (Lack of) Shared goals - This is kind of related to 1, but slightly different. If 2-3 folks are working on the same/similar project then there is more shared problems to discuss and even hack on a week-end, but if you don't find a common ground, you cant build a cohesive group who would like to meet. 3. Social networking ? - I am guessing here, but I do feel that the advent of social networking has affected real social gatherings to an extend. I am not talking about attending marriage ceremonies or house warming here, but shared social collectives such as tech groups like us. Since there is an alternate channel (twitter, FB) to share content and discuss in real time, I am wondering if it acts as a deterrent to meeting in person. 4. Maturity - I think this is a point which we often forget. When BangPypers was starting off, we had a lot of energy and enthusiasm since Python was not as much popular then as it is now. There were a lot of basic ignorance so many of the initial meetings were discussions on the language aspects. However right now this initial novelty has worn off and the language (and the group) has matured. So topic picking is not as easy as it used to be and finding themes to discuss that is novel and holds others interests is perhaps not as easy as earlier. I am not proposing solutions in this email (tired fingers), but identifying problems is a start to fixing them. > -- > regards > Kenneth Gonsalves > > _______________________________________________ > BangPypers mailing list > BangPypers@python.org > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/bangpypers > -- --Anand _______________________________________________ BangPypers mailing list BangPypers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/bangpypers
