[BangPypers] Create Better Python community

[Anand Balachandran Pillai]

On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 12:15 PM, Kenneth Gonsalves <lawgon at 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
>
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-- 
--Anand