One point brought up in the AGM a few months ago was that there has been little growth in the membership of SLUG. I have no clue how many non-financial members there are, but IIRC there are only about fifty paying members. My question is, what can be done to increase this number?
I see two main challenges to solving this conundrum:
* getting people to attend a meeting in the first place
* encouraging people to continue to participate afterwards
I would imagine that there are plenty of people who attend one meeting and
never participate again. Many geeks are by nature quite introverted. It can
be intimidating for such people to be in a room full of other people. Imagine
yourself walking into a room of 30+ people, many of whom seem to know each
other and have formed little cliques. How would a shy person break into these
groups? Many potential SLUG members, I believe, are discouraged, and end up
never returning.
One solution I can think of would be to further promote the informal means of
communication, such as the mailing lists, IRC channel and SLUGlets. We should
make people feel that they can chat in an easygoing, relaxed environment.
Small groups (<10 people) are more hospitable than larger ones.
It may be a good idea to encourage newcomers to introduce themselves on a
mailing list first. They can say things like who they are, where they are
from and what they hope to learn from the meeting. A SLUG member can then
arrange to meet that person prior to the meeting, and can personally
introduce them to the ways and culture of SLUG. I believe that this kind of
'buddy' system can provide an effective opening for newcomers into the group.
Note that there is no magic bullet for this situation. A working solution will
likely address a multitude of factors. It will take some effort, but I
believe that this is important for SLUG and for free software as a whole.
--
"Writing software isn't about doing cool stuff, it's about watching your
back."
- Simon Phipps, Sun Microsystems chief technology evangelist,
on software patents, March 2004
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