[Israel.pm] Introducing Myself + Some Advice on Future Growth of Ithaca.pm

[Shlomi Fish]

Hi all!

I have had the pleasure of chatting with your founder on IRC, and became 
interested in Ithaca.pm after I saw that she kick-started this Perl Mongers 
group. While not native to Ithaca (I live in Israel), I am collecting Perl 
Mongers groups as a way to compensate myself for the fact I am banned from 
the incredibly-active London.pm. [London-pm]

My name is Shlomi Fish and you can learn more about me on my homepage:

* http://www.shlomifish.org/

* http://www.shlomifish.org/personal.html (My Bio)

* http://www.shlomifish.org/meta/FAQ/ (My F.A.Q. list)

But back to the topic at hand. I see the mailing list has not been active in 
quite a while, and I don't know if you have any more meetings. So here is 
some advice from my experience in organising Perl meetings and other FOSS 
activities in Israel. (I'm CCing this message to the leader of Perl-Israel 
and to their mailing list.)

1. You need more content. A good way to resolve it would be to setup a wiki 
(MediaWiki or whatever) on the site. My experience with most wikis has been 
that they can have a lot of activity and then they are practically inactive 
for a long time. That's perfectly natural. The Perl-ILers have a MediaWiki 
at:

http://wiki.perl.org.il/

We also have a comprehensive static HTML site:

http://www.perl.org.il/

A wiki probably does not make as good an impression as a more organised site, 
but it is still easy to setup and easy to contribute to.

So advice #1: set up a wiki.

2. You need to announce the meetings. Useful channels for announcements are:

* use.perl.org
* A calendar of some sort.
* An RSS feed.
* More

3. I don't know about Ithaca, but in Israel we noticed that we only took off 
after we had some interesting technical talks. We do not limit our talks to 
Perl alone: we've covered software management (Extreme Programming, etc.) , 
foreign programming languages, computer science and algorithmics, etc. 

Most Israelis will not attend a meeting unless they know what it's about. The 
Itahaca people may differ, so I don't know.

From my experience we normally prefer several short (~ 40 minutes) 
presentations. 

4. The leader - in Perl-IL we had an interesting situation where the group was 
originally set up by someone, while seeing very little activity on the 
mailing list. Then Gabor came, registered the domain perl.org.il, set up a 
new mailing list - perl at perl.org.il, set up a site at http://www.perl.org.il/ 
and then started organising meetings and presentations. We then continued to 
have three Perl-specific conferences and an OSDC (Open Source Developers' 
Conference) conf for Perl and related technologies. Then we had a smaller 
scale Israeli Perl Workshop.

The mailing list has grown in activity up to a certain point, and then became 
less active. I suppose it's natural, and most other Israeli FOSS mailing 
lists are not too active either.[Perl-rep] I suppose it's natural.

In any case, my point is that the leader should be: 1. Relatively tactful. 2. 
With a lot of initiative. Otherwise, the group will not take off. Since we 
believe in open-source and competition, then people can volunteer to initiate 
stuff independently, with the blessing of the leader (or so I hope). 

5. If the Ithaca community of Perlers is small - you may wish to extend beyond 
just Perl. One of my qualms about the Perl Review is that it is Perl-specific 
and not about other dynamic languages and similar technologies. I once wanted 
to unite Perl-IL, Python-IL and Ruby-IL under OSDClub, but it was met with 
resistance. (At the moment, none of them has a lot of activity, so I may have 
been right.)

Maybe you'll have a better luck.

------------

So this is my 20 agoroth (= an Israeli currency).

Send comments and flames to your local mailing list.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

{{{{{{{
[London-pm] - I'm half-joking - I actually like being on many groups. 
Interesting incoming email is always nice.

[Perl-rep] - it's also possible that use and interest in Perl has declined 
somewhat due to the bad reputation it received. See:

* http://perlbuzz.com/2008/05/perl-decentralize-diversify-colonize.html

* http://perl-begin.org/learn/myth-dispelling/
}}}}}}}



-----------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
Interview with Ben Collins-Sussman - http://xrl.us/bjn8s

The bad thing about hardware is that it sometimes work and sometimes doesn't.
The good thing about software is that it's consistent: it always does not
work, and it always does not work in exactly the same way.