ECRuby - The future

[Brian Hogan]

Hey everyone.

It doesn't look like there's going to be a June meeting. There was
only one person who signaled that they could make it, and once again
we find ourselves without a place to hold the meeting where we can
have a presentation.

There doesn't seem to be enough interest in this group anymore. What
should we do? Many of our members have moved away, and our Ruby Camp
didn't seem to spark a lot of interest. I'm open to ideas.

[Paul Neibarger]

Brian,
I Hope you don't disband. I just signed up.

Best regards,
Paul Neibarger II




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[charle...@gmail.com]

Hey All,
I agree interest is falling in the group, but I hope we can find ways to re-energize it!. I think we can do this by changing things up a little and maybe trying a few new things. One thing I have always thought would be fun would be to have a group project. Maybe a Gem that we write and support. That way people who can't make all the meetings and may move out of town can still participate. I think we could also move our Formal topic meetings to every couple months and try and get them planned a few meetings out. We seem to strain for topics, but if we can give more time to fewer topics a year, I think it would be more valuable. Another thing I think we could do that would be cool is get together and work on patches to current OSS. Anyway these are just my thoughts. Anyone else have some ideas?

Charley

[Kevin Gisi]

Hi all,

I'm sorry to hear that the ECRuby group is struggling a bit. I know I don't really have a say in how things go forward, but I would like to say that at least for myself (and I suspect a fair number of our alumni), I'd be happy to come back and help out with any larger events you'd all like to host.

Perhaps getting some members back in September/October for an open-house meeting, and a RubyCamp might bring in the new members needed to keep a critical mass. Just a thought. Otherwise, be sure to keep all us non-local members advised of what we can do to help support ECRuby!

--
Kevin W. Gisi
http://www.kevingisi.com
ke...@kevingisi.com | (916) 538-4474

[David Hurd]

Hi everyone,

I agree with Paul. I just found out about this group, and am pretty excited to check it out. I realize it's tough to keep a group going without much interest, but I hope changes can be made to rejuvenate it.

David Hurd

[Doug Rhoten]

Instead of a language or platform/company based group do you all think we
could get more local interest going if we focus software and web
development? From there we could always break out into smaller special
interest groups.

This is something I have been considering doing for a while with CVNUG.
People have told me their interested in development, technology, drinking
beer with other geeks but didn't want to attend because they thought we were
exclusively .NET and didn't cover other topics.

Doug

[Jonathan Fretheim]

I agree with Doug here. To thrive, ECRuby needs a sizable venn-diagram-overlap of ::[people who use Ruby a lot or happen to be interested in it right now]:: and ::[people who are interested in/have time for learning new geeky things in general]::. More general might be the way to go.

I certainly have avoided CVNUG events because I don't know anything about/haven't had occasion to use .NET stuff.

I'd be into a more general EC software dev get-together group. I think it would be easier to find folks willing to give small presentations, too.

Jonathan

[Brian Hogan]

Doug and I have discussed this and I think it's something worth thinking about.

Especially after seeing this a few weeks ago:

http://searls.test-double.com/2012/05/14/language-based-user-groups-considered-boring/

The benefits to this would be that more people would get exposure to things.

The downsides is that presenters would need to be more applicable to
the group at large. Like code camp, if the presentation is on "doing
[advanced thing] in ASP.Net MVC" or "Advanced ActiveRecord" then
people will tend to skip the meetings they're not interested in. While
that seems fine on the surface, I'm concerned that it still creates a
divide.

I for one would love to see more diverse talks - a broader range of
topics rather than a deeper range. Additionally, we could still keep
the hack night going.

Interesting things to think about here.

[Michael Hoitomt]

I like the idea of a combined, more generalized group. As somebody that doesn't work with Ruby all day or .NET every month the presentations from each of the meetings tend to go over my head most of the time. But I do like drinking beer, eating pizza, and talking software with fellow geeks :-). A broader range of topics might be preferable to others like me.

Also pulling back from deeper topics would open the door to more presentations from others that might have a broader range of knowledge. It can be intimidating to present to people smarter than you, so you feel like you need "wow" the group in order to add value. It seems as though there is resistance to presenting "tutorial" type topics, and that is understandable due to the wealth of information on the web. But having "simpler" presentations opens the door new/inexperienced users.

As a caveat, I've only been to a couple of each of the meetings. The meetings are great and the people are great. But if the topic isn't relatively useful there are a lot of competing priorities that get in the way of attending.

A Big Thanks to Brian, Doug and everybody else that has made these groups possible. Let's find a way to keep them going and thriving.

[Tony Eichelberger]

+1 for bigger tent

- Tony

[Blia Xiong]

+ 1

Thanks,

Blia Xiong