From: Tom Armitage Date: 2006-10-27T01:53:54+09:00 Subject: Re: [ANN] Potential Brit ruby meeting formally Chunky Bacon On 26/10/06, Paul Lynch wrote: > There's no real reason that the UK should be tacked on to Europe, > community-wise, and improving the local community has to be a *good* > thing, not a bad one. No, I know there's no "real" reason, apart from _numbers_, which is why it's sometimes more feasible to band together into a large enough number. > The London Ruby group seems to be very much a stealth group. If > newcomers to the community aren't aware of it (and it took me more > than 6 months before I heard about it), then there's room for a more > public forum. RailsConf, on the other hand, was reasonably well > publicised. Well, the London Ruby Group is only of relevance to people in/near London, TBH. It's very much _not_ a stealth group, though; it mentions its existence here and it has very vocal members of the community. It also has a few _long-standing_ members of the Ruby community within it. They are very much not stealth, either. I'm just trying to point out that the best course of action as a newbie is not to go "hey, let's have a conference, who here does Ruby?" but rather to poke around for larger organisations such as Geekup, LRUG, etc, who might be able to offer advice/expertise/contacts/resources to make a really kickass conference, rather than just a bunch of people loosely throwing things together. (For instance: LRUG has a very good relationship with Skillsmatter, who ran the events side of things at RailsconfEurope (along with RubyCentral) and offer us a room each month. They're nice, and they have good facilities). This does not mean such an event can't be thrown together quickly and affordably and without hassle, it's just prudent to look for peers rather than assume you're the only people interested in doing stuff. It's not a case of raining on parades or treading on toes. It's just advice, and it's frustrating people charging into things. t.