MESSAGE
| DATE | 2009-01-29 |
| FROM | Ron Guerin
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| SUBJECT | Re: [NYLXS - HANGOUT] NYLXS Projects
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Ronny Abraham wrote:
> I think Ruben nailed it when he kicked this off by pointing out that
> there was a lack of work on projects. People ultimately take interest
> when there is activity. Not so much when it's only speech.
> However, while I'm willing to put in a couple of hours a week on this,
> but I'm simply not going to do it if no one else will.
There's certainly a relationship between activity and volunteers and
participants. I would warn you though that it's definitely not enough
to just have a worthy project. We've tried this several times with the
Python Workshop, and as I think Mark Halegua would agree, it hasn't gone
very well.
That doesn't mean I don't think it has to not go well. I think however
that in order to attract enough people to a given project, we all need
to be casting our nets a lot wider in relation to our "advertising"
efforts. I think this is a problem in general with Free Software/Linux
user groups in the NYC area lately, and it may not be a local problem.
The nature of things has changed, but we largely have not. So Ruben may
post a NYXLS announcement here and on NYLUG, and the Sulzberger machine
will send it off to every other mailing list full of people we more or
less already know, and off into the newsgroups where the only people
left are people we already know, and I may forward it to a few places
full of people we already know. By now you can see where I'm going with
this. I don't think our groups have become obsolete, I think our
methods of communication have become pretty insular though.
The word I'm looking for I guess is "outreach." There's going to have
to be a lot more of that. There's something like 8 million people in
this city and that we apparently don't reach enough of them to put 100
people in a room reliably is a failure to reach people. We should be
able to announce that we're going to watch paint dry and get 100 people
to show up.
- Ron
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