Need advice on starting a Python group

[Kurt Smith]

On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 8:57 AM, gb345 <gb345 at invalid.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> I'm hoping to get advice from anyone with prior experience setting
> up a Python group.
>
> A friend of mine and I have been trying to start a
> scientific-programming-oriented Python group in our school (of
> medecine and bio research), with not much success.
>
> The main problem is attendance.  Even though a *ton* of people have
> told us that it's a great idea, that they're *very* interested,
> and have asked to be added to our mailing list, the attendance to
> our first few meeting has never been more than 5, including my
> friend and I.  Last time just he and I showed up.
>
> The second problem is getting content.  The format we'd envisioned
> for this group was centered around code review (though not limited
> to it).  The idea was that at every meeting a different member
> would show some code.  This could be for any of a number of reasons,
> such as, for example, 1) illustrate a cool module or technique; 2)
> present a scientific research problem and how they used Python to
> solve it, or get help solving it; 3) get general feedback (e.g. on
> code clarity, software usability, module architecture, etc.).  But
> in principle just about anything is OK: e.g. a talk on favorite
> Python resources, or a comparison of Python with some other language,
> or an overview of Python gotchas would all be fair game.
>
> Also, we stressed that the talks were not expected to be polished:
> no need for PowerPoint slides, etc.  Just project any old code onto
> the screen, and talk about it, or scribble stuff on the chalkboard.
>
> Still, we have a hard time finding volunteers.
>
> And even when we've had volunteers, hardly anyone shows up!
>
> Any suggestions would be appreciated.
>
> GB
>
> P.S.  There's a Python Meetup we could go to, but it does not fit
> the bill for us: it doesn't meet often enough, it's sort of out of
> the way, and has practically no one doing scientific programming.
> --
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
>

There's a general Scientific Computing interest group that gets
together here at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and it has a
significant Python component & focus.  They put on a Python bootcamp
this January that was a huge success.

http://hackerwithin.org/cgi-bin/hackerwithin.fcgi/wiki

They have bi-weekly meetings, sometimes it's of the 'come and share on
X topic,' although many times its 'local guest speaker is coming to
speak about Y'.  My impression is that the latter meetings grabbed a
number of people around campus -- 'hey, I need to do Y, I'll see what
the speaker has to say,' and then they started coming for the
show-and-tell meetings.  My recommendation would be to provide
something of value every meeting, the more specific the better.
'Python' in this regard is a bit open ended.  You'd likely get more
involvement if you had meetings that focused on, e.g., parallel
computing (and have examples in python (mpi4py), and have someone come
and talk about MPI or something), or scientific data formats (with
examples of pyhdf5 or pytables...), or you could advertise a tutorial
on some scipy & numpy features and their advantages over using
matlab/octave/idl.

It's more work than show-and-tell meetings, but look at it as priming the pump.

There is much interest around here re: Python in science, but many
have only heard about it, some have dabbled but put it on the shelf,
others couldn't get it to work (they're scientists and used to
prepackaged software that works out of the box -- if it doesn't, it's
somebody else's problem), many others can't justify the time it would
take to learn it when they already have something else working.  Until
something with value comes along (like your meeting with specific
topics) to change their minds, an open-ended meeting won't appeal much
to them.

Just some thoughts, and an example of what's worked here.  Personally
I tend to make it to the meetings with a specific topic, and end up
skipping the ones that are more open-ended.

Kurt