About a year ago, I took over the running of Portland Perl Mongers (http://portland.pm.org/). I managed to convince the owner to let us host the meetings at our company and every month we rent chairs for the meeting. It's a small expense, but he's watching every nickel. He asked me yesterday exactly how our company has profited from hosting Portland Perl Mongers. We've had difficulty finding other convenient and reliable locations for the meetings, so I'd be concerned if this goes away.
For the cost of only $50 US a month, we've had short, but useful talks on new Perl technologies and techniques. We've had talks hosted by such luminaries as (in order of presentation) Randal Schwartz (twice), Tom Phoenix, chromatic, Allison Randal, Brian Ingerson, and Michael Schwern. The cost of sending our programmers to seminars on these techniques would break our budget, but the owner is not convinced. Part of the reason he wanted to host the meetings is to develop a pool of people we could get to know if we were hiring. Unfortunately the person in charge of hiring never sends out job announcements to the group until *just* before we have to hire someone and, as a result, we don't get to use the "pool" that the owner envisioned. I'd love to hear other arguments in favor of keeping the meetings here and spending the fifty dollars on those chairs (what a paltry sum for the information won!). I'm very concerned about upsetting the stability of the group as we have not missed a meeting in a year, but prior to that, meetings were held every six months, at best. I don't want to throw this away now that we've got it! -- Cheers, Curtis "Ovid" Poe
