Bruce Dawson wrote: > So either we have to increase the priority of going to a meeting, or > lower the priority of people staying away. The former can be done by > having higher quality speakers, "famous people", more interesting > subjects, more career/job benefits, ... The latter can't really be done.
I think you may have inadvertently created an artificial 'either-or' and there may be other variables to tweak. Let's not change the meeting content or quality at all, but increase by 10 the number of people who know the meeting is happening. With no other changes on our part, we should see more people attending, some of whom decide to stay. > Perhaps we should look at ways of improving our presentations, > escalating our speakers (by "creating famous people"), or ... I have spoken at two dozen professional conferences over the years, and I think the quality of our presentations can't be beat, and certainly not for the cost (segfault - Division by Zero!). Seriously, I think that the issue is simply this: Ten percent of the 300 people who know about any particular meeting attend. I think that's a good percentage. We have a rotating crowd of interesting people who may be more interested in the electronics, the networking protocols, the administrative management, the user space applications, the software development world, or the consumer products. That's awesome. And the other folks are busy that night, not that interested in the topic, not feeling well, have to pick up the kids, have to wash their hair or some other feeble excuse. That's okay, too. I would like 3000 people to know about the meeting, so maybe 5% of them would attend. That would double our attendance. The efficient engineer points out that we are wasting our message on 2940 people and lowering our overall efficiency. I am taking the stance that 60 people at a meeting is great. Both are true. That's okay. > Provide a non-time and non-location dependent way of "meeting". I believe that's known as "not meeting." *rimshot* I think preserving what goes on in meetings is the best way to establish a legacy of knowledge from the group. I'm trying to do that with the notes I post to the group, and I'd really like to see more effort in capturing the meetings in video or audio format. > Our mailing list, archives, and wiki are our greatest standing > resources. Why don't we capitalize on them and let "meat-space" meetings > become more informal. We should increase the capture mechanisms because > those meat-space meetings have useful content. I do think that I'd like our meetings to be informal, and that there be more time to chat. I've heard several folks remark that the best meeting they attended recently was one with no presentation. However, I also think the presentations are of great value and shouldn't be discontinued. We ought to find some way to have our cake and eat it, too. -- Ted Roche Ted Roche & Associates, LLC http://www.tedroche.com _______________________________________________ gnhlug-org mailing list gnhlug-org@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-org/
