[Jax.PM] [Admin Post] Meetings? Thoughts, ...

[WC Jones (Bill)]

[Jax.PM Admin]
As always - your input as to the following is welcome  :)

Meetings, well, let's see -- we had a couple of informal 
meetings -- people dropped by the office (where I used to work) and 
said "Hi"  =)

I think I've actually run into a couple of members out and about 
around Jacksonville.

But, no, we have never had an official get together or meeting.  I 
have attempted to secure meeting places - FCCJ, Libraries, local 
Pubs, etc.  But each was either unavailable, not useful, or taboo.


Of the members, old and new (we have had a high of 23 members in 
the past) very few -- maybe 4 including myself -- are actually in 
Jax or near enough to benefit.  On the PM Leader lists the Florida 
area leaders (Tallahassee, Miami, et al) have talked about getting 
together - either merging or just hanging out once in a while.

Those discussions were never brought up here because they never 
became any thing than just that.

Since I am pretty much in a career holding pattern these past few 
month I have thought about a lot - Perl, work, Apache, eating, 
Apache, sleeping, playing Spades on Yahoo, Perl, playing Unreal 
Tournament ... Perl, MySQL, Perl, Jones Knowledge e-Education 
Software Standard, PHP, JAVA, MySQL, my resume, my life ... Playing 
SOCOM Navy Seals ... Perl...

LOL, not exactly all at once nor in that order.  =)

OK, maybe I play around too much, maybe I need to get off my duff 
and actually do something with the group.

These are my thoughts about --

	1) The group site:  jacksonville.pm.org -

I feel that there is no real sense in duplicating the other Perl 
sites, etc, so while I have tried to do a couple of things - job 
postings for Jax area (shot down by PM Advisory panel on legal 
grounds), Perl news around Jax area (shot down, well, basically 
because Jax isn't a Perl town), messed around with using myself as 
an example Perl geek on the site (shot down because the PM Advisory 
panel thought I was tooting my own horn too much -- prolly so...)

I really would like members to send things to post there - that way 
if any actually interested Jacksonville, Florida citizens arrive at 
that site there would be something there.

It would likely be best to have just a plain generic site saying 
"We are HERE! Come join us."


	2) The group meetings:

Hmm, in the past I have never had a stable enough schedule to 
commit to meeting anywhere - between family, teaching, then there 
is actually having to work, and all my studies I just didn't have 
time.

Well, I have time now, and since I no longer work or teach at the 
college, I have been meeting with a couple of old students -- we go 
out most every Wednesday to Rigby's and shoot darts and/or play 
pool.  Everyone here is more than welcome to come out with us - I 
even buy the beer  :)

I believe we would be best served by just have a quarterly meeting 
schedule and really only gear it toward maybe a membership / Perl 
awareness drive.  Possibly (seriously) have a bi-annual Perl 
programming contest ... just don't know what/how.  I did some 
research and asking around about meetings and things and a some 
other groups have never met either - some have gone through 
evolutionary changes where one group dies off and other begins.  
The real issue to me is - do we need to meet?  For sanity's sake?  
Maybe a twice or four times a year thing would be better?


	3)  Member projects:

Some of the other groups have actual "work" assignments for their 
respective members ... and while I have no heartburn assigning more 
work for people to do (I am a heartless BOFH after all) I would 
rather only do that if this group's charter covered education and 
there were actual "student" members.

People have historically did the RTFM (and similar route) to the 
student issue with discussions breaking down into 70% RTFM and 20% 
"Why are you telling me to RTFM?" - with about 10% being actual 
useful content.  We all pretty much know this first hand 
(especially if you were subbed to the BPL or BPCL lists.)

My own projects have included DocSet ( http://search.cpan.org/ ), 
Interchange ( http://www.icdevgroup.org/i/dev/index ), as well as 
one project posted by another member: Bricolage 
( http://bricolage.cc/ ) -- I am still hesitant in monopolizing 
another persons time (especially if I cannot reimburse them.)

My personal project has revolved around http://cis4dl.sf.net/ and 
http://InSecurity.Org/  both of which are just this side of 
failures mainly because I do not know what I want.

Lately, since I've been out of work, I've picked up the cis4dl 
project and have been looking at a DocSet/MySQL/Mailman scenario.  
In the past such non-Perl (pure perl) rants would be punishable by 
death -- but hey, Perl should allow other languages be good at 
something.

:)

OK, I believe I have given you enough rantings to consider for one 
e-mail posting (I may have even tripped the 32K digest barrier so 
this goes out today.  We shall see.)

Think about Perl, Jax.PM, and, to steal a quote -

Ask not what your Jax.PM can do for you ... Ask what you can do for 
your Jax.PM ...

Cheers!
-Sx-  :]
Jax.PM Founder;
...and part time leader...