Hello Steve, it is very nice to learn from Scipy users in China! Below are some suggestions that might help you. If you want more specific answers, you should give more details about * Who are the members of the group? Academic staff? Students? Engineers working in industry? * What are your goals? Creating a local user group to organize installations and training parties? Developing the use of Python e.g. at university, so that companies using Python/Scipy can hire graduates that already have a knowledge of the language? On the long term, contributing to numpy/scipy's code for some specific aspects? Fostering a local community --------------------------- If you want to create a local community, you'll need a good website, a mailing-list and... a lot of energy to organize events (food and drinks, etc.). Do you have access to a server that could host a website, e.g. a blog, and a mail server? You should spend some time looking at the http://wiki.python.org/moin/LocalUserGroups page that lists Python User Groups round the world, to see how the local Python groups work. I don't think there exist that many Scipy-only user groups. In fact, if you want to reach the critical mass to have enough momentum in you user group, you may consider widening the scope of the user group to the Python language. I have seen in Dakar (Senegal) the birth of a Python User Group thanks to the local Linux User Group, that had provided a server and a mailing-list (as well as the help of a bunch of enthusiastic and efficient people), so that the Python User Group could start off very rapidly and at almost no cost. If there exists already a Linux User Group in your area and you think they may be willing to help you, that could be an option. Getting more users ------------------ If you want to develop the use of Scipy in your region, you'll have to advertise Scipy a lot, and to organize training courses. A good target for that purpose is universities and engineering schools, where there is often a course on an interpreted scripting language (Matlab/IDL/R/Octave) being taught. If you can convince a professor that the framework Python/Numpy/Scipy is highly interesting for performing all the tasks of scientific computing, then it's a done deal. The best way to convert professors to Python is sometimes to show them that they can use it for their own research and not only in their courses. If you work for a company, you can give some feedback to the university that you may be interested in hiring graduated trained in Python/Scipy. Of course, this requires quite a bit of lobbying! You can also organize yourself some training parties, and then count on word to mouth to get more users. Some seminar/course material is available on the web. Take a look at http://docs.scipy.org/doc/ and http://www.scipy.org/Additional_Documentation?action=show There is a whole course about Scipy in http://www.rexx.com/~dkuhlman/scipy_course_01.html There is a whole textbook about Scientific Computing with Python by Hans Petter Langtangen (http://www.amazon.com/Python-Scripting-Computational-Science-Engineering/dp/...) There is also a variety of slides available, e.g. on https://cirl.berkeley.edu/fperez/py4science/2008_siam/ I don't know if the tutorials given the coming week at Scipy 2009 Conference will be posted online, you can check the page http://conference.scipy.org/tutorials later this month. Getting help ------------ As the organizer of the User Group you will get a lot of questions about Numpy/Scipy, some of which you obviously won't know how to answer. You should encourage strongly the users to suscribe to the classical numpy-discussion and scipy-user mailing lists in addition to a local mailing-list. The local list is useful for organizing the life of the group, but questions related only to Numpy and Scipy should rather be asked on the classical lists. Take a look at a recent thread on this subject http://www.nabble.com/Numpy-Scipy-and-the-Python-African-Tour-td24626720.htm.... Don't hesitate to ask more questions, and please let us know about the development of your User Group! Cheers, Emmanuelle On Sun, Aug 16, 2009 at 09:43:10AM +0800, Steve Han wrote:
Hi list, � We are a numpy/scipy user group in Shandong Province ,China.Our interest is at using Numpy/Scipy and Python multiprocessing to leverage scientifc and engineering computing in day to day work.We need the help from the community of Scipy,first we mean�establish a local scipy community,then the other.Any suggestion? Thanks a lot!