[Baypiggies] hold a meeting at YouTube in San Bruno?

[Atul Varma]

On Tue, Jun 24, 2008 at 2:33 PM, Mike Cheponis <mac at wireless.com> wrote:

> I think this would be a terrible idea.
>
> That's because a regular place and a regular time are tantamount to a
> vibrant user group.  Stephen McInerney's survey showed where we are is the
> best for everybody (maximizes "utility").
>

Coming from the Chicago Python User Group (ChiPy) and having moved here in
late March, I actually strongly disagree here.  ChiPy, which in my opinion
is a very vibrant user group, hosts its meetings at a different place each
month; it varies between being held at Google Chicago, ThoughtWorks,
Threadless, other companies, and non-corporate places too (last summer there
was a meeting in the common area of someone's apartment complex, which might
sound weird, but I personally love the DIY/hackerish feel of such
gatherings).

One of the really interesting things about this is that we get a fairly
different spread of people depending on where we hold it, which I think
improved diversity.  And not to knock on Google--they're an absolutely
awesome company and everyone I know in it rocks--but the Google meetings
tended to have a more impersonal and less community-centered feel to them,
simply because a lot of "google oglers" who weren't particularly interested
in Python came, which diluted the experience a bit.  I've only been to one
BayPiggies meeting so far so I'm not sure if this is an issue or not here,
but for the sake of having a more diverse range of attendees, I think it'd
be really great to vary the location from month to month.

- Atul
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/baypiggies/attachments/20080624/30f48efd/attachment-0001.htm>