Back 20 years ago I was the organizer of the local #Perl community. We had in-person meetings with presentations. It was rather intimate as we were usually 10-15 people and we knew each other.
These days I organize events for both the local #Python and #Rust groups. We call them communities, but I feel that the people are a lot less connected to each other. I guess part of the reason is that at each meeting there are 30-50 people and half of them are new. It is good that a lot of people attend our events, but we know each other much less than in the good old days.
Of course I also grew by 20 years so maybe I am just old and grumpy.
One of my problems is that it feels that there are two classes of people: "speakers" and "listeners" and I really don't like that. I believe everyone can contribute from their experience or even from their lack of experience.
For example I love presentations about "I am learning X, these are the things I found interesting, these I found problematic". I love these because at the end many of the participant also struggle with learning these thing so seeing others struggle helps put things in proportion.
In addition, hearing newcomers struggle with something help the more experienced people see where things (explanations, documentation etc.) needs to be improved. Besides, I saw so many experienced people find out about aspects of languages and libraries only the newcomer noticed. So we can also learn a ton from these newcomers.
My attempt to bridge this gap is having ad-hoc lightening talks (less than 5 min) at in-person events and have online chats where people can talk about the things they learn about or struggle with.
What other strategies do you think might help?
Top comments (5)
That’s a really interesting reflection. I think what you describe makes a lot of sense. Once a group grows, it naturally becomes harder to maintain the same connection between members as in the early days. But on the other hand, the larger and more diverse group also creates more opportunities to hear different perspectives. If people are willing to speak.
Personally, I really like your idea of ad-hoc lightning talks. I’d also add that even “structured randomness” could help like picking 2–3 people at random each time to share a short story about what they’ve been learning or struggling with. It doesn’t need to be a polished talk, more like a quick check-in that breaks the “speaker vs. listener” separation. Although I'm not a particularly good community organizer, I also feel the lack of connected communities that you mentioned.
The other thing that might help is if we can create smaller groups, where a more family-like atmosphere can develop.
By the way, I'm not sure, so I'll ask: is SuliPy yours?
Based on your name, I'm guessing it's yours.
I worry that picking 2-3 people would "put them on the spot" and some would hate it. (But doing that in private worked.)
SuliPy looks like a nice project, but no, I am not associated with it.
Yeah, it's risky, but if I'd like to say something in a large group and I can't, because someone dominates the whole comversation, I would hate that too. So I think that every situation has it's up and downsides.
Hm, life is strange... same name, same role, but two different person from different places. Well, nevermind. 😀
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@shamir_khan_ef05f8645178d
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