SMH article of death of computer clubs

There was an interesting article in the SMH today on the death of computer clubs. As the co-president of a user group, the picture painted by the article seemed overly gloomy, and certainly doesn't represent the state of play for developer user groups. Last week's SDNUG meeting represented our 5th anniversary, and we are still very-much going strong. For a popular talk, we'll easily exceed the 80 person capacity of out venue at AMP Capital Investors, and we have at least ten new subscriptions to our mailing list each month. There are over 600 email addresses on the list, and we also have an RSS feed that gets many hundreds of hits a month.

One of the least accurate observations of the article (as it relates to SDNUG anyway) is that online communities are replacing face-to-face interaction. While attending a physical meeting is a significant time commitment over an online chat, the dynamics involved with an online vs. physical chat are totally different. I'm not a big IM fan for chatting, and find I'll rarely talk to someone on IM for more than 10 minutes when I could easily have a face-to-face conversation that lasts over an hour. A few of the things we do at SDNUG to offset the time investment is to set aside the first 30 minutes of the meeting for socialising over pizza and softdrink, we run a tight ship with getting speakers to finish at or close to 8pm so people can get home to their families at a decent hour, and we go to a pub afterwards so folks who want to continue the interaction for a longer time period can do so without any time limit.

Another key to our success is a close relationship with Microsoft that give a degree of street-cred, which was especially critical in the first six months when Dan and I where getting the whole thing started from scratch at a time when .NET had only RTM'ed three months earlier, and we had an established user group at North Ryde that we nominally a competitor (both groups are still going strong, and there is no sense of adversity or competition between Adam and us).

I'd like to see SMH do a corresponding article on the computer clubs and user groups that where doing well. From talking to most folks running groups on Microsoft-related technology, they all seem to be doing fine.