On Sat, May 20, 2006 at 12:38:37PM +1000, Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote: > I would imagine that there are plenty of people who attend one meeting and > never participate again. Many geeks are by nature quite introverted. It can > be intimidating for such people to be in a room full of other people. Imagine > yourself walking into a room of 30+ people, many of whom seem to know each > other and have formed little cliques. How would a shy person break into these > groups? Many potential SLUG members, I believe, are discouraged, and end up > never returning.
One thing I first heard of in any detail was a small group of dedicated "greeters" -- hang around the door (or even outside) and pounce on anyone they don't recognise, introduce themselves, get a couple of relevant details, and maybe try and find a regular with similar interests. The idea isn't that the greeters are everybody's new best friend, but rather that there's going to be at least a couple of familiar faces with names attached, at least one of whom is in a similar situation/has similar interests to the new attendee, and so there's a bit of a personal bond there that might draw the new person back again next month. Of course, this pre-supposes that there's enough extraverted people who know enough existing SLUG people to be able to usefully route new attendees into the crowd -- I think there might be, but I know it can be awfully uncomfortable to pounce on complete strangers. - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
