Anand Balachandran Pillai <abpil...@gmail.com> writes: > On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 12:15 PM, Kenneth Gonsalves <law...@gmail.com>wrote:
[...] >> 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. Exactly. It keeps it going which is something. > 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. The ChennaiPy people, AFAIK, do LPTHW exercises, watch Pycon videos etc. These are things that can be done on a continuous basis. > 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. Agreed. We need a pet project. > 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. I don't know. I freelance and work from home myself and can eagerly pounce on a meeting, tech or otherwise to meet people in the flesh. There's only so much that technology can do. However, if you have enough social engagements via. work, then this becomes secondary. > 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. This is basically just dearth of topics. I don't know how to fix it but maybe we can give it some kind of stimulus with a day long hackathon? It would help us get into depth about *something* and make some headway. [...] -- ~noufal http://nibrahim.net.in Our comedies are not to be laughed at. -Samuel Goldwyn _______________________________________________ BangPypers mailing list BangPypers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/bangpypers
