2011/8/19 Anand Balachandran Pillai <abpil...@gmail.com>: > 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.
Why don't we meet this weekend and discuss this? Anand _______________________________________________ BangPypers mailing list BangPypers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/bangpypers
