[Pikes-peak-pm] Regarding Wednesday Lunch Meetings

[Dusty Wilson]

Hey all!

I want to say that I greatly appreciate having these Wednesday
lunches.  While most of you seem to be surrounded by tech-minded folk
on a regular basis, I'm not.  That's an unfortunate side-effect of
living 90+ miles from civilization and about 250 miles from cities
like Denver and Colorado Springs.  I have yet to find anyone within an
hour of me that even knows what programming is, let alone actually
partaking in it.  Of course if you want to talk farming, you'll find
masses.

I completely understand work and personal things that interfere with
regular attendance of such lunches.  Once upon a time, I lived in the
Seattle/Tacoma/Olympia, WA area and had a decently hectic schedule.
Last month, a total of four people attended the lunch.  This month,
only two.

Hopefully without stepping on any feet, there are a couple of things
I'd like to do to attempt to increase the regular attendance of these
meetings:

1)  Adjust the time or day of the meetings to better suit the greatest
number of interested attendees, but only if required.

2)  Provide a means of predicting how many people will attend and
under which conditions (minimum attendance, location, length of
meeting, etc).

For example, I intend to attend all meetings that have at least two
other attendees.  If only one can attend, I'd prefer to not drive
about 250 miles to get there.  The location, day, and time have no
affect on my attendance.  For others, they might only be able to
attend on Wednesdays, only on weekends, or only after 3pm.

Of course, as a dyed-in-the-wool programmer type, I'm willing throw
code at the problem.  I made this as a rough-draft type of thing:

http://oakley.dusty.ext.megagram.net/pppm/attend/

I want your opinions/etc about this.  It took almost no time to make
it (30 or so minutes), so don't feel obligated to like it.  But if it
can help determine who is going to attend, that will help me directly
and might give others the option to not attend unless a certain number
of others have pledged to attend as well.

These meetings are valuable to me and I would like to increase their
attendance.  Having something like this is not something I can take
for granted and am willing to go great distances (literally and
figuratively) to both keep them going and to enhance their attendance
and value for others.

Thanks,
Dusty