[yapc] BOF - local perl monger meeting attendance

Scott Walters scott at slowass.net
Fri Jun 25 12:58:38 PDT 2010


Missed this BoF too.  I've written a lot about my experiences with
Phoenix.PM.  As far as I can tell, the key ingredients are:

* organizer with the right personality
* audiance happy with social meetings or else a few people willing to present over and over year after year
* central location to minimize excuses from people who have families to go home to
* core people to attend so the thing doesn't bottom out while it's ramping up

We had a mix of people hoping the meetings would have tangible,
immediate improvements to their career (more immediate than teaching
them awesome Perl hackery, such as recruiters standing by), 
maintenance programmers whose life with Perl just sucks and won't
be made by happy that doesn't just take a rotorooter to their
codebase, weirdos like Marlana from Fight Club who just go to every
meeting in town but never actually do anything or have any personal
interest in any of it, and hip kids looking for the cool thing.
Most of these groups saw we had nothing to offer (only awesome
technical presentations) and never came back.

Good luck!

-scott


On  0, Jesse Thompson <jesserthompson at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 06/23/2010 09:12 AM, Todd Rinaldo wrote:
> >houston.pm has in the past struggled to maintain attendance at monthly
> >meetings. Would anyone be interested in meeting for lunch today to
> >discuss your successes/failures with getting attendance up at your
> >local perl monger meetings?
> 
> I missed this BOF :-(
> 
> Madison.pm attendance can be attributed to JT Smith's efforts in 
> organizing meetings.  Also, it doesn't hurt that he is known for paying 
> for food and beer.  :-)
> 
> I was pondering the idea of creating a local $work.pm.  This might not 
> work for small development shops, but it would be especially useful for 
> large organizations - such as a university, or a even large division of 
> an organization - where there are disparate perl programmers that would 
> benefit from a perl mongers group but don't think to ever attend.  I 
> haven't worked up the courage, or found a topic, to present anything at 
> Madison.pm, but perhaps a $work.pm would help me to vet topics and 
> practice presenting.  Ideally, a $work.pm would help make people more 
> aware of the existence and the value of the local City.pm
> _______________________________________________
> yapc mailing list
> yapc at pm.org
> http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/yapc


More information about the yapc mailing list