[BangPypers] Create Better Python community

[Anand Chitipothu]

2011/8/19 Anand Balachandran Pillai <abpillai at gmail.com>:
> On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 12:15 PM, Kenneth Gonsalves <lawgon at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 2011-08-19 at 12:05 +0530, Noufal Ibrahim wrote:
>> > > chennaipy meets on the 4th Saturday of every month, this is fixed.
>> > > Attendance varies from 2 to 15. So the question is not 'shall we
>> > > meet?'  but 'are you attending'. This has been going on since 2006
>> > > with some breaks now and then.
>> >
>> > A fixed date without attendees does not a user group meeting
>> > make. ChennaiPy has *some* people attending every month.
>>
>> 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.
>
>  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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> I am not proposing solutions in this email (tired fingers), but identifying
> problems is a start to fixing them.

Why don't we meet this weekend and discuss this?

Anand