[pydotorg-www] A new planet for user group blog postings!

[Alex Clark]

On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 11:54 PM, Stephan Deibel <sdeibel at wingware.com>wrote:

> Alex Clark wrote:
>
>> Right, but the point is… we know no one cares about user groups :-) We're
>> trying to get people to care about user groups ;-). In particular, we're
>> trying to empower user groups and one way to do that is to give them a
>> spotlight of sorts.
>>
>>
>> Also, I'm not sure what you mean by "way too many". Can you have too many
>> user groups? You can certainly have a hard time keeping track of them all
>> (and keeping the list current), but that's a different story…
>>
>
> I think people are interested in user groups, but their interest is limited
> to first finding one or a few groups near them and then following just those
> groups.  A world-wide feed of all groups doesn't seem like an interesting
> thing to me either, though I may just not be getting why I would care what
> all user groups are doing.
>

You are. And I hadn't really intended to get into this too much, but suffice
it to say there are people interested collaboration between user groups for
the purposes of advancing the state of the art (of grass roots support). If
a software community's grass roots support is strong (i.e. lots of user
group activity) then lots of Good Things Can Happen™, including:

   - People interested in the software have a local resource, a place to
   meet and gather with other like-minded folks, and possibly get a job.
   - Organizations in the local community have a resource where they can
   find Good People™
   - All manner of productivity can occur in the form of user group
   meetings, sprints, trainings, conferences, etc., powered by the folks
   described in the previous two bullet points.

If the software community does not support local user groups, then Bad
Things Can Happen™, including:

   - None of the above 3 bullet points can occur.
   - Folks interested in supporting the software become discouraged, when
   the software community does not support their efforts (i.e. folks like me.
   While I'm used to pushing the envelope, and dealing with different-minded
   folks, and trying to encourage change, other folks may not be as
   persistent).



>
> That said, I would be perfectly fine if all of them blogged and showed up
> on planet python since I already expect there to be far more than I can read
> there and I just skim for what I'm interested in reading.
>

Right, but there is no incentive for them (or anyone interested in them), if
the blog postings are not aggregated into a separate feed… again, not
looking to debate anyone here, just offering to do something that Doug
Hellmann and I discussed and both thought was an interesting idea ;-)


This should be a trivial addition IMVHO to python.org that either helps or
does nothing…


In case it helps, take a look at http://meetup.zpugdc.org. We have
approximately 300 Python programmers in our membership, 20 of which show up
every month for meetings. And a growing list of sponsors from the local
business/gov/non-profit community (well, no gov sponsors yet). The idea is
as simple as this: I want to help build these kind of organizations
worldwide, but I can't do it alone. We need the support of the software
communities, whose software we advocate to take the idea seriously.




>
> - Stephan
>
>


-- 
Alex Clark · http://aclark.net
Author — Plone 3.3 Site Administration · http://aclark.net/admin
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