Posted by: Anonymous
[ip: 68.2.48.8]
on July 23, 2007 04:53 PM
I'm on the steering committee of the Phoenix Linux User Group, who also experienced this drop in attendance. What we did to try and help out our attendance problems was to switch from a single topic presentation, which is almost guaranteed to bore a decent sized part of the audience into not showing up in the first place, into what we like to call the magazine format. We now try and have 3 or 4 small presentations, if a presentation is too big to fit into one meeting, we break it up into several. We try and keep all the presentations on a similar topic, but have the individual topics cover a low, medium, and high difficultly level. That way there is something for everyone at every meeting. On presentations that would demonstrate a new program; we also switched to preferring a presentation format that would show off what the program can do rather than how to use it. We found that we could get quite a few interesting presentations out of just 1 person if they would do like Alton Brown does on good eats and just say "...but thats another show".
We found that, at least at our meetings, we had our regulars that would come out no matter what the topic was, then we had the people that would pick and choose which meetings they would come to based on the topic. We could almost guarantee attendance by certain people just by choosing the correct topic. We also tended to do a lot of high level presentations that scared off any newbie that might come through the door. (I know there were several new faces that I never saw again after our 3 hour long presentation on how to write a kernel module)
In the end it's been a little easier to get people to do presentations because they don't have to prepare as much as before. We are seeing attendance slowly pick up again despite not currently advertising ourselves anywhere other than our own website and via word of mouth. We used to have a couple of freebee computer rags that you could pick up on your way out the door of just about any grocery store, and I think that was one of our major sources of new LUG attenders.
I hope the above is semi-readable.... I haven't been able to sleep in a couple of days and it's starting to show.
Learn about Linux
Download Linux
Get Linux help
PLUG might have found one fix for this.
Posted by: Anonymous [ip: 68.2.48.8] on July 23, 2007 04:53 PMWe found that, at least at our meetings, we had our regulars that would come out no matter what the topic was, then we had the people that would pick and choose which meetings they would come to based on the topic. We could almost guarantee attendance by certain people just by choosing the correct topic. We also tended to do a lot of high level presentations that scared off any newbie that might come through the door. (I know there were several new faces that I never saw again after our 3 hour long presentation on how to write a kernel module)
In the end it's been a little easier to get people to do presentations because they don't have to prepare as much as before. We are seeing attendance slowly pick up again despite not currently advertising ourselves anywhere other than our own website and via word of mouth. We used to have a couple of freebee computer rags that you could pick up on your way out the door of just about any grocery store, and I think that was one of our major sources of new LUG attenders.
I hope the above is semi-readable.... I haven't been able to sleep in a couple of days and it's starting to show.
#