I’ve been trying (with help from ScottW and the local MS DEs) to start up a new user group in NJ, but I’ve run into a couple problems, the most important is the lack of a standard meeting date that does not intrude on the pre-existing user groups. The problem is a good one to have, since it means that the developer community is of sufficient size to support more focused user groups (rather than the typical general purpose groups). But by focusing the user group on one topic, it also limits its potential audience, so we need to make it available to a larger group of developers. What I was thinking of doing is to create 3 new user groups (or one big one with 3 different tracks) which all meet at the same location, just separate rooms. The 3 groups would be an Asp.Net group, a SQL Development DBA group (for folks who write sprocs and DTS packages, OLAP and such, geared towards the new Yukon dev stuff) and a traditional SQL Server Support DBA group (for the traditional backup/recovery/performance stuff). Then, instead of meeting every month on a weeknight, meet once a quarter on a Saturday morning and have 3 presentations per group (or track) which would mean 9 sessions in total. The idea is that most folks can't travel more than 20 miles on a weeknight because that is about an hour commute time (thanks to traffic), so a Saturday morning (with no traffic) would mean that people could travel further. But who wants to give up 1 Saturday morning a month? So if we have 3 sessions on a quarterly basis we could meet once a quarter, and still cover the same amount of material, and only have to give up 1 Saturday a quarter.
I’ve tried to find out what others areas are doing to solve this problem, but I haven’t found others that have run into this (I would think that only high density populations of developers, like Silicon Valley, would have hit this yet). Anyone have feedback for me on this? I guess trying to keep a community active in a group that meets only once a quarter may be an issue, but with a proper community site, and support from the monthly user groups, I’m inclined to believe that this shouldn’t be a problem.
Also, does anyone know of a User Group that is a member of PASS and Ineta? I would think that with Yukon coming next year, more groups will be registered with both user communities.