CommunityBuilding

Grig's Appeal

Spurred by Mel's email, we discussed at our meeting last night (January 14 2010) various ways to increase the collaboration in the Piggies group. Here are some ideas:

Instead of regular presentations, have everybody who comes to the meeting give a 5 minute presentation on how they're using Python, favorite Python projects/tools/modules, favorite Open Source projects, etc. (see recent meme by Tarek Ziade: http://tarekziade.wordpress.com/2009/12/28/new-years-python-meme/)
Come up with a project we can collaborate on, put it up on Github or BitBucket (some people said they've seen cases where there was initial enthusiasm on such group projects, followed by an eventual abandonment of the project)
Contribute to the wiki (http://socal-piggies.org/scp) by editing existing pages or creating new pages for ideas for collaboration.
Use the common twitter account twitter.com/socalpiggiesto keep the group informed (for example when you add a wiki page, or when you stumble across something interesting in the Python world, or when you found that perfect cappuccino at that special coffee shop)
Contribute time and talents to existing Python projects who needs collaborators—one of the examples given was Titus's pony-build continuous integration tool (http://github.com/ctb/pony-build)
Proposed topics for continued learning. Add your suggestions for proposed learning topics. (This is in response to an e-mail thread started by Charles Phillips, and subsequent request from Grig Gheorghiu.)

I think if we follow up even on a couple of these ideas initially it would still be progress.

For the next meeting (which will be on Feb 11th at the Language Weaver offices at the Howard Hughes Center -- details to follow) I propose that we do the first item in the list.

Thanks to everybody who came to the meeting last night and shared their ideas. Please keep this thread alive by adding more ideas -- and adding them to the wiki wouldn't hurt either

-- Grig