SPUG: Re: Eastside Perl; can it rise from ashes?

[Tim Maher/CONSULTIX]

Asim Jalis says:

>If anyone's interested in presenting at next week's meeting on the
>Eastside (Redmond) let me know.

>Short presentations are welcome. Could be as short as 15 minutes. Here
>are some topic ideas:

Folks,

As the leader of SPUG, allow me to clue you in on a few realities of
the Rise and Fall of special-interest User Groups.

1) If the group is willing to base its meeting schedule on the
willingness of Vendors to make self-serving product presentations,
it can limp along with a passive membership, if enough vendors can be
found (although this would currently be impossible in the case of Perl).
However, people attending such meetings will typically complain
about the "hype/useful_info" ratio, and skip most of the meetings,
making for a disjointed, and mostly disgruntled, membership.

2) If the Vendor/Sales-Pitch model is rejected, speakers must usually
be obtained from the membership, which means if the group is comprised
primarily of "Takers" (people who only want to benefit from the work
of others), it will surely die.  There must also be an appropriate
proportion of "Givers", people who are willing to expend some effort
for the benefit of the group as a whole.

3) Thus far, it looks like the Eastside population, which complained
bitterly about the inconvenience of attending the (thriving)
downtown-Seattle meetings and clamored for an Eastside location, is
composed primarily of Takers (with one obvious exception being Asim,
who is bravely trying to resuscitate E-SPUG from its moribund state).


Unless people are willing to come forward to help create useful
content for the meetings, E-SPUG will cease to exist, at least in 
its current form, and rightfully so.

You should consider Asim's recent plea for speakers as a referendum on
the future of E-SPUG, and if you want to keep this group alive, please
volunteer to share something you know about Perl with the rest of the
group at next Wednesday's meeting (10/25).

-Tim

==========================================================
|  Tim Maher, Ph.D.           Tel: (206) 781-UNIX        |
|  SPUG Founder & Leader      Email: spug at halcyon.com    |
|  Seattle Perl Users Group   HTTP: www.halcyon.com/spug |
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