Ever since I ended up creating an ALT.NET group in my fair city I have been thinking about where I want all of this to be heading, and what I want the group to become. Currently, the activities of the group are driven by these observations:
The number of seminars and public meetings related to the .NET framework is rather small.
The technical level of such meetings is typically ‘beginner’ rather than ‘practitioner’, meaning that it’s not very interesting for people with work experience.
The level of people’s exposure to new technology in the .NET stack is greather than their exposure to existing technology. This is driven mainly by marketing concerns, and is understandable.
Consequently, the idea behind the group is to produce a .NET-oriented environment that caters to continous practice and excellence in .NET matters, and that is fit to house experienced professionals as well as people starting out (with the focus on the former). There is a lot to be said about the viability (and usefulness) of such an organization, mainly from the socio-economic point of view:
The prevalence of outsourced cost models in most cases hamper people’s professional development. In fact, with certain notable exceptions, such enterprises are entirely incapable of fostering professional development because their income is based on skills declared rather than ascertained. The immediate consequence is that a vast percentage of working programmers will never come to our meetings, not because the level of challenge is high, but because the motivation is not there.
The ‘worshop culture’ that’s become the norm elsewhere is nonexistent. This implies that the open space model simply does not work, because any random group of developers is unlikely to be able to self-organize and come up with a cohesive discussion plan. (I’m wrong about this in the sense that the progressive few developers might. But the .NET community is not the same as, say, a Ruby community, so YMMV, as always.)
Since the local business is essentially 90% outsourcing, it’s not interested in IT communities. This implies that the group will never have corporate sponsorship, which consequently means that the group’s profile can never be raised about ‘enthusiast’ level. This isn’t a problem for me—I’ve made a decision to never spend my own money on the group, so a zero-budget group is a perfect approach for me.
I suppose one advantage the group confers is a potential tie-in between my own company and the group. So, for example, I could provide corporate sponsorship for the group on my own terms. Because, looking at how things are right now, I doubt anyone else will.