[Wellington-pm] Upcoming meetings

[Grant McLean]

On Fri, 2018-02-09 at 13:04 +1300, Sam Crawley wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Grant: I understand why you'd want to merge groups, and you're right
> it's probably time to do that.
>
> It is nice having a smaller group where most people know each other.
> Sometimes the larger groups can feel a bit impersonal and for new
> people can seem a bit cliquey. Hopefully any new group can avoid that.

I agree.  Being welcoming to new people is crucially important and also
something that doesn't happen without deliberate consideration and
actions.  We can do better in this area.
> 
> One problem I'd see though is that it does make the focus a lot less
> specific. This probably will have a big effect on the content of
> talks. If you're talking to an audience who mostly don't know Perl
> (and are not really interested in learning about it), then (e.g.)
> there's not much point talking about some obscure (but cool) new uses
> of Moose.

I'm not sure I agree.  Taking Moose as a specific example, there may be
people who chose Python or Ruby over Perl because they wanted OO and
might be pleasantly surprised to find that Perl has a superior object
implementation :-)

Regardless of which group you're speaking to, there will always be
something on the slides that goes over some people's heads.

>  I guess there will be cases where there's some feature/module x which
> seems unique to Perl and people who use other languages might be
> interested to learn about it. But a lot of stuff tends to be "if you
> do things this way in Perl, this might help you", but is not of much
> use to other people. The talk I did last year on my game was probably
> only of interest to Perl devs. People can make their talks a lot more
> general appeal, but that means some of the interesting Perl stuff
> won't be getting discussed (at least to the same degree).

I'm not sure there have been many talks at Wellington.pm in the last
year that wouldn't fit in the sort of group I'm envisaging.
> 
> A couple of other questions: will this merger mean that wellington.pm
> disappears completely? Or will there still be occasional meetings?

There could certainly still be occasional meetings.

In the past when we've had international guest speakers (Damian Conway,
Peter Fenwick, Jacinta Richardson ...) I have promoted the meetings to a
wider audience and we had good-sized crowds along.

> Also, what are the other groups we might merge with?

In the first instance, I'm specifically thinking of WellyLUG.  People
from the Python group have been quite enthusiastic about the idea of
merging (the group leadership might not be so keen).
> 
> And if there's not enough interest in merging (from this group or
> others), what is the future of wellington.pm?

Probably it would be necessary for someone else to step up and run it.

> Thanks,
> Sam.

Thank you!
Grant