[BangPypers] Create Better Python community

[Noufal Ibrahim]

Anand Balachandran Pillai <abpillai at gmail.com> writes:

> On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 12:15 PM, Kenneth Gonsalves <lawgon at gmail.com>wrote:

[...]

>> on several occasions we had 2
>>
>
>  I dont call that a user group meeting. That is definitely
>  apathy though better than no meeting any day.

Exactly. It keeps it going which is something. 


>  I see a few factors that discourage people in actively
>  attending tech forum meetings such as BangPypers.
>
>  1. (Lack of) Continuation of thread/topic - Most of the time we
> end up discussing different topics from one meeting to next. Topic
> dis-continuation leads to lack of focus and lack of shared goal which
> finally leads to apathy.

The ChennaiPy people, AFAIK, do LPTHW exercises, watch Pycon videos
etc. These are things that can be done on a continuous basis.

> 2. (Lack of) Shared goals - This is kind of related to 1, but slightly
> different. If 2-3 folks are working on the same/similar project then
> there is more shared problems to discuss and even hack on a week-end,
> but if you don't find a common ground, you cant build a cohesive group
> who would like to meet.

Agreed. We need a pet project. 

> 3. Social networking ? - I am guessing here, but I do feel that the
> advent of social networking has affected real social gatherings to an
> extend. I am not talking about attending marriage ceremonies or house
> warming here, but shared social collectives such as tech groups like
> us. Since there is an alternate channel (twitter, FB) to share content
> and discuss in real time, I am wondering if it acts as a deterrent to
> meeting in person.

I don't know. I freelance and work from home myself and can eagerly
pounce on a meeting, tech or otherwise to meet people in the
flesh. There's only so much that technology can do. However, if you have
enough social engagements via. work, then this becomes secondary. 

> 4. Maturity - I think this is a point which we often forget. When
> BangPypers was starting off, we had a lot of energy and enthusiasm
> since Python was not as much popular then as it is now. There were a
> lot of basic ignorance so many of the initial meetings were
> discussions on the language aspects.  However right now this initial
> novelty has worn off and the language (and the group) has matured. So
> topic picking is not as easy as it used to be and finding themes to
> discuss that is novel and holds others interests is perhaps not as
> easy as earlier.

This is basically just dearth of topics. I don't know how to fix it but
maybe we can give it some kind of stimulus with a day long hackathon? It
would help us get into depth about *something* and make some headway. 



[...]


-- 
~noufal
http://nibrahim.net.in

Our comedies are not to be laughed at. -Samuel Goldwyn