[LA.pm] RFC: What do you want from LA.PM?

[Jeffrey Ryan Thalhammer]

On Apr 28, 2013, at 11:59 AM, Andrew Grangaard wrote:

> Hello Mongers!  I'd love to hear from you all.

Hey Andrew-

I'm so glad to see you are asking these kinds of questions.  Here in San Francisco, there are dozens of Ruby meetups, hackathons, and socials.  I could literally find a Ruby event for every day of the week here.  I want to see the same kind of energy in Perl (again).

Some ideas I've had:

Do It All The Time: If you've got office space, open it up for weekly drop-in sessions.  It's usually not hard to secure a conference room for a couple hours every week as long as everyone knows it is happening.  Or if you don't have office space, invite everyone to invade a local cafe.  The key thing here is to do it frequently.

Breed With Others: Rather than pushing a Perl-specific agenda, start mixing speakers on Ruby, Perl, Python, whatever.  Then you can advertise the meetings in other communities and bring in all sorts of new people.  Yes, the Perl message gets a diluted a bit, but you also get to hear some new ideas from other languages and infect them with some ideas from Perl.

Always Lubricate: Alcohol makes everything better.  It really helps people communicate and socialize.  Make sure you have plenty for every meeting.    Good food helps too.  It's hard to justify missing a hot home-cooked meal for cold pizza.  Press your manager to pick up the tab -- it is a small investment that generates a lot of goodwill.

Girls, Girls, Girls: Women are terribly underrepresented in this profession.  Reach out to them.  Find them on campus, or around the office, and invite them in.  Set up a ladies-only night where women can meet and hack their way.  And guys, lets give the ladies some respect -- understand that men and women think & communicate differently.

Remember Your First Time:  Us old timers already know our way around the community.  If we want to learn something, we know how to find it on IRC or at YAPC.  But if you want to bring in new blood, you have to start teaching the basics.  Do entry-level tutorials on Perl, web frameworks, or programming in general.  Imagine yourself as a college student or budding professional and start producing content that would be helpful to that audience.

-Jeff