[yapc] BOF - local perl monger meeting attendance

[Jesse Thompson]

well said.  I think what you say makes sense.

For clarification, my proposed $work.pm idea would be to "teach awesome 
Perl hackery" to the "maintenance programmers" so that they might be 
interested in $city.pm.

Also, it would give the "people who have families to go home to" a 
opportunity to be part of a Mongers group while their lives are busy, 
and maybe make them interested in attending $city.pm when they have more 
time in the future.  Even if $city.pm never pans out, at least it 
encourages more interest in Perl.

On 06/25/2010 02:58 PM, Scott Walters wrote:
> 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
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