[yapc] BOF - local perl monger meeting attendance

Aran Deltac bluefeet at gmail.com
Fri Jun 25 13:41:52 PDT 2010


Weird, this e-mail just arrived in my inbox, but it shows as being sent 3
days ago.  :(  Blame google or pm.org?  :)

Anyways, over here at Thousand Oaks (NW of Los Angeles) we've maintained a
meeting of between 8 and 12 attendees every month for the last couple of
years.  We've had large groups before (30+) because we had a big name give a
talk such as Conway and Schwartz.  I think we've been able to keep
attendance up because we're always looking for new ways to get our name out
there.  Here's the points that I'd recommend for any group:

   - Keep your home page up to date, or if not feesable, stop it from
   becoming out-of-date.  If you find that you can't keep the "next meeting
   date" bit up-to-date, remove it.  Its better to say "its the second
   Wednesday of every month" then it is to say "March 10th, 2010" months after
   that meeting has passed.
   - Make groups on social networking sites for your PM and get your mongers
   to join them.  At TO.pm we have groups on facebook and linkedin.
   - Notify you social networks about meetings a few days before they
   happen.
   - Notify your PM's mailing list about meetings a few days before they
   happen.
   - Attend local conferences, even setup a Perl booth.
   - Network with fellow local perl mongers organizers.
   - Always have presenters, never cancel a meeting, even if that means you
   pick up the slack when nobody steps up.  Lack of consistency can push away
   potential regulars.

I've done all that and have had good results from it all.  Also, our home
page (http://www.thousand-oaks-perl.org/) is a meetup.com page which gives
us a whole lot of cheap (not free!) exposure.

Some things we've talked about doing, but haven't:

   - Hold Perl classes sponsored by TO.pm, proceeds going to TPF.
   - Get listed on local technical web sites, publications, and newspapers.

HTH.

Aran

On Wed, Jun 23, 2010 at 10:12 AM, Todd Rinaldo <toddr at null.net> 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'm thinking we could meet on the ground floor in the middle around
> 11:40 and leave at 12:00. Please let me know if you plan to attend.
>
> I'm wearing a dark blue T-Shirt with the flash on it.
> _______________________________________________
> yapc mailing list
> yapc at pm.org
> http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/yapc
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.pm.org/mailman/private/yapc/attachments/20100625/aa3c0aaa/attachment.html>


More information about the yapc mailing list